RON DAVIS -- Through My Eyes
We’ve probably all stood in a long line at a market or bank waiting to
conduct our business. Sometimes the interminable wait is the product of
an unanticipated rush, and sometimes because the business just doesn’t
employ enough people to serve the number of customers.
It really galls me when I finally make it to the front of the line only
to meet a clerk with the IQ of a floor mat. Some businesses are proud of
the fact that they have the lowest ratio of employees to customers. Some
businesses are also proud that their employee compensation packages are
thinner than the air on Mt. Everest, resulting in employees with the
personality of a lemon and the intelligence of a bar of soap. You get
what you pay for.
When it comes to businesses that make these kinds of decisions, we can
either put up with it or go elsewhere. But when it comes to public
safety, we can’t just dial 911 and insist on highly trained, experienced,
smart cops; immediate service; or cops who will be able to avoid the
miscues that result in expensive lawsuits, lost cases, and worker’s
compensation claims.
Nor can we insist on cops who have the intelligence to provide public
safety without becoming a police state -- we get what we’ve previously
paid for.
While Huntington Beach is proud of its ratio of 1.2 sworn officers per
1,000 residents, compared to a statewide average of 1.7 officers per 1,000, and about two officers per 1,000 in beach communities, I’m not
convinced that pride is justified.
While Huntington Beach tries to supplement the ratio by using overtime,
that is expensive and gets very old. Regular hours for cops means working
holidays, weekends, birthdays, anniversaries, swing shifts and night
shifts. Asking these same cops to do more of the same to compensate for
the lower-than-average cops-to-residents ratio is probably too much.
Worse yet, a low ratio not only means slower response times but exposes
officers because there may not be sufficient backup. Huntington Beach
compounds the problem by coupling too few officers per resident with the
lowest salary and benefit package in the county, according a countywide
police salary and benefit survey. I put great faith in this Garden Grove
survey, since its objective wasn’t to justify raises or maintain the
status quo in Huntington Beach.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I certainly don’t want to be dead last
when hiring anyone -- particularly public safety officers. While
Huntington Beach is a great place to live with a low crime rate, so are
other cities, which by virtue of their salary and benefit packages are
able to select from the cream of the crop for both new officers and
experienced lateral transfer officers.
I think it is fair to ask whether Huntington Beach’s structure is
designed to hire only those officers who can’t get jobs elsewhere. If
that’s true, we incur all of the training costs and allow them to make
whatever costly mistakes rookies make while they submit applications to
other departments. And guess what happens after we’ve trained them? If
they still can’t get a better paying job at another department, we get to
keep them in ours.
We’ll only have the level of public safety we pay for. Whether it
consists of bright, well-educated officers who make fewer mistakes and
save us from costly lawsuits is completely up to us. We have to hire the
finest if we are to have the finest public safety.
Given today’s highly competitive job market and need for public safety
officers throughout all of Southern California, that may mean more than
simply providing the best salary and benefits in the county, but paying
bonuses designed to entice top-notch lateral officers to consider
Huntington Beach.
The test for public safety isn’t whether we’ve had problems in the past
but a constant examination of what we have presently and how we’re
maintaining it. We’re not the safest city today because we received an
award yesterday, but because we continue to hire and retain quality
public safety employees who can produce the safest city today and
tomorrow.
* RON DAVIS is a private attorney who lives in Huntington Beach. He can
be reached by e-mail at o7 ronscolumn@worldnet.att.netf7 .
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