Revisiting Old Promises…
Sorry for the TRIPLE POST! Ouch, I’ve been out of commission too long. (And, what’s worse is I’ve got two more posts in mind, but we’ll save those for the time being).
I’m looking back over some of the drafts of potential posts that were never posted and I ran across this little gem which was written last August. In it I was going to say:
Peterson has promised 200 new police officers, but with the consolidation, the last budget actually cut the number of officers by 77. The 11% increase [proposed by Peterson at that time], if spent entirely on new officers would fund about 45 officers, leaving 232 to go before Peterson could declare “promise delivered.”
Perhaps Birdy can help me out on this, but it seems that Peterson has never delivered on his original promise. Even with an 11% increase in public safety spending last year, we are still far short of realizing the promises that Peterson has been spouting for some time. Now we are saddled with a 65% increase in our county income taxes, who wants to bet that we will see Peterson’s original promise fulfilled finally? Perhaps we should wait until he raises our taxes another 80 or 90% before we really take him to task.
Perhaps not.
Posted: July 26th, 2007 under Dems Run-a-muck.
Comments: 1
Comments
Comment from Birdy
Time: 26 July 2007, 11:45 pm
Well, this is an interesting re-read: http://www.indygov.org/eGov/Mayor/Plan/Peterson_Plan_1/part1.htm
Then we read this, lo these 8 years later:
http://www.indygov.org/NR/rdonlyres/761FE180-3FED-4F44-B99B-93F2485380BA/0/CrimeSpeech.pdf
There\’s a lot to wade through there, and the smell will get to you quickly, but please bear it for the sake of the truth.
We needed, said then Candidate Peterson, at a minimum, 140 officers added to the 1999 number to \”keep up with the Joneses\” of cities of similar size. So he proposed to \”add 200 more officers.\” He claims he did this between 1999 and 2003. (Let\’s leave aside the federal COPS grants which payed for the bulk, if not all of these \”additional\” officers. Let\’s see who can figure out how much the net gain was when taking attrition into account? If you can drum up the staffing levels of the old IPD and MCSD and then exclude jail and civil deputies from those numbers, and compare them to current levels of IMPD staffing, you have my gratitude and admiration. You won\’t find them in Peterson\’s rhetoric.
Still, here\’s an interesting point: \”The merger that created IMPD has already resulted in fortynine
more officers on the streets than with the two separate
departments, a number that will swell to 137 by next year. This is in
addition to the one hundred new officers I propose today. As soon as
they can be trained – and we will speed that up – we will have 237
more officers on the streets than in the days of the old Indianapolis
Police Department and the Marion County Sheriff’s Department.\”
Forty nine is an interesting number. If he \”added\” 200 by 2003, shouldn\’t that be 249? Oh, yeah. I forgot. Retirements, firings, attrition. Gotcha. Interesting verbiage: \”already resulted in.\” As in, smoke and mirrors. And how, I wonder does he know for certain that another, what, eighty-eight officers will be \”added?\” Did he already tell the Sheriff and Chief of Police to hire exactly 88 more recruits and ensure they make it through training no matter what?
And I will likely need Karl\’s math skills to figure this one out: if it is true that \”Indianapolis has 2.7 police officers for every 1,000 residents; but, according to FBI statistics, the national average for cities with populations of at least 250,000 people is 3.1 police officers for every 1,000 residents. Just for IPD to reach the national average, Indianapolis needs at least 140 additional police officers,\” then given that Indianapolis\’s population was 791,926 in 2000 and is 795,571 as of 2006, and is surely a little higher than that now, what (if anyone would be willing to tell us like they told Bart Peterson back in 1999 what the exact number of police officers \”on the street\” is) does this say about our current needs? By the way, an IMPD press release invited us to \”Please join us to celebrate the historic swearing in of the 57-member first recruit class of the
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.\” The first recruit class of the IMPD had 57 officers who \”went onto the street\” at the end of April, 2007. Which to my mind, means that the 49 net gain meant they were down before the consolidation of IPD and MCSD. Am I missing something?
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