Police chiefs often discuss their funding levels while “we support a business model in our agencies that is dysfunctional and broken,” Police Chief Jeffrey Kruithoff of Springboro, Ohio, writes in the Police Executive Research Forum’s “Subject to Debate.” He suggests that mergers or consolidations be considered “as a viable response to shrinking local budgets.” Despite “many examples” of consolidation [that] worked, says Kruithoff, “chiefs are too many times supportive of a business model that is fraught with duplication, needless redundancy, and cross-jurisdictional conflict, and that advocates the accumulation of localized power in spite of the impact on the public taxpayer.”
Citing federal bailouts of some big private firms, Kruithoff says that U.S. “law enforcement has continually received a public bailout and is rarely challenged to re-think the way in which we do business” in what Kruithoff says is a “uniquely American and uniquely inefficient model of public safety.” Kruithoff says that if he were to shoot a gun from his office, the bullet would cover ground where five police agencies have jurisdiction. Each agency maintains separate administration staff, work policies, procurement procedures, facilities, and other infrastructures that duplicate each other. “It would be wonderful to see a national dialogue, initiated by police chiefs, on how the policing model of America could be changed to be more efficient, have less duplication, and have less bureaucracy, Kruithoff writes.
Link: http://policeforum.org/upload/STD_Dec08_v3_261326849_1230200813484.pdf