Posted on 02/24/2011 9:37:34 AM PST by katiedidit1
Sketching out a worst-case scenario of San Jose's budget meltdown, city officials warned this week that they could lay off as many as 349 police officers and 145 firefighters, slashing close to a quarter of the city's public safety employees.
The city is also looking at millions of dollars in other cuts, including shutting off neighborhood
streetlights for much of the night and eliminating some gang-prevention programs.
There has never been a major layoff of police officers in the city's modern history. But last year San Jose laid off 49 firefighters, and this is the second year in a row the Police Department has faced layoffs.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
I live across the street from a sewage treatment plant. It was built in the early 70’s and was way out of date technology wise and over capacity most of the time, especially after rains. The tanks were open and the stench was unbearable on some hot summer days and nights. It was closed about a year ago when a new larger modern facility went on line a few miles from here. The stench is gone, but the eyesore is still here. They will take forever to tear it down..............
The police are really political police. They are not about crime, old testament crime, what people think of as crime.
They are not even Law enforcement. They are legal enforcement. Their main purpose is as a conditioning agency of the masses. Especially the ones with non elite notions, disdainful of the clown circuses that pass as legislatures.
The less intelligent of LEO’s complain that they are working hard but the system prevents them. They don’t get it. The system works as it is supposed too. Keep crime going, make manufacture more criminals by each year making what was free, unfree, and basically getting the cops to capo like suppress their own class.
With out cops, agents and such, what would people do? Criminals would still be criminals, which I believe the state likes, and protects and nurtures( welfare,section 8, etc ) but more threatening to the tax/spend crime racket is that without police the vast percentage of ordinary people would go on with their lives. And this would be a mortal blow to the gov rip off gravy train. Many would be forced in to poverty, suicide, or God forbid, honest work.
Bingo. They cut the things they need like cops and firemen, but there will be plenty of $$$$ for useless PC crap that only helps a few people.
We shouldn’t of built systems we couldn’t maintain.
There are hundreds of once taxpaying, progress making, industrial cities in a square from New Jersey to Maine, as far west as Detroit down to St. Louis. Once the wonder of the world. Now welfare breeding farms. Those people can not support themselves, let alone any excess wealth( there isn’t any) to maintain the systems built in a supposedly poorer time. Hack, hooked up contractors coupled with crypto Marxist architectural firms, paying off politicians providing union labor. Really, just a scam. Like the guys that put a $50K vinyl siding job on a 90 year olds house. Wealth extraction by other means.
How much longer do you think burb and non urban, or self sufficient urban citizens are going to have money funnel for ‘renewal’ schemes in dead man walking cities?
People have for thirty years, like East Germans fleeing the leftist republic of East Germany, been moving away from the dead, over taxed, over permitted hooked up crooked cites.
The cities, built by the now long dead, defeating the diseases of filth and pollution are now controlled by different engineers. Social engineers. And their product is pathology and debts.
If there could be a vote by criminals, which do you think they would prefer. The present raise-my-mommy baby welfare/criminal justice system, or a older, charity, I-have-a-dead-thief-in-my-yard, call the Sheriff system?
Police and everything that goes with it are to protect criminals, not citizens. With out police, citizens would quickly fill the void, have real neighborhoods, with mutual assistance and ‘take care’ of business themselves.
Would murder, rape, robbery disappear? No. But I feel we would have less, with more sure punishment with out the costs of what I believe is a police/lawyer/judge organ that first and foremost is about protecting and expanding its wealth and scope.
Oh.
Thanks very much. I didn’t realize that the salaries were that high.
Still, I think there could be other cost savings to be had before furloughing the currently employed police and fire fighters.
This is what happens when you support illegals in health care, education etc etc etc and then liberals have their contracts negotiated by SEUI and other powerful unions.
meanwhile essential services can go to the devil ..
they get what they deserve now
Perhaps you are correct. The consequences of wasting infrastructure will not be reduced. Waste is never good.
It’s often cheaper to junk a car, tear down a house, a school, send to the scrappers an aircraft carrier. Cities are just bigger. Let the dieing die.
A hundred, maybe more has been spent on Detroit alone. Whday think, a trillion dollar HUD run, ‘remodel’ of Detroit, version 7.9?
Is there anyone that thinks that programs that ran by the name of Slum Clearance, Urban Renewal, Model Cities, Refinances Center, will work this one last time?
For ten thousand years, people lived in cities because of high transportation and communication costs and security. None of that exists in cities anymore. The last fifty years, for the first time in human existence, you can get lower transportation, communication costs and better security outside cities, by and large.
There’s enough money to pay an adequate level of police and fire protection. What there isn’t enough money for is all the other BS departments and programs being provided.
The city fathers need to lay off employees in other departments, completely cut their positions and then lay their own butts off before any essential services are cut.
This is a time-old, tried-and-true tactic of rats in rat-run cities, counties and states across America: scare people into believing the services most needed will be cut if they don’t pony up more tax money. Commie Governor Jerry Brown is coming oout with a referendum on tax inxreases. The people will vote on whether or not they want to increase taxes to pay for all this crap. Brown has an extensive network with mayors and county governments throughout the state. He will have no trouble getting large Bay Area counties (such as Santa Clara Co. which is where San Jose is) to help him with his propaganda campaign to get the initiative to pass.
This particular announcement is a blatant propaganda move: notice that the announcement includes the threat of severely reducing gang control programs? Blatant scare tactic. There are a whole lot of people who should be sent packing, including the mayor and the city council, before one firefighter or cop is laid off. Any layoffs from police and fire should be strictly clerical. Let some of these fatassed beotches put their finger nail files and their cell phones and their bags of chips and Hostess ding-dongs down and do some work for a change. If they all put in a day’s work for a day’s pay, 2/3 of those jobs could be eliminated.
Santa Clara County would be right at the top of the list for wanting the tax increase initiative to pass because it is so heavily Mexican and pro-Mexican there it may as well be called San Jose, Mexico. For example, CSU San Jose has been renamed to something (I forget what at the moment) that implies it is a Mexican university or is in Mexico. Santa Clara County wants this increase to keep funding more programs and benefits for illegals.
So that’s the Real story.
Yep. See post #110 for more.
See post #110.
By and large government activities have no ability to be efficient. They don’t have prices for the costs of each job.
The private sector is always trying to get a handle on all costs. A good restaurant owner will tell you what a paper napkin costs him, what his gas bill is in cold weather each month. You think that type of cost control exists in the public sector? It doesn’t. So, even energetic managers don’t have price/cost data to make economic decisions, and thus free up money for what is thought more valuables.
And you know that the entire culture is price/cost investigating adverse. People don’t want to know. The whole subject is fraught with the chance that your position is the most costly, or least productive, or thought of as the easiest to target. Everyone will hang on hoping they’re the last. Human nature.
The office ladies are near the decision making administrators. If the ladies go, then there won’t be a need for so many office admin, so the decision makers will keep them as a reserve of last ditch sacrifices to the lay off God.
“they don’t slash pensions, bennies, and bloated bureaucracies”
It is amazing how secure the janitors job at city hall and the litter picker-upper job is at the local park compared to cops and fire fighters.
Need to cut jobs, it is always to cops and not the other 80% of absolutely useless city hall workers. I worked at City Hall in New Orleans and saying that 20% do something is being kind.
I have to agree with you to an extent. But I disagree to this extent: gun laws, which are gradually improving, need to be advanced to full or near full 2A restoration in all 50 states before we can say adios to these (mostly) crappy police “services” in this country. Right now, it’s really demographics that presents a mixed bag as to the need for cops.
Although we pay dearly for what little benefit we get from the police who spend most of their time pushing around taxpayers and riding herd on the lowlife population of any given city, they do serve as a deterrent in many cases. They can make a local mob-type gang of teens threatening and disrupting shoppers and businesses desist and disperse just by rolling up to the scene. They do, in many cities, have a decent handle on gang control by getting good intel and showing a heavy visual presence in those neighborhoods, and ganags do need to be controlled. CCW isn’t going to protect you from a stray bullet suddenly fired a half block away from a drive-by or an incident you are unaware is even going down. To be blunt, in any urban or large suburban area where the demographics present even low to medium populations of middle and lower income blacks and chicanos, you need cops to bust heads so the savages don’t take total control of the streets. They also do a decent job in many jurisdictions of keeping the homeless from committing the more brazen public offenses against homeowners, like crapping on the front doorstep of businesses, homeowners, and so on. In rural areas or mostly white areas, cops are bullies, just revenue thieves, or both. For the rare burglaries and bar fights, all they do is take a report. They are, at best, just an unnecessary expense.
They are useless in most cases of crime against one individual. They are also often bullies, liars and just downright dumber than a bag of hammers.
Also please see post #110.
Yep. You got it right. The office workers are The Final Solution.
You know, the entire concept of the government we have is a rat proposition. It isn’t a libertarian or even pub model of government. We are and always will be playing on the rat’s turf even when we’re the majority. Government wholly is, by its nature and function, now a rat construct.
Defending yourself? THAT the cops WILL show up for. And arrest you.
Why not lay off thousands of cubicle monkeys downtown that do nothing but shuffle papers and destroy liberties?
Bingo! Betcha at least 80% of the public employee retirees from California, New Jersey, Michigan, etc. retire out of state in states such as Texas, Florida, etc. Pump up the last couple of years with a lot of overtime, retire and flee the state.
There is no bang for the tax increase buck.
You get more bureaucrats hired who need more pay and pension and who vote for more increases for more jobs costing more pay and pensions.
After a while you got one lone guy in one lone factory supporting a gazillion bureaucrats all impressed with their position in the pecking order of the bureacracy.
It’s insane. It can’t go on.
When taxes go up, at a minimum you should see a bridge, a road, a something that gets built or repaired and that consumed some 95% of the increase.
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