Do Cities Have Their Own Police and Fire Departments Out of Need or Ego?

Read this first and then I'll have some comments:

Oakland, where violent crime is up, has cut 80 officers--10% of it's department-- to save $14-million annually.

The city of Stockton -- $23-million in the red-- is laying off 26 officers, and prompting concerns by the local police union.

"We're not doing as much follow up police work as far as when we do respond to a call, we don't have the amount of detectives that we used to follow up and investigate these cases and try and get these suspects in custody," says Steve Leonesio, with the Stockton Police Officers Association.

Now, that union is taking its fight to the streets, buying billboard space to send grim, graphic, messages. One sign welcomes visitors to "the second most dangerous city" in the state. Another says the murder rate is up, and keeps a running body count.

"During tough times, you've got to make tough decisions, and we don't think cutting public safety is the right decision that's being made at city hall. So that's why we're doing this," says Leonesio.

Critics charge short-changing law enforcement is the wrong way to make up for years of poor financial decision making.

The Bay Area city of San Carlos believes it's come up with a better solution: it's disbanding its P.D. altogether, and turning law enforcement over to the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office. It's a decision the mayor says will maintain the same number of cops, but cut the city's $3.5 million deficit nearly in half.

Ed Rogner, a law enforcement consultant who worked with San Carlos, says numerous police departments have merged with county sheriff's departments in Southern California. He believes that will eventually become a trend in Nor Cal cities, too.

In a day when city budgets are increasingly stressed does it really make sense for so many cities in a place like Orange County where I live to have their own police and fire departments? Orange County is now pretty much fully developed, and from the time you enter the county at the San Diego County line on I-5 and until you depart at the L.A. County line in Buena Park you can't really tell when your leaving one town and entering another. It's just one mass of buildings and development the whole way.

Since city boundaries are so hard to see anymore it would seem to make sense to me that many city services, and especially police and fire services, could be handled by one county-wide agency rather than a bunch of city-level organizations, each with its own bureaucracy, management and support services.

When I was a kid growing up in Westminster my town had it's own fire department. So did Seal Beach, Buena Park and San Clemente. Today all those cities are serviced by the Orange County Fire Authority. In fact, everything in Orange County from Tustin and Irvine south to San Clemente is handled by the OCFA. And everything south of Irvine is handled by the Orange County Sheriff's, along with several other parts of the county, some mere small county islands that have never been absorbed by the surrounding cities.

Most of the cities in Central and Northern Orange County have their own police and fire departments. This seems like a gigantic waste of taxpayer money to me. Both the Sheriff's and OCFA have county-wide facilities and capability, and could absorb the operations in these cities without too much hassle. Most of the rank-and-file cops and firefighters would be picked up by the countywide organization, but much of the expensive overhead of management, maintenance facilities and the like could be consolidated into more efficient operations. As it is now fire units routinely roll into neighboring cities as part of mutual aid agreements, so transforming the whole bunch of them into a bigger OCFA wouldn't dramatically change the way the nearest available units are dispatched.  Public safety wouldn't be comprised a bit.

People have become accustomed to the idea that there are shiny cop cars and firetrucks with their city's name on them, but we pay a pretty price for the ego trip of having our own departments.  I see no reason why larger countywide agencies couldn't still provide quality local service but at a greatly reduced cost to taxpayers.

We've seen what happens when local government runs amok, such as in the city of Bell where the police department, which consisted of a handful of sworn officers, was run by a chief making over $400,000 per year.  That kind of stuff should never happen.