I am now convinced that Police Chief Cummings has completely lost his mind. He is requesting nearly $170,000 for two new police cars JUST for the School Resource Officers he wants. See page 87.
$170,000.00.
One hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
You could buy a house for that a couple years ago.
It was bad enough they are using the Uvalde incident to hire two new officers at great expense. The problem with Uvalde wasn’t that they didn’t have enough officers. It’s that they didn’t execute the plan and stood around twiddling their thumbs for like 90 minutes while some scrawny kid who never shot a gun before massacred a bunch of kids.
I have to think that with as small as our town is, every single cop at the station could be at ANY of our schools in under 8 minutes – and a couple schools might be under 5 minutes. I know we have at least 3 or 4 officers who would bust the doors down and give the shooter a double shot center mass (then one in the head to be sure) then calmly eat a burger (**cough** Morua ** cough ** Hummer ** cough cough).
In short, the “plan” we had last year is fine. There is no need for a new plan.
NOW Chief Cummings wants TWO brand-new cruisers. You know – for the SROs who literally stay in one spot all day at the school.
That is pure insanity.
One thing that has bothered me for a LONG time is that every time I drive by the police station, there are at LEAST six patrol cars there. So at any given hour of the day, SIX vehicles are sitting unused. But now he wants two more? Why? SO everybody can get their own personal car with their names on it?
Bullshit.
That’s fine for the higher-up officers who have been there forever. But the new guys? You get to all share a car. You school resource officers? Grab one of those many vehicles sitting there at the station all day long. You know, the ones that are ALREADY equipped with:
$14,902 worth of “equipment”
$6,210 for ‘video system’
$6,500 for a radio!
$4,467 for a COMPUTER!
$3,401 for radar
$1,200 for a router
$1,000 for “graphics”
The above numbers are what they are requesting for EACH new police car. The vehicles themselves are $46,000.
Pretty sure the radio was invented over 100 years ago by some wop named Macaroni or something. No joke. Now, you’re going to blow $6,500 on a radio?
I gotta say this sounds like some Pentagon-level waste. Obscene spending for questionable needs…ESPECIALLY when you ALREADY have a bunch of patrol vehicles sitting there UNUSED all day long. But you can’t speak out against it, or you risk being called “anti law and order” or “anti military”.
[Sorry – had to drive by there today just to prove my point. Now, at least one of these is a Burnet cop car. Almost all the rest were marked “Lampasas”.]
We ALREADY have 24 vehicles, according to the latest City council packet [see page 62].
I’m a pro-law and order guy, but I’m also a fiscal conservative. At some point you need to tap the brakes and say “WTF??? There’s gotta be a better way.”
I realize that by posting this, I’m opening myself to maybe having a “broken tail light” in town and getting a ticket, but I don’t care. This is a crazy and obscene waste of tax dollars. There must be a cheaper way.