RINGING THE BELL FOR POLICE OFFICERS

RINGING THE BELL FOR POLICE OFFICERS According to a story in Tuesday’s Sun Times, “A shortage of officers is emboldening criminals, said a former high-ranking Chicago Police official who said he's "terrified" for officers because felons no longer fear the police. A two-year police hiring slowdown has left the Police Department understaffed by more than 2,230 officers a day, below the city's budget-authorized 13,200.” "The manpower situation in the Chicago Police Department is bad," added Mark Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. "Guys are out there every day telling us they have to wait for backup. And we're advising them to wait for backup for their own safety." The police department is not fully-staffed because of money woes. As I have written before in defense of first responders, (July 9, “All Fired Up”), “The fire and police departments are the two most important departments. Really, who cares if someone from the City’s graphics department has to take a furlough day? It does not have an effect on my life or anybody else’s if some invitation for one of the many Mayor’s receptions goes out a day late. But if I had a fire, then it would matter if staff size were lower because of furlough days.” I do not want to live in a city where there are not enough police officers or firemen! As a citizen of Chicago, ranting about needing to hire more police officers is easy; finding the solution to the fiscal woes is harder. But I have an idea. If we need 2300 more police officers (I know they say we need 2230, but I am rounding up) and the average pay is $200/day for 365 days per year then I need to find about $183 million dollars to cover the annual salaries and benefits of the new hires. There are approximately 3 million people (adults and children) who live in the city limits. So if we divide the money needed by the number of people who live in the city, it works out to $63/year/person or only seventeen cents a day! That is simple enough math for even my friend Linda to understand and not start spewing pea green soup at the thought of multiplying and dividing! (But she lives in Oak Park so the police shortage is not her problem!) That sounds like a small price to pay for protection; but the Mayor is never going to send all families a tax bill for their share. Not when it is an election year. So we need a way to raise the money and assure that the money is used only to fund the police department. The Salvation Army is very successful during the two months a year during the holiday season when they are ringing the bell and they raise millions. Let’s take that idea and have some sort of daily equivalent fund raising. We could design something like a parking meter that people could put money in that they know would go solely for funding police salaries. These police meter boxes could be on every corner and when you passed one, you would put in some change. How could we be sure that the revenue would not go into the General Fund? When Al Gore was running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2000 and was asked about his plan for funding future Social Security payments he said that he would keep the money earmarked for the program in a lockbox! So we would have a special lockbox storing the money to be used exclusively to pay for extra police officers. I know my plan will never be implemented but I wanted to toss it out to bring attention to the fact that we are talking about seventeen cents a day per Chicagoan to fund the extra hires that are sorely needed. That is less than pocket change. How come the money cannot be found by the Mayor somewhere in the billions of dollars of revenue the city takes in? By the way, I will be happy to keep the lockbox at my home. I promise I won’t go shopping at St. John!