Another important decision awaits those who live in my community, as the board of supervisors in the town where I live is proposing to disband the police department and contract with the county for services.
To fully appreciate this situation, it’s important to understand New York’s somewhat complicated (at least to me) governmental organization. Coming from the Northwest, it was pretty simple, Within a county, you either had incorporated areas (cities) or unincorporated areas. Those not incorporated were served either by the county or by various voter-generated districts (fire, water, school, etc.) In New York, you have a veritable menu of possibilities. Within a given county, you can have cities, towns, villages, and hamlets–each with their own distinct and separate governments. For example, a city resides within a county, but is independent otherwise. Towns function similarly, but can also contain villages, which have seperate government structures and often provide residents all the typical city services, but may permit the town to do so. Towns also comprise hamlets, which are as you might expect pretty tiny, with some elected officials but services usually provided by the town or county. If your head is spinning, it’s no surprise. I live here, and it spins mine still.
The decision to abandon the police department is one other governments in the area have tried with degrees of success, and is largely one of economics. The county-provided service will save the town a million dollars a year–a not insignificant sum for a community of 60,000 people. The present department is small and it seems the consensus is they are pretty worthless at anything except writing citations. I’m inclined to agree with that, since they are hardly visible and seem hopelessly unable to handle important tasks like maintaining residential speed limits. That is something that village police forces–where they exist–are incredibly efficient at doing. In my neighborhood, cars drive entirely too fast for the numbers of children who walk and play along residential roadways–and I could probably count on both hands the number of times I have seen patrol cars on even the well-traveled arterial streets there.
But the county contract provides for only 2 patrol cars to cover what is the county’s largest town by area. That may not be far from what our present reality is in terms of actual coverage, but strikes me as a far cry from what is needed. I’m also concerned at losing local control over public safety–not that it’s really had much of an impact up to this point. I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to worry less about saving the million bucks(this is a heavily Republican area constantly trying to find new and better ways to spend less money) and turn the whole $2.4 million department budget over to the county in exchange for pehaps double the number of patrols.
Then again, I’m not sure what we would be buying in improved service, since the entire force will be able to transistion into similar positions in the sheriff’s department–and would initially be assigned to patrol Clay. They may get the opportunity for better training and supervision, but who knows? We all may end up no better and possibly worse for the experiment. It is likely the story with a nearby village, who decided to let the nearby city of Syracuse provide its police service–only to revert back to their own force a couple of years later.
The town will put this up to a vote of residents in June, which gives me a little bit of time to ponder this. It reminds me of the old adage: "There’s never a cop around when you need one". It certainly seems to be the case here–even when you don’t necessarily need one…
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