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In Oregon, a Demand for Safety, but Not on Their Dime If you ask Sgt. Todd Moran of the Grants Pass police, the answer is unquestionably yes. Burglaries were up almost 70 percent last year in his city of 35,000 about an hour north of the California border. Theft cases, up almost 80 percent. And at least part of the reason, he said, is an awareness by criminals that their actions are increasingly without consequences in cash-starved Josephine County, where the jail the city depends on is mostly closed for lack of money. Even a felony suspect arrested with stolen goods or drugs in hand is usually just given a citation and released. Better financing for the county’s jails and prosecutors is the only way forward, Sergeant Moran said. “It’s just broken,” he said as he drove through town on a recent afternoon patrol. Now drive an hour south and meet Sam Nichols and Glenn Woodbury, who volunteer with a group called Citizens Against Crime. They say that financial troubles are in fact strengthening the community and that citizen crime patrols like theirs are proving that money — meaning higher taxes — is not the solution. They began patrolling the back roads of the county last summer after staffing at the sheriff’s office was gutted by budget cuts. With local residents on watch, crime rates in their area have fallen to near zero, said Mr. Nichols, a retired marina manager, as he drove on a recent evening, with Mr. Woodbury in the passenger seat shining a spotlight into the woods and winding dark driveways. “Eleven months without a reported theft,” Mr. Nichols said, a handgun strapped to his hip, as an orange light flashed on the roof. With the fiscal year that started on July 1, the Josephine County Sheriff’s Office now has exactly one deputy left available for general calls in a county of 83,000 people — down from a high of 22 at full staffing a few years ago. Citizen applications to carry a concealed weapon, meanwhile, rose 49 percent last year, according to county records. At grocery stores in Grants Pass, stopping and citing shoplifters — sometimes with whole carts of beer or food in tow — have become part of the daily law enforcement routine. “I hold my breath, every day, for everything,” said Sheriff Gil Gilbertson in an interview in his office, where images of John Wayne lined the walls. Push payments that kept property taxes low have fallen to a trickle. And a federal stopgap payment measure to make up for the timber money was phased out last year. County residents, meanwhile, have voted multiple times, most recently in May, against raising their property taxes to resolve the shortfall. “It’s a slow-motion disaster,” said Bruce A. Weber, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at Oregon State University and the director of the Rural Studies Program. And with federal spending programs in retreat and the state budget under continued stress, he said, no fix is easy. “We’re among thousands of people in the country that are just to the point of not ever voting for another tax, whether it be public safety, or any type of an increase,” he said. Even without a resurgent timber-cutting plan, there are already worries that balkanized camps of armed residents could create new tensions http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/06/us...nted=1&_r=0&hp |
With so much crime, it seems pretty crazy to resist new taxes to pay for more police instead of just local armed citizens. Still it is only just burglaries and theft that are the problems, local armed militia seems an effective solution.
EDIT: Thats like 46 police for the entire city of Sydney 4.6 Million people which is kinda nuts.