Why Bad Public Safety Policy Leads to Much Higher Taxes

This is Part 3 of my series on policy and how it affects you. Good policy can lead to a higher quality of life and lower taxes. Bad policy creates dissatisfaction and greater tax burden. Understanding how good policy can affect you -- and understanding why it's so important to find candidates for office who understand policy -- can make all the difference to your bank account and quality of life.

In this segment, you will see how your taxes are affected by poor public safety policies and inefficiency in government.

POLICY: Properly Funding Public Safety

As Kootenai County becomes more populated, so too will its public safety needs grow. We will have more drugs. We will have more crime. And we will need a system with the capacity to fight and manage it. When density increases, crime increases at a faster rate. Not sure about that?

DOJ studies have shown that urban areas have 50% to 100% more crime on a per capita basis than rural areas. Here are some charts from a White Paper I wrote about how some cities (without a SO contract or PD) decide to dump their law enforcement needs onto the county, and how it creates an excessive burden on unincorporated county citizens to help subsidize law enforcement in these cities. (I will share the White Paper in a future Blog where you can see what cities pay and which don't. The numbers were different than what I expected.)

Here are some additional stats from the National Bureau of Justice highlighting the drastic difference between rural and urban victimization rates by crime.

If it's not clear, crime in urban areas (like cities) is drastically higher than in rural areas. Consequently, policing needs in cities are significantly more.

As it stands now, public safety consumes roughly 60% of our entire county budget. The only question we need to ask is will we have a "reactive" or "proactive" public safety division. Right now we do not have a meaningful proactive public safety program here.

What is Proactive Policing?

Good question. Proactive policing aims to prevent crime before it occurs through community engagement, traffic enforcement, targeted patrols, and intelligence-led strategies, whereas reactive policing responds to crimes after they happen, relying on 911 calls and investigations.

In order to achieve a proactive policing model, you need to have enough staff on a shift to have the time for community engagement and targeted patrols, which also deters crime. When staffing levels are low, it often means officers showing up to crimes after they have occurred and depending on follow up investigations to identify the perpetrators. Reactive policing often leads to higher crime rates and lower quality of life.

However, if we are proactive, then we will need to fund additional staffing levels so there is excess capacity within our law enforcement agencies to go out and get the bad guys before they perpetrate more crime in our community. See how all those extra federal agents and national guard troops cleaned D.C. so quickly? Having a large deterrent force that frees up police to investigate and solve existing crimes (as opposed to reacting to them) can make a big difference.

Why You Should Want Both Quantity AND Quality

As you should be able to see, having enough officers is an important factor in keeping crime rates low. But that's not all we should want to have.

While it's no surprise, we live in a litigious society where everyone has a cell phone camera on their person. Improperly trained or lesser qualified law enforcement officers can be a huge liability for a community. We've seen what can happen in other places because of cell phone footage that doesn't look favorable. We should never put ourselves in that predicament because we're not willing to pay enough to get qualified applicants into our public safety departments.

When we don't pay enough to either attract highly qualified applicants, or worse keep them, then we are opening ourselves (i.e., taxpayers) to greater liability. If we want to recruit and train the best talent, then we need to keep our pay competitive enough to find those quality people and then train them well.

Properly funding our public safety from boots-on-the-ground deputies to a fully staffed and capable prosecutor's office will be the only way to ensure legitimate proactive policing. We will also need judges to be on board with stricter, crime-discouraging policies and a strong public defender's office to ensure that those charged with crimes are afforded their constitutional right to competent public defense. We don't want criminals to be released on technicalities.

Why Should You Care about Strong Public Safety?

Good question. It's expensive and we live in a great community with lots of law abiding people here now.

We perceive our community is safe because we don't experience crime like the big cities, which is correct. But we do have crime, a lot of it.

It's mostly drug related crime, but that can lead to bigger crimes if it's not adequately policed. When your community is safe, businesses can prosper and not have to charge as much because of the effects of vandalism and shoplifting. It also keeps property values high.

Safe neighborhoods command bigger bucks from buyers than ones with even modestly higher crime rates. Everyone should want one of their most valuable assets to have the maximum appreciation potential possible, and strong public safety ensures that.

POLICY: Operational Efficiency in Government

Let's be clear: I'm not talking about the kind that allows a police officer to write twice as many tickets during a shift. While that may be considered efficient, it doesn't really serve the taxpayer, unless harassing people on the roads and fining them is what a community wants. Instead, I'm talking about creating efficient operational systems where more citizens can be served with fewer staff.

As it stands now, salaries consume roughly 2/3 of the entire county budget. Almost every department head request for more staff is driven by anecdotal stories of why we need to expand government. Why is that?

I would argue that our elected officials should focus more on data-driven metrics (within their respective departments) showing the community why we need to hire more people. We should never allow anecdotal stories to drive government growth.

For those of you in the private sector, management wouldn't consider expanding the workforce without a measurable illustration discussion beforehand. You'd get laughed out of a meeting if you tried to justify adding staff without legitimate numbers. But not in our government. We are presented with these types of requests almost exclusively by department heads and elected officials.

The First Step Toward Legitimate Transparency in YOUR Government

I believe that when you -- the taxpayer -- can look at the same data-driven reports (which we don't have now) that your commissioners are looking at, you will understand the problems facing your county government and why us elected officials make the decisions we do. I also believe that when we can achieve true operational efficiency, we might actually be able to lower turnaround times on services and even charge less, because the state prohibits the county from making a profit from fees.

Lower costs from efficiency means lower fee prices for you. Our solid waste department is very good at using numbers to make decisions. I'm working on getting our other elected officials on board with this mindset, but sometimes it's not easy as it should be.

My next blog will discuss why it's essential to properly allocate cost to where the benefit is enjoyed. When this isn't done correctly it leads to an unsustainable fiscal nightmare for taxpayers.

NOTE: Please share the link to this story (and others) with neighbors and friends. If they've ever wondered why growth continues to happen unabated and taxes are constantly rising, these articles are a good way for them to better understand why.

If you want to see me complete this important work at the county (and produce more of these articles), please consider contributing by clicking the "CONTRIBUTE" button on my website. By contributing to my re-election campaign you are making an investment in your community. The total allowable to contribute is $1,000 per individual or business, $2,000 per couple.

Not only is it greatly appreciated, but it will help me to continue getting the word out to a larger audience on how we can preserve a more rural, lower tax community and state. Many of us have left places we once called home but are unrecognizable today. Let's keep that from happening here. Thank you for being a dedicated supporter.