A Stitch in Haste

The Baltimore Sun has an idea:

From coast to coast, it is estimated that 80 percent of the nation's 17,000 state and local law enforcement agencies have vacancies they cannot fill. The Los Angeles Police Department has more than 700 vacancies, and in March, New York City announced plans to hire 800 more officers.
...
Some departments are considering relaxing requirements for college credits and modifying prohibitions on applicants with a history of arrest or drug use in an effort to expand the pool of potential hires.
...
The solution is ... the Law Enforcement Education Program, or LEEP. ... In the 1970s, it helped pay to educate more than 300,000 law enforcement officers who attended more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide.

Translation: Have people in Kansas or Utah pay, through their federal tax dollars, for police in New York or Los Angeles (or, I'm guessing, Baltimore).

I have an alternative: how about each city simply offer a market-clearing salary? I have no doubt that if the NYPD offered, say, $200,000 per year to a rookie cop rather than $32,700, then there would be no shortage of qualified applicants.

When governments, at whatever level, can find enough money to fund just about everything except the core function of government -- maintaining public safety -- you know something is terribly, terribly wrong.

The phrase "Congress should pay for..." is nothing more than shyster shorthand for "Somebody else should pay for..."

Which, in turn, is shorthand for greed -- or theft.

Someone call the police.

(Via CrimProf Blog.)