Can County Pay The Price To Keep Up With Gangs?
If there is an expectation to get tougher on crime and gangs, and keep offenders in jail to serve their time, it's going to cost a lot more money according to Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond.
"With more and more people moving to the unincorporated areas, gangs becoming prevalent, the economy is bad, with all of these factors together if you don't stay up with it something has got to give somewhere," Sheriff Hammond said.
Sheriff Hammond said the downtown jail is fast approaching it's useful life span. It's old, crowded, falling apart and being a high rise it takes more manpower to maintain security. A growing gang population requires even more security measures to separate groups.
An increasing challenge in recent years is housing inmates who have mental challenges. The Sheriff said 25% of the inmates need costly psychotropic drugs.
"I'll tell you one of the other issues that deeply concerns me is the state is more and more cutting back on the mental health institutions and jails are becoming the mental health institutions," Sheriff Hammond said.
A new jail will cost about $30-million, but of the state's top five counties, Hamilton is the only one without a future jail plan Sheriff Hammond said.
The cost of fighting crime in neighborhoods is growing too. Since patrol deputies have been moved to SRO positions in middle and high schools there's a gap in street coverage. A fourth of patrol cars on the road have more than 150,000 miles on them.
Sheriff Hammond said about 18,000 warrants can not be served because there are not enough people to process them.
So the Sheriff will ask the county Board of Commissioners for money to hire 15 new patrol officers, 15 new corrections officers and nine new detectives. He said the cost to replace aging patrol cars is about $600,000. This adds up to $2,563,000.
Another major looming cost is replacing the county's analog car and portable radios with digital radios. Sheriff Hammond said the county's legacy analog system will be taken off-line within two years. The cost for new digital radios is in the millions of dollars.
Is there money to pay for these requests? Don't bet on it, according to Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger.
"Again, it is going to be a lean year, we went through some tough times last year with tough budget issues and we made some real tough choices last year and there will be tough choices to make once again this year," Mayor Coppinger said.
Since 2012 is an election year the chances of elected officials raising revenue through taxes or other fees are slim to none.
Another major issue the Sheriff has not even addressed yet is raises for county officers, who have not gotten raises in several years.
"In all fairness to the Commission, they have a tough decision to make, but we are now in what I would call the critical zone in law enforcement," Sheriff Hammond said.
