Defunding the Police.... it's now fashionable to talk about OT
For our regular readers, you may recall my constant rant against Police OT here in the Ham. It's been 1 million plus for as many years as I was a Town Meeting member and continues today in next years proposed budget.
Overtime in most industries is a sign of poor management or a huge increase in need as a result of huge demand for products or services. Not so for cops and the union contracts. The unions have manipulated the system so that they can earn double and triple their salaries. To illustrate how bad it is in Boston, BPD has a budget of over 414 million, of that 60 million has gone to OT. More than 500 officers made over 200k last year while 20 made 300k last year. In the Ham the last time I checked, almost 40 officers made over 100K and a couple made over 200K.
While I do think that redirecting money from police OT is in order, I don't think we can de-fund the entire police department. There is a petition going around on FB to remove the cops from the schools which they claim we pay 500k a year for cops and security.
So last night at the Council meeting, they voted to not authorize FPD to buy new cruisers and voted to reduce the FPD budget by 85K. J Stefanini's call for another 1% reduction in the budget lost. The council did approve the increase of 1% increase in the school budget.
posted by Jim Pillsbury @ 12:11 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
The Patch did a recap as well.
https://patch.com/massachusetts/framingham/framingham-council-votes-budget-some-new-cuts-additions?fbclid=IwAR36U9kCYThRr2XU89JMJIx9YBqRcQiWDGFmedsABlwYMbRjjefxPbKNXnE
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Who is at fault here? Is it the chief for not managing schedules and time off effectively? Is it the city negotiating team who approved a contract that allowed this? The city solicitor for not raising this issue during contract negotiations? The district council for letting a budget line item for this excessive overtime pass without reductions? If the council does not have the guts to stand up to the police in this time of broad cuts to police budgets across the country, they never will. After watching the last few council meetings, I am ashamed of them and of those of us who elected these blowhards.
The Mayor is the only elected person in Town to negotiate the last police contracts. The Council does not have the authority to get involved with the contact, but can so no to the funding, but they did not. The majority of the council member's are affarid of the cops and fear losing their support in the next election. The Chief hails it as a groundbreaking contract because it allows us to opt out of the Civil Service requirements. Which means the Chief can hire anyone from anywhere now. But given what we know about how many bad cops there are still on the force, I wonder if the vetting process will weed out the bad apples. Since Congress is no talking about national standards and a data base of bad cops, I wonder If I will live that long to see it. Baker and DeLeo are on the same page now about the very same things that the Feds are talking about, but there is so much influence from cop unions, that I wonder if we will see that here in Mass.. ever.
Maybe our Chief will adopt the measures below.
From the Commonwealth Daily Download:
Around the country, and now in Massachusetts, police departments are adopting a set of policies that could potentially decrease violence inflicted by law enforcement.
The "8 Can't Wait" project seeks to have law enforcement adopt quick and definitive changes to their policies on use of force, which have been questioned in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
The eight policy changes are: banning chokeholds, requiring de-escalation, requiring a verbal warning before shooting at someone, exhausting all non-force and non-lethal alternatives, requiring other officers to intervene and stop excessive force used by other officers, banning shooting at moving vehicles, restricting extreme use of force to extreme situations, and requiring officers to report when they use or threaten force against a civilian (including pointing a firearm at someone).
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