Thousands of police officers have been laid off all across America since the current economic crisis began. Thousands more are getting ready to be laid off. So could we be on the verge of a new era of chaos and anarchy in America as crime runs wild and there are just far too few police to respond to it all? That is the message that one blood-smeared billboard in Stockton, California is trying to get across. Paid for by the Stockton, California police union, the message of the billboard is chillingly clear: "Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California. Stop laying off cops." As state, city and local governments across the United States continue to be devastated by the ongoing economic crisis, budget cuts are becoming much deeper and police forces have suddenly become a very popular target.
Officer Steve Leonesio, the president of the Stockton Police Officers Association, has announced that the police union plans to spend approximately $20,000 on at least 20 more billboards.
Why is the union putting up all of these billboards?
Well, it turns out that Stockton has been considering a plan to lay off 53 police officers in an effort to eliminate a $23 million budget deficit.
But law enforcement in Stockton has already been cut to the bone. Recently, the Stockton Police Department dropped this bombshell....
"We absolutely do not have any narcotics officers, narcotics sergeants working any kind of investigative narcotics type cases at this point in time."
Do you think drug dealers will be flocking to Stockton after they hear that?
But the truth is that so many of these local governments around the nation are just flat broke at this point.
Even major cities are having to admit that they have accumulated such large debts that they cannot even afford to provide the most basic services any longer.
In Oakland, California the battle over police layoffs has made national headlines over the past couple of weeks. Oakland has laid off 80 police officers, and now the police chief says that there are some crimes that his department simply will not be able to respond to.
In fact, Chief Anthony Batts has compiled a list of exactly 44 situations, including grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism, that his officers will not be available to handle any longer.
What in the world?
Once upon a time in America you could get a police officer to come out for just about anything - including for getting a cat down out of a tree.
But those days are long gone.
Today it is very hard to get a police officer to come out for anything short of murder.
The following is a partial list of crimes that police officers in Oakland will no longer be responding to....
- burglary
- theft
- embezzlement
- grand theft
- grand theft: dog
- identity theft
- false information to peace officer
- required to register as sex or arson offender
- dump waste or offensive matter
- discard appliance with lock
- loud music
- possess forged notes
- pass fictitious check
- obtain money by false voucher
- fraudulent use of access cards
- stolen license plate
- embezzlement by an employee (over $ 400)
- extortion
- attempted extortion
- false personification of other
- injure telephone/power line
- interfere with power line
- unauthorized cable tv connection
- vandalism
Not that Oakland wasn't already a mess, but now how long do you think it will be before total chaos and anarchy reigns on the streets of Oakland?
But Oakland is far from alone.
The sheriff's department in Ashtabula County, Ohio has been slashed from 112 to 49 deputies, and there is now just one vehicle remaining to patrol all 720 square miles of the county.
So what are the citizens of that county supposed to do to protect themselves?
Well, when asked about what they should do, Judge Alfred Mackey gave this stunning piece of advice....
"Arm themselves."
So is that what we are left with?
Is American society degenerating into a "Road Warrior-style" wasteland where we are all left to fend for ourselves?
It gets really frightening when you start considering just how many police are actually being laid off across the United States....
*Acting State Police director Jonathon Monken has announced that the Illinois State Police will lay off more than 460 troopers and close five regional headquarters by this fall.
*Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford has proposed a plan to lay off 40 police officers.
*The police department in Vallejo, California will temporarily suspend its K-9 and SWAT programs at the end of the month in a move to delay officer layoffs.
*Last year, 18 special police units in Toledo, Ohio - including the gang task force and the mounted patrol - were eliminated or downsized in an effort to replace the 130 patrol officers who were laid off because of a $20.7 million budget deficit.
*Of 315 municipalities the New Jersey State Policemen's union canvassed, more than half indicated that they were planning to lay off police officers.
*Four police officers in one town in New Jersey were greeted at work this past Monday morning with notices informing them that they will be laid off on August 31st.
*Police in Phoenix, Arizona have been told that more than 400 officers could be impacted by layoffs if "the worst case scenario" plays out.
*Police and firefighters in Flint, Michigan decided that layoffs were preferable to taking a 15 percent pay and benefits cut.
*The city of Maywood, California laid off all 68 of its employees July 1st and is now "contracting out" police services.
*In Colorado Springs, dozens of police positions are going unfilled and the police helicopters were put up for sale on the Internet.
The sad thing is that as local police forces across America are being stripped down or dismantled, many communities are opening their arms wide to increased federal law enforcement "assistance".
In recent years, we have seen a large number of examples where the U.S. military is being used for domestic law enforcement, which is supposed to be against the law. In addition, federal government agencies are increasingly taking over the financing, training and even command of local police.
But is this "federalization" of local law enforcement a good thing?
Of course not.
Unfortunately we live at a time when almost everything is being centralized under federal government control. Of course this is completely contrary to everything that our founders intended, but most of our "officials" don't seem too concerned about actually following the Constitution these days.
So what are you seeing in your own local community? Is the police force being slashed where you live? Is crime on the rise? Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion....
Nuestro amigo libertariano Gerald Celente has predicted that The Banana Republic of America (formerly the USA) is headed for a major increase of violent crime and that American cities will become as dangerous as Caracas, Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City. He is absolutely right, of course. The Third World horror movie that used to be the USA is now a banana republic, and in banana republics, one finds an extremely affluent minority and a dirt-poor majority. Combine cutbacks in law enforcement with ever-rising unemployment rates, and you have a very toxic brew. Get ready for kidnappings, armed robberies, gang violence and drug violence galore.
But there are some folks who are still hiring: Mexican drug cartels. And when Americans are poor enough, hungry enough, cold enough and desperate enough, they will accept the dangerous jobs that los carteles narcos de Mexico have to offer. You know a country is seriously screwed when the only growth industries are drug trafficking, kidnapping and debt collection.
It is very difficult for me to feel sorry for laid-off police. Police, in general have set themselves up as an elite class that is above the laws imposed on society. In Central TX, I’ve seen Police Union officals attempt to portray male and female cops, killed while drunk and speeding on a motocycle, as victims of the bar where they and their fellow cops were partying. These cops drove their cycle into the bar and left a tire burn on the floor before riding off to their doom. Why didn’t their fellow cops stop them from committing DUI? Why weren’t they arrested for property damage to the bar? It was because they were fellow cops!
Police have an us-versus-them attitude towards citizens. Police think everyone is guilty; they just haven’t arrested us, yet. I think this is becoming more prevalent due to the hiring of ex-military personnel. The military indoctrinates soldiers to view everyone not in uniform as a hostile. Shoot first is quite valuable thinking in a war zone, but not in dealing with citizens. A local cop tasered an old woman who could barely walk because she argued with him over signing a ticket. I could continue with many more examples of bad cops that literally got away with murder.
Citizens abet police abuse by seldom holding them to reasonable standards. Even the most egregious abuse results in little more than being fired. Juries routinely find cops not guilty, even when there is video evidence to the contrary. After all, if a cop is guilty the local government would likely lose any civil case filed by the person harmed by the cop. This emboldens police to contined enforcement excesses.
Here in Connecticut, we could easily do without about 50 percent of the police. If you look at the court dockets here, probably 70 percent or more of the charges are for “victimless” crimes: possession of marijuana, possession of other drugs, public displays of “inappropriate” behavior (someone was too loud, set off fireworks while a neighbor was sleeping, etc etc) and – well – low level misdemeanors.
It is common for police to stop young people on a ruse like “your tail-light is out”. Getting out to look is obstruction of justice, and if it’s working after the police leave they will just say “it was not working when I stopped the vehicle”. Once stopped, they bring in the drug-sniffing dogs (unless the kid is somehow connected) hoping to find enough to to make an arrest. A stub of a joint is enough to be charged with possession here.
The reality is they have nothing better to do. They arrest drug users because there is no coordinated effort to even look for the drug dealers, much less find and arrest them.
The result is a huge cost in maintaining judicial system capacity to deal with all these cases. Plus the cost of maintaining the police capacity to create the cases.
I am sure that in major metro areas, cuts in the police force create an unsafe environment. But here in CT, the result would be the exact opposite. Since the police do nothing except react when violence occurs (gang, drug, robbery or domestic-related), and they do not investigate anything that does not leave someone either crippled or dead, most of their time is spent on petty stuff.
The kind of stuff that now results in an arrest, reams of paperwork and case processing, and several court appearances? 40 years ago the police here would have ignored them or, at the most, given a stern 5 minute lecture about.
The best thing that will come out of this depression is that we will rationalize police work just as large corporations rationalized corporate jobs in the early part of the decade. For starters, stop buying the doomsday talk about the negative effects of fewer police officers. Except for a few dozen high-crime zip codes, most police are little more than crossing guards and armed insurance clerks. Comparisons of communities with and without police forces show no statistically significant different crime rates. The problem of runaway police costs can only be solved at the local level. If you are a member of or candidate for a municipal office take a close look at your community’s budget and add up the total coast of policing, including fuel, equipment, insurance, payout to settle wrongful arrests (the dirty little secret in the business), overtime and most important pensions and retirement healthcare. Then compare your town’s hourly cost for crime control agains the actual cost of crime. Also keep in mind that most of the “good works” for which police claim credit is actually done by volunteers who give their time tolocal fire departments and EMS units. As for decreases in break-ins, thank the folks who use private alarm services.
I think we had far more cops – and far more “victimless crime” laws – than we needed to begin with. In cities we’ve forgotten how to walk over to a neighbor’s and ask them to please turn the noise down, it’s almost midnight. And if Smalltown America out in the boonies start getting an influx from the cities, I suspect we’ll find that rural areas are sufficiently well-armed to take care of themselves.
Anyone else see something wrong here? The gov’t just offered $25 BILLION for a new nuke power plant, but can’t help out with a shortage of cops – unless we want some free foreign troops and US military taking their places under martial law and a suspended Constitution.
How about we just say “HELL no!”?
Ian
I live in canada so sorry to you country down
With all the dirty cops we have in Memphis, TN, we could lay off about half of them and not miss them at all. IN fact the city would make money. the **** cops we got here total a police car a day doing stupid stuff like speeding without going to a call; pulling out of a service station and hitting another cop head on (happened last week 7/23/10)- that totaled two cars; then there are the times they elect NOT to use a siren and run red lights and broad side civilians… so in short, Memphis, TN would be better off without all the cops. If we need a cop now days, you better have the phone number of the local Krispy-Kreme doughnut shop in your back pocket!
The police have NEVER had a duty or legal obligation to provide protection for individual citizens. The US SCOTUS, as well as Federal and State courts have ruled on this in over a dozen cases–the benchmark is “Warren v. District of Columbia”. So having fewer (or more) cops on the street will NOT have ANY statistically significant effect on the number or types of crimes committed. It will ONLY effect the speed of arrest AFTER the crimes are committed, and the number of citations that a department can write. I have concealed carry permits in 3 states, and I Open Carry wherever legal (which is about 99% of the time). I value my own life, and that of my family too much to trust it to some minimum-wage dispatcher, and the average 15-minute response time for a 911 call… When seconds count, the police are only minutes away…
I am prior law enforcement…notice the key word ‘prior’. Much of what has been stated in the replies to this article are fairly correct. Sad to say, the days of law enforcement upholding and defending the Constitution of the United States (which is what we as officers do when sworn in) are a bygone era. Yes corruption is rampant. Yes a lot of cops are egotistical and arrogant. There are some good reasons for it, but….is there really a good reason for everyone to be a suspect? To continually use authority to bait and switch the general public into jail? Oh yes, there are those who are always walking the line of crime, full of lies, always manipulating, basically low life. But I have experienced police tactics after retirement – namely the Oklahoma State Troopers. I was profiled as a potential drug runner (I was driving a 2000 ford 250 truck with a 100 gallon fuel tank in the truck bed). The trooper found that I was driving to close to the car in front of me….barely, just enough to warrant in his eyes to stop me. I know all the tactics and he did everyone of them. It all ended with me not consenting to a search of my truck, so he used the drug dog for a sniff, then let me go. Here is a law abiding citizen about his legal business getting stopped by an over zealous trooper. Since then I’ve repented from how I was as an officer and feel sorry for everyone I see with their affects strewn along Interstate 40.
My point is this: Citizens of America – Arm yourselves, hold all government officials accountable for what they do, get involved at all levels, put YOUR FOOT ON THEIR NECKS! And when all else fails let us take our country back!
Police are not required (by law) to do anything that does not directly involve the protection and enhancement of the “system”… People are just now finding that out..
So, people are beginning to understand that THEY.. the taxpayers could do with a whole LOT LESS police who are bullying, harassing, beating, shooting, and scorning the man on the street.. the taxpayer.
Government generally has deliberately created a “dependency state” a mind set that dictates that we the sheeple must have someone else “do it for us”… NOT SO~!
Time to start doing “it” for ourselves.
Nancy said, “Government generally has deliberately created a “dependency state” a mind set that dictates that we the sheeple must have someone else “do it for us”… NOT SO~!
Time to start doing “it” for ourselves.”
Reply: Absolutely right! It’s time for citizens to become self-sufficient, self-reliant, and relearn self-defense. This used to be the individual’s responsibility–if they wanted to survive. Now, self-defense has become the major condition for each of us to survive the out of control, monstrosity the government has created.
The sheeple need to stop sending their money to the federal government. Your income tax funds this monstrous empire building and police state. I am urging everyone to stop withholding and stop giving your money to these thugs. Keep the money local and you will see a rebirth. It’s tie for the states to say no more, we’re keep ing our revenues so we don’t have to beg to get it back.
This article is written like the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic. Cops are bullies and thugs. We live in a world where personal security is cheap and readily available. I’m not talking about guns like these hicks that want to tote firearms like the very thugs they despise — I’m talking home alarm systems, security cameras and locks.
[...] Anthony Batts says that due to severe budget cuts there are a number of crimes that his department will simply not be able to respond to any longer. The crimes that the Oakland police will no longer be responding to include grand theft, [...]