Northeast News
May 18, 2017

Recently, Police Chief Darryl Forte announced that due to budget cuts, his department would have to trim officers and positions. Most of the cuts the Chief said would be made through attrition and the elimination of positions that were currently unfilled. Sounds almost painless right?

Wrong.

Just because a position is not filled right now doesn’t mean it would have remained unfilled in the future. The elimination of the position severely hinders the department’s ability to staff back up at a later date. Adding positions isn’t done with the wave of a hand, but moreover usually involves countless meetings and detailed analysis.

The Mayor and council sent a strong message with the passage of the new 2016-17 budget, in which the Fire Department was fully funded but Police was told to trim their numbers for the second year in a row. Public Safety, or at least the department charged with keeping the citizens of this city safe, was basically told to pound sand on their submitted budget numbers. This dog isn’t going to get into the fire versus police fight, but the question begs an answer.

At a time when the homicide rate is starting to climb and warmer weather is ratcheting up crime city wide, it certainly has this dog wondering why the popo’s budget was cut yet again.

Maybe the blue ribbon, Mayoral-appointed violent crime reduction committee chaired by Councilwoman Jolie Justus can provide us some answers on this. We’re guessing not though, given the committee is more of a resume bullet for members than it is a problem solving initiative. We’ve noted before that the committee’s makeup is completely devoid of any blue uniforms that would offer expert testimony on how to go about reducing violent crime. Maybe if the Mayor and council are serious about reducing violent crime, they’ll restore funding to the Police department so they can effectively police the community. But that would be too simple, right?