Traffic Cops Jogging? - Why Local Control of the Police is a Bad Idea

When you mix Dave Helling's journalistic judgment and the inability of some council members to think before they speak, you wind up with a KC Star front page that makes it clear why we do not want our City Council involved with decision-making for our Police Department.

Several Council members are shocked, simply shocked, that the Police Department bought cars for the officers to use. Their shock is triggered by the unheard-of concept that the Police Department didn't wait until after they needed the cars to purchase and outfit them for regular use, patrolling our streets and keeping us safe.

I suppose, if you're really, really thoughtless (or really, really stretching for news), you could argue that it looks bad that the Police Department spent $2.1 million over a couple budget years to adequately equip our police force with vehicles, at the same time they were complaining that the City Council preferred to donate $2 million for stadiums rather than invest in public safety. The coincidence of similar numbers, plus the eagerness of some Council members to play politics with our safety, makes for an intoxicating mix.

Sadly, some of the Council members are demonstrating their financial illiteracy by arguing that the money spent on cars should have been spent on keeping some of the cops on the street that they themselves idled. There's a difference between capital expenditures and payroll. The "rob Peter to pay Paul" idiocy espoused by some council members goes a long way toward explaining why politically ambitious City Council members make such terrible decisions for our city when it comes to spending money.

Right now, our Police Department is overseen by an appointed board, and City Council members will agree - off the record - that it is one of the best-run departments in the City. But it bothers them that the only control they have over the Police is in approving the budget. As they demonstrate in today's paper, they thirst for the ability to micro-manage the Police Department and misdirect funds to cover their own mistakes. As they also demonstrate in today's paper, such local control would be an unmitigated catastrophe for the citizens of Kansas City.

It was a blow to our collective safety when City Council members chose to fund stadiums instead of police in the last budget cycle. Perhaps they should direct their attention to micro-managing the Royals instead of taking potshots at the Police Department.

Playing Games with "Cops on the Street"

After hacking $15 million dollars from the budget of the Kansas City police department, the Kansas City Council wants to act like it didn't do anything wrong. Incredibly, two City Councilwomen have sought to breeze in and wallpaper over their budgetary attack by encouraging the Police Department to eliminate support positions and change the working conditions for 200 cops - all so that they can claim that their budgetary attack didn't reduce "cops on the street".

These are the same people who voted to donate almost $2,000,000 to the stadiums, instead of using it to reduce the cuts to cops.

Frankly, avoiding a reduction in the number of "cops on the street" is political showmanship, not effective public safety. "Cops on the street" need support off the street, and $15 million in cuts to the back office is going to have an impact on the ability of the cops on the street to do their jobs. Those cops on the street need supplies, they need well-maintained vehicles, and they need supervision. Like any business, they need support services, and cutting those support services while artificially maintaining the number of cops on the street is likely to do more harm than good.

Sure enough, after the Police Board passed the budget without a single negative vote, one of the City Council members took the low road and preemptively slimed the Police Chief. "If officers are pulled off the street that will be Corwin's decision, not the council's." Folks, I've seen some pretty vile attempts at denying responsibility for one's own behavior before, but that one ranks way up there.

Of course, in the anti-Funk hysteria this town is currently suffering through, nobody wants to talk about the irresponsibility of the council. Instead, people are aiming their guns at the one person who has worked hardest to preserve the police force. The same Council member mentioned above had the unmitigated gall to complain that "Funkhouser hadn't helped the city officials dicker with the police staff during task force meetings about the budget."

I believe that the Council "dickered" the police department quite well without Mark's help.

Showing an amazing ability to focus on the irrelevant, Yael "Funk is a Big Poopyhead" Abouhalkah even took a cheap shot at Funkhouser for not attending the meeting at which the budget passed without a single negative vote. Again, showmanship gets valued over substance in Yael's mind. Instead of even mentioning the vote tally, Yael wrote two columns attacking Mark for the same missed meeting, and implied that pre-meeting participation in the budgetary process doesn't matter if none of the voters mentions it during the vote. Amateurish, petty hack job.

If we want to talk about failure in Kansas City, we ought to be talking about the attempts of certain City Council members to paper over the impact of their disastrous police cuts, and the Star's biased refusal to call them on it.

112,000 Brave Americans

I've written before about my opinions of airline security, but I've never filed an official complaint about it. Yesterday, I read this well-written blog post on the topic, and learned that 112,000 brave Americans have actually dared to complain.

My hat's off to those brave souls. So are my shoes, my belt, and anything else the TSA people feel like telling me to remove . . .

Don't Drive Drunk on Saturday, in South KC

It will probably be a great Saturday evening for getting your drink on and cruising the roads of Kansas City north of 75th Street, because the Police Department has announced it will be running a DUI checkpoint in South Kansas City, starting at 11.

What does this mean to you? If you drive in South Kansas City, it means you may be accosted by the police without any individualized suspicion of wrongful behavior. If you live elsewhere in Kansas City, you may face blackouts of police coverage, since dozens of officers will be spending hundreds of man-hours to arrest a few buzzed drivers. If you pay taxes in Kansas City, you will simply have your tax dollars wasted in an effort that is more about misguided PR ("We're a police state, and we can interfere with you whenever and wherever we like" being the PR message) than about saving lives.

If, by chance, you or a loved one is killed because some drunk moron blows through a red light, well, the police will respond to the scene when they get around to it. They'll be busy delivering a PR message in South Kansas City.

Update on the Wrongheadedness of DUI Checkpoints

When I wrote yesterday of the foolishness of numerous cops spending untold tax dollars stopping and delaying hundreds of motorists last Friday night to catch 7 allegedly intoxicated drivers, I didn't realize how bad it was.

Over at the always informative Capt. Spaulding's World (a newsy blog), I learned that "Meanwhile that same night- several police patrol zones were "blacked out"- or had no cars available to run calls."

Can you believe that insanity? While hundreds of innocent citizens were experiencing an unwelcome, warrantless, probable-cause-free, police intrusion into their evening, other citizens who actually needed police services were left as voices crying in the wilderness.

Not a nickle more for the wasteful Police Department until it stops wasting our tax dollars!

Not a nickle more for the wasteful Police Department until it uses the money we do giv it to protect citizens instead of hassling them.

Hire Cops Instead of Hassling Hundreds of Citizens

Not a nickle more for the wasteful Police Department until it stops wasting our tax dollars!

The Police Department claims there's no way that it can live up to the promise to hire 20 new cops this year.

Yet buried in the paper on Saturday was this little item:

Kansas City police arrest 7 for DUI at checkpoint

KANSAS CITY | DUI arrests

During a sobriety checkpoint late Friday and early Saturday, Kansas City police made 7 DUI arrests and arrested two other people for other unspecified traffic violations.

Police stopped a total of 286 vehicles from 11 p.m. Friday to 4 a.m. Saturday near the intersection of Ward Parkway and Wornall Road, according to a press release.

Karen Dillon

How many cops worked how many hours for those seven arrests? I'll guess 10 or so, probably more. How many hours of paperwork went into it, before and after? Were any of those hours paid at an overtime rate? 5 hours of checkpoint means at least a full 8 hour shift, maybe more. Ignoring the prospect of overtime pay, I'm willing to bet they blew over 80 hours of cop time on 7 arrests and 279 needless hasslings of law-abiding citizens, with attendant delay for those unlucky saps. More than 10 hours per arrest, and if they eliminated two checkpoints a month, they would save the equivalent of a new cop.

I personally think that DUI checkpoints are a warrantless unreasonable search and seizure conducted without probably cause, but the courts disagree with me. Regardless of their legality, though, they remain a singularly intrusive and ineffective waste of resources for a department that cries about underfunding.