Law Enforcement Layoffs: Sheriffs, Police, Corrections, Jail Closures & Crime Rates in USA

Executive Summary – The economic crisis is getting worse. The year 2009 is expected to be worse than 2008. What is happening is tax revenue is shrinking. Retail sales are down so state and city sales tax revenue is down. Property values are dropping a lot and the people are having their homes reassessed resulting in a new lower tax basis thus reducing property tax revenues. Home sales are down thus tax from home sales is down. People are out of work so income taxes on the city, county and state level are down. Corporate payroll contributions are down due to layoffs and business closures. Business inventory taxes are down since businesses that are still around are operating with reduced inventories due to reduced sales. All of this reduction in revenues for the cities, counties and states leads to layoffs and now they are resorting to laying off law enforcement and corrections workers. The implications of this are serious but most won’t understand it until it is happening.

Partial List of Announced Law Enforcement Layoffs – This is a list of some agencies that have already decided to layoff law enforcement workers (sworn personnel). The list excludes any agency talking or thinking about a layoff of which there are numerous agencies. It excludes layoffs of just non-sworn personnel. We are also excluding the California layoff of 25% of their state employees including law enforcement and corrections personnel. The list was compiled quickly and is very far from comprehensive. It is just to get you thinking.

• Montgomery County Sheriff, OH
• El Paso County Sheriff, CO
• York County Sheriff, ME
• Premble County Sheriff, OH
• Lorain County Sheriff. OH
• Yonkers Police, NY

Prison Closure – Hamilton County, OH closed its 822-bed jail. They transferred the inmates to other jails nearby. It was apparently cheaper to farm out the incarceration to other nearby counties. There are other prison closures going on and being planned as well. Rest assured more will follow.

Prison Cost Cutting – What is going on is sentences are being reduced by the judges to save money and jail bed space. Early release is becoming popular. In some cases inmates are even being asked to delay reporting to serve their sentence. The smarter ones will file lawsuits claiming cruel and unusual punishment due to the delay and having it hang over there head interfering with them getting on with their life. If just one or two filed such lawsuits they would merely say ok serve your sentence tomorrow. If there are hundreds of such lawsuits by smart lawyers then it will work since there is no jail space and the criminals may get out of serving any jail time. They are also reducing the amount of people on probation and parole. They will also cut overtime in the corrections systems.

This sounds good but it requires the inmates of the correctional facilities to be cooperative and not engage in riot behavior while there is no budget for overtime. When a prison goes into lockdown due to riots, correction officers can be asked to work 24 hours in a row or even longer. Sleeping at the site is not unheard of. There are a lot of correctional officers at the city, county and state level that are used to earning over $100,000 a year with overtime for many years now. I expect without the overtime we are going to see a lot of early retirement, more disability claims and even quitting since corrections jobs are not considered to be good law enforcement jobs. Most likely those leaving will not be replaced with new hires for some years.

Effect on Crime Rate – When you put all this in the pot and stir it up you get rising crime rates. It’s not exactly like Obama can get on TV and make a plea to the people to not commit crimes because there is no money to pay for police and jails. This would be an invitation for criminals to step it up. This is starting to be reminiscent of the USSR after it broke up. It got so bad there that the criminal gangs put blue lights and radios in their cars and operated with pseudo-authority as an ad hoc police agency, of course in a totally criminally self-serving way.

The USA has about 2.1 million people behind bars, running at a blended cost of about $35,000 a year each. Some prisons cost more than others, some inmates require more attention and healthcare than others, so it is just an educated guess. When you add in the parole, probation, supervised release, and house arrest the bill probably is about 125 billion dollars a year without getting into court and prosecution expense.

The police state concept is probably running the government close to $500 billion dollars a year when you take into account all of the federal agency law enforcement agents and police salaries, benefits, pensions, equipment, labs, training, and prosecutors courts, prisons, etc without even adding in what is spent abroad.

Hidden Cuts – There are ways to hide the budget cuts. One way is to freeze all new hires. Law Enforcement people retire, quit, get fired and file disability all the time. They just do not replace them, which is about the same thing as a lay off in that coverage gets diminished. They suspend overtime. This means when the shift ends no matter what the need is, the officer goes home or works for free and not a lot of people like to work for free. Forced days off without pay is another way of getting there budget wise.

This works like they each take 1 day off every other week without pay. This saves money and reduces services. Another approach that calms the public down is to reduce non-sworn personnel, the support staff like clerks, dispatchers, secretaries etc. This makes the jobs harder and more complicated for the sworn personnel and results in diminished services.

What About the Federal Government and Layoffs – Will they lay off? Not sure if they will but sane business practices would require this. Their spending is way out of line. The only new jobs being created seem to be government jobs. Will they just turn on the printing presses and try to sweep it under the rug again and act like nothing is wrong? Maybe. If they do this it may postpone things briefly. The world is out of patience with the unsound economic and monetary practices of the USA and is resorting to alternatives other than the USD for monetary reserves. I think the people of the USA are more than a little fed up too, well the ones that can understand what is going on and why it came about anyway – not that many.

If the Fed is bailing out the private sector they will probably bail out themselves, why not, just a few more days of printing money, who cares. It seems inescapable that sooner or later the Fed will downsize including this massive law enforcement, prosecution and incarceration apparatus they have built. They see themselves as the world policeman. This is ludicrous in light of the current financial crisis they have brought on and can hardly afford to continue this insanity. We’ll soon see if Obama is working for the same people as Bush or if he really ahs change in his heart and mind. I am not overly optimistic. Who is backing this junior senator who came out of nowhere anyway?

Will Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Curtail Crime – Sadly they have and will have minimal impact on real crime. The Federal Agents are not real crimes against person and property enforcers like police. Federal Agents do not concern themselves with crimes like: assault, rape, burglary, grand larceny, armed robbery, homicide, murder, aggravated assault, shoplifting, looting, car jacking, auto theft etc. These are crimes where there are real living (or once living) victims. Federal Agents mostly concern themselves with crimes where there is no real victim; just a violated statue or you could say they make the government the victim. No Federal Agents go around investigating rapes, robberies, assaults, murders, burglaries etc unless they were committed on federal property like in a National Park or Reserve or in a Federal Office Building. In other words while they lock up a lot of people they are not going to make you safe from crimes.

They have no prevention presence. Every see an FBI agent or a homeland security agent in a car on patrol looking for crimes in progress. Imagine seeing a guy robbing a liquor store. You report the crime to the IRS and say that you have information about a fellow who has undeclared income and you can catch him in the act. Never get them to respond or even take you seriously. How about calling the FBI and saying your neighbor just had his door kicked in and his family is being raped and assaulted, get over here now and see what they do. How about calling a Homeland Security Special Agent and explaining that there is a gang in the park terrorizing the neighborhood making your homeland unsafe? They will either threaten you for calling or hang up on you.

Try calling a Special Agent from the US Commerce department and tell him the gangs are selling stolen goods that have been taken over state lines violating interstate commerce laws, predatory pricing etc. and see if he does anything. Try calling a Food and Drug Special Agent and tell them someone is selling drugs in your neighborhood and see if they hang up on you. If you see someone having their house broken into call the Secret Service and explain to them that you know the President is not in that city at present and you are witnessing a violent crime and maybe they can jump in their cars and the save the lives of these people because the police are all too busy and see if they hang up on you. It is the local police who help keep you safe, or at least try to. It would be very rare to find a local police officer that would not aggressively pursue a rapist, armed robber, burglar etc. Sadly these are the guys getting laid off and having their budgets cut.

What Effect on Crime Will This Have – Well the criminals by now know the sentences being handed out in the city, county and state courts are a far cry from what they used to be. They stand a far less chance of being incarcerated at all and if so for much less time behind bars. It will be easier to make bail or be released on their own recognizance since the local jails will have precious little room to hold those awaiting trial. Plea-bargaining for little or no time served will become a more likely prospect.

Criminal cases will become easier to beat in court since the prosecutors and the system will be extremely overworked and budgets for investigative evidence gathering, lab work etc will be greatly diminished. We understand indirectly from our sources that the Federal Judges were recently getting memos asking them to reduce sentences as well. This will make for bolder more aggressive criminals. The budget for investigations (detective work) is of course cut or going to be cut. This means far less follow up investigation, less evidence gathering, less laboratory work, and the police need to work harder to get through the reduced manpower shortages. It is sort of like triage in a battlefield hospital.

The investigators will only go after the cases they can close, that are worth going after, ignoring the others. One approach is to avoid investigating thefts unless the amounts are substantial. Many crimes will not be investigated at all because they are considered too petty, or the chances of apprehending the violator(s) are too small. Police will respond less and less to home and business alarms. The vast majority of these are false alarms. This will make burglars and home invaders bolder. Crimes of all sorts will rise. The more crime increases the more time police spend taking reports and thus it goes into a downward spiral of constantly diminishing police coverage.

People who were not criminals previously, will now resort to crime due to being broke, homeless, starving etc and the chances of getting away with it will be greater. Cities and counties will not replace prosecutors as they retire, quit, or get fired. This combined with increased crime will bog down the court systems. Court budgets will also get cut eliminating clerks and secretaries thus bogging down the system further. Private security businesses will flourish as those with assets to protect rely more and more on them. Gated residential communities with roving patrols of armed guards will flourish. Bullet resistant vehicle sales will flourish. Sales of large home safes will go up. Firearm sales will continue to rise having already increased 42.9% since Obama was elected. Ammunition sales will rise as people stock pile ammunition. Bullet resistant vest sales will rise. People will put more and better locks on their doors and windows. More wealthy people will hire personal bodyguards. People will buy more large dogs for protection. Cities hit hardest by the economy will have greater breakdowns in law and order.

There will be more regions the police will become afraid to venture into unless they are in large numbers. Gangs will become bolder, wealthier and move more into dominant positions in certain areas. Mexican and El Salvador gangs will move into some cities with greater boldness and velocity. Social order will fall part in sections of cities or even in a whole city. Think hurricane Katrina and New Orleans without the flooding as a model. The Federal Government will not be able to do much other than ignore it unless full-scale riots break out and the mobs start to drift into the more affluent areas. The fed may mobilize some shock troops, government or private like in New Orleans or they may just ignore it.

Insurance rates will soar as crime rises and many businesses and persons will not be able to afford the new high rates and go without insurance. Crime is now a major problem in many parts of the USA. In a few months it will become much more of a problem. This will cause a drop in tourism as crime reports reach international papers and the Internet. If the government finds a way to fix the economy at the base level, in other words new small businesses and new small to medium size manufacturers that export, then things might get better. If the people start to restrict their purchases to domestically made goods to keep their own people working, then things may improve but the government never suggests the people do anything like this. Just printing money and increasing debt and dumping it back into the economy will not do much of anything except stall the inevitable for a few months at most.

If there are no productive jobs (like manufacturing agriculture etc – government jobs are not at all productive) then things will continue to be doom and gloom. Eventually the USA may go the way of the USSR and break up into pieces, which coincidentally is what the foremost Russian economists think, will happen. The Fed will default/bankrupt on its debt to the Federal Reserve by dissolving and they think four new states will emerge from the USA. Who knows what will happen, only time will tell. We do know that a lot of law enforcement personnel will now be looking at getting work in the private sector. They should reflect on the image they were presenting to the public since this image may come back to haunt them when applying for work in the private sector, which is something, they thought, would never happen. The person interviewing them for work is not going to be thinking of the armed robberies that former police officer prevented but instead the time he got a ticket for going five miles an hour over the speed limit with attitude on the part of the police officer.

This current state of affairs may get the law enforcement officers mindful of the fact that their job is to serve and protect. It is the people and the constitution they serve not the other way around. On the other hand imagine if the Fed does a job lay off and a former IRS agent has to go look for a job in the private sector. Would they get hired?

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