Revenue sharing cuts impact public safety

Deep cuts to state-funded local revenue sharing that have forced local communities throughout the state to make major cuts to police and public safety programs have helped fuel a boost in violent crime in some cities, experts say.

Speaking about the situation as a whole in Michigan, Andy Schor, Ingham County Commissioner and Chairperson of the Finance Committee said funding has “steadily gone down.” “The impacts have been huge,” he said in regards to how it has affected law enforcement.

“It’s about four billion dollars over the last 10 years taken from counties and communities and put into the state budget,” said Schor during an interview with the Michigan Messenger. “Money has been taken from communities and counties and put into the state budget deficit.”

Schor went on to say that the challenge as a commissioner used to be trying to figure out how to spend the money that was brought in from the state, as well as property taxes, to provide community services; now it’s all about finding places to cut.

Victor Celentino is also on the Ingham Board of Commissioners and sits as Chairperson of the Law Enforcement Committee. He agrees with Schor that the cuts have impacted public safety.

“After you’re done cutting all the small things, law enforcement is 33 percent of our budget, when you have a large deficit and you need to make substantial cuts you can only do so much with cutting pencil and paper,” said Celentino in an interview following a board meeting on Tuesday. “You have to take a look at what is the large percentage of expenditure, and that’s law enforcement.”

Ingham county recently had to make the decision to cut road patrols this past year due to lack of funding and failed millage votes.

The cuts were inevitable despite continued efforts to save money by the board including jail closings, union employee concessions, hiring freezes and furlough days.

Many law enforcement jobs have been cut through attrition, where an officer who retires or quits is not replaced by a new hire.

“We’ve run the gamut of ideas and things to do to save money,” said Schor.

Carol Wood, At-Large Lansing City Council Member and Chair of the City Council Public Safety Committee, said the city of Lansing has also struggled because of the state’s lack of funding.

The city will be forced by July 1 to cut 44 patrol officers from their department. That’s a little over one fourth of the entire patrol force, according to Wood.

“It’s going to be a concern out there,” she said. “We’re not alone with trying to figure out how we can do this, but for anyone to say that we can handle this with what we’ve got isn’t being realistic.”

Lansing was recently included in a report published by Business Insider that showed the 25 most dangerous cities in the United States, according to FBI statistics. Flint and Detroit also made the list, adding to the concern that decreased funding is hurting local government’s ability to provide public safety to its citizens.

Lansing officials bristled at the new report. Teresa Szymanski, Lansing Police Chief was at the meeting on Thursday to give her comment to the rankings and she expressed outrage.

“Quite frankly, I find this Business Insider report disgusting, it’s absolutely atrocious, it’s deeply flawed, it’s grossly negligent in my opinion.”

Szymanski went on to say, quoting language from the FBI’s website, that the FBI does not rank cities and advises against doing so.

Wood was less defensive, saying that it’s “hard to judge a community based on numbers.” But she had to admit that the deep cuts in law enforcement have had a negative effect on public safety. “Now what we’re looking at (to cut) is not only those positions that we would hope that we would be able to hire,” she said, “we’re also taking people and pink slipping them and losing that protection.”

Lansing has seen a small increase in violent crime from last year, though it did have a small decrease in homicides. According to the report, Lansing has double the national average for forcible rape. And this at a time when violent crime has been going down steadily at the national level.

Dave Harvey is the Executive Director at the Michigan Commission On Law Enforcement Standards (MCOLES), a group that promotes public safety by “setting standards for selection, employment, licensing, license revocation, and funding in law enforcement and criminal justice, in both the public and private sectors.”

Harvey has been both a city manager and a police chief. He said that during the 80′s there was a lot of precinct overlap, which was good for both the officer and community safety. He says the lack of revenue sharing dollars has forced major cutbacks to police departments.

“If you go back 10 years, we’ve lost over 3000 police officers in total. I know that over that time period we’ve had decreases in state revenue sharing, not just this year,” Harvey said. “It’s not one community that’s having financial stress, everybody is having financial stress and everybody is cutting back.”

Crime reduction is continuing to become more difficult in Michigan, said Harvey. Poor economic conditions and decreases in specialized units all burden the role of public safety.

“There are a lot of factors that reduce crime, some of it is economic conditions and things like that. But certainly something that goes with that hand-in-hand is the number of police officers that you can put out there. Not only to prevent crime but also to follow up on crime.”

Harvey went on to say that one of the key results of revenue sharing cuts is the decrease in specialized units in cities and townships. These are officers that not only make immediate arrests but also work to prevent crime in the community before it happens — school resource officers, drug units, surveillance units, units beyond the basic patrol officer.

“You can’t always get an officer to prevent the crime or make an immediate arrest, you need detectives on top of that. And a lot of departments are struggling with those additional units.”

Officer safety is also a major concern.

“From department to department it becomes an officer safety issue too, at some point in time you need somebody to back you up,” said Harvey. “It used to be where different departments could back each other up except for possibly in rural areas where there wasn’t a high number of officers. But now everyone is in the same boat, everybody is cutting back police officers.”

“It only takes one bad run to get an officer in trouble,” he said. “And you’ve got some officers that may have more than a half hour wait for backup. It only takes one of those in your lifetime to be your last.”