Posted on 01/26/2003 8:37:20 AM PST by Tunehead54
CLEARWATER -- Police Chief Sid Klein hoped the day would never come.
But later this year, Klein will lose 13 police officer positions on his force. The losses come because federal grants that fund the positions have run out. Klein was hoping the city would absorb the positions, but city leaders say they cannot afford it.
So during the past few months, Klein has formed a plan to brace for the losses. No police officers will lose their jobs. Positions will be eliminated through attrition, including several in community policing and traffic enforcement -- two areas Klein considers prized programs.
"It's a hard pill to swallow, certainly," Klein said last week. "When you take a hit . . . in a department of this size, it's a big deal."
This is the first time in Klein's 22-year tenure as police chief that he is losing staff. The 13 lost positions represent almost 5 percent of the department's 268 positions and 6.3 percent of the agency's 207-person patrol and community policing staff.
"Nobody is happy about it," he said. "But everybody understands the facts of life. We're good troops. Those are our marching orders. We're going to tighten our belts and do it."
Eleven of the positions to be cut were obtained through the U.S. Justice Department's Community Policing Office, which provided scores of grants to police departments nationwide in the 1990s to set up or expand community policing programs.
The other two positions were funded through the Clearwater Housing Authority, which has elected not to fund the positions this year, Klein said.
Klein and his staff pride themselves on community policing and consider the department progressive when it comes to community policing programs. The International Association of Chiefs of Police recognized the department in 1999 as one of the five finest community policing agencies in the world.
But in determining where to slice positions, Klein decided he couldn't tinker much with the department's most basic duty: patrolling neighborhoods and responding to calls; therefore, only one position will be cut from patrol.
"That's your basic mission," he said. "That's your foundation. When you get right down to it, our basic mission is responding to calls for service. Everything else is an add-on."
But other cuts and changes will affect community policing squads.
In North Greenwood, a community policing squad of eight officers, including one sergeant, will be clipped to seven officers, including a sergeant and a corporal.
The same will happen to a downtown community policing squad, which patrols the city on bicycles. A squad of eight will become a squad of seven.
Klein is not touching the South Greenwood community policing squad. In fact, he would like to increase officers in that unit but doesn't have the resources. He said community policing squads have flushed problems from North Greenwood to South Greenwood during the past several years.
The end of the housing authority funding means a substation in Jasmine Court will be shuttered. The substation was opened in the early 1980s as an answer to rampant drug problems in that area. The grant funded two officers who worked as agents of the housing authority.
Klein will add one officer to the nearby Wood Valley community policing squad and will expand its duties to include Jasmine Court. That squad will have five officers, including one sergeant.
"I don't know how that's going to shake out in there," Klein said. "We're going to try to keep our presence in Jasmine Court, but it won't be the same level as it was before."
The community policing squad in the Old Clearwater Bay area will be meshed with the department's Community Problem Response team, which is dispatched to hot-spot areas of the city that are suffering crime problems.
The CPR team will work out of the Old Clearwater Bay substation and will have responsibility for community policing in that area. That squad, made up of seven officers, including a sergeant and corporal, also will continue to float to other areas of the city having problems.
"I think their level of coverage will actually increase," Klein said of the Old Clearwater Bay area.
A sergeant position made obsolete by the combination of the units will be assigned to internal affairs, where Klein wants to see investigations completed more quickly.
"If discipline is to be fair and firm and effective, it has to be relatively quick," Klein said. "I want a faster turnaround time on internal affairs investigations."
Perhaps the most hard hit by the cuts was the department's traffic initiative, part of Klein's "Project Next Step," the chief's plans to expand community policing in the city.
Two officers will be sliced from the department's DUI team, while another two will be carved out of the traffic enforcement team. That will leave the staffs of both units at the same level as they were two years ago, said Lt. Steve Burch, commander of those units.
Burch said traffic citations have gone up, while traffic crashes and fatalities have fallen, since the new officers were added in October 2001.
"Any time you reduce staffing, it's going to have a negative impact," Burch said.
But he said he understands what Klein has to do.
"He has a boss, too," Burch said. "I'm going to make do with what I have. Would I have been happier if my unit had been spared? Sure, I would."
Klein said patrol officers will be told to place more emphasis on traffic enforcement to compensate for the cuts to those units.
In addition, Klein will eliminate a sworn officer from the computer operations support team, and pluck a position out of the vice and narcotics unit. The latter position was assigned full-time to a federal drug task force. The department will remain involved with the group, just not full time, the chief said.
Starting in May, Klein will transfer the officers in those positions back to patrol, temporarily beefing up the ranks. But as officers retire or are promoted, those positions will not be refilled. Klein said he thinks the positions will vanish within a year.
Though Klein said his shuffling plans shouldn't create any gaping wounds, he is disappointed that the positions could not be kept. He had hoped city leaders would have picked up the bill after the grants ran out, which they had done with previous gifts from the federal government.
"I held out a glimmer of hope that the city would follow the pattern that it had done with previous grants," the chief said.
City Manager Bill Horne said he was pleased with Klein's plans. The police department is the city's biggest expenditure, with a budget of about $28-million.
"The question is, can we meet the demand? We'll find out. If we can't meet it, then we'll have to address it," Horne said.
-- Chris Tisch can be reached at 445-4156 or tisch@sptimes.com .
It just pisses me off to no end that people have no idea how much the "government" takes from them
One side of the equation anyway:
We must . . . End Tax Slavery Now; Nov '97
by Jarret B. WollsteinHOW MUCH DO YOU REALLY PAY?
According to the Tax Foundation, in 1994 the average American paid 22.4% of his or her income in federal taxes, plus 11.8% in state and local taxes - 34.2% total.
But that's just the beginning! Dr. James Payne of the University of California found that in addition to direct taxes we also pay huge, hidden taxes including:
- Compliance costs - record keeping, monies spent on tax planning, computers and software purchased to fulfill IRS requirements, etc.
- Enforcement costs - IRS audits, field investigations, service center corrections, criminal investigations, litigation, and forced collections.
- Emotional, moral and cultural costs - families forced onto welfare, time and creative energy lost figuring out how to avoid taxes, etc.
For every $1 we pay in direct taxes, we spend an additional $0.65 in compliance costs. And even that figure doesn't include the cost of import duties, license fees and other government regulations. For a typical U.S. family, the real cost of taxes and regulations is at least:
Federal taxes 22.4% of income
State & local taxes 11.8%
Compliance costs 22.2%
Regulatory costs 12.7%70.1% of your income is now consumed by government
Not surprising when, they really is no way for the average person to measure the actual burden on him, most of it is hidden behind a veil of price inflation.
Surely you jest???? You know full well the term "cut" is not in any politicians vocabulary. My goodness, the sky would fall if we to cut "needed" services. I dare say there are 13 officers on that force that are non-producers that could be put out on the street. Will it happen??? Course not.
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