Originally Posted by
Spartan
Martinson is absolutely right. I have been following the situation in Tulsa and they're looking at cutting at least a hundred (1/6th) of their fire dept and quite a few police officers as well. Overall public safety is going to be cut 8.8% along with every other dept unless Tulsa sales tax collections miraculously spike upwards after the Holidays. Tulsa has been hit much harder than OKC which is remarkable considering that Tulsa has so much BETTER places to shop than OKC (They actually have Saks, Whole Foods, etc).
Public safety is the worst thing we can be spending our money on. Every increased dime that we give them just goes into the pockets of existing employees. They aren't adding to their numbers, despite that being their mantra for more funding, and what these officers do on the clock is a sham in the first place. For an average of $78,000 a year most of OKC's police officers are cruising highways and sitting still along thoroughfares looking for speeders. NOT fighting our city's gang problem. And we wonder why we have gang issues? The fact of the matter is that our gang problems fall on our already $$$-bloated police dept. When you are the highest-paid police dept in the region, in the lowest cost of living city in the region I might add, you can't pass the buck on gang problems. Being featured on Gangland is inexcusable.
Were OKC paid to appear on that show? Probably. So in between going to the donut shop and spending 50% of their time looking for speeders, the rest of their time filing paperwork and police reports on those speeding tickets, taking the occasional domestic dispute sham call where some mom is calling the police on her kid for not eating his veggies, it's amazing they even have the time to appear on TV in the first place!
These people who we like to think are doing the public a service by doing a job none of us could really do are in fact sucking the govt tit as hard as they can squeezing as much out it for themselves as possible. That's the way it is any time you have union employees on the govt payroll. "Public service" my arse. I would even tolerate union politics and union corruption and union worker pay rates if it actually led to a drop in crime and eradicating our city's gangs -- but there is absolutely no evidence available to support that police are effecting in wiping out gangs. This money would be better spent on education, which is the only ingredient our state is really missing. If we were better educated WE WOULDN'T HAVE THE GANG/CRIME PROBLEMS WE HAVE NOW. We would be featured on the History Channel for GOOD things.
I say get rid of the unions, cut police pay by at least 40%, don't add any more police to the streets, stop getting them shiny new cars every 2 years, make them use their equipment to last, and abolish the permanent funding source that they have that no other public safety dept in this region has anything like. We need to see an end to the day where police unions have held us all hostage and won't let us go. As we increase police budgets, crime has soared. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result. We want to lower crime..oh I know, let's triple the police budget again!
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