When we first started to see the mercenary groups showing up in Iraq by the tens of thousands, a red flag went up. Those groups were paid significantly more than American troops.
In Oakland, city officials are reporting the opposite in that the private police are cheaper than hiring regular police. All of this occurs in the dim light of the recession which is straining city budgets all over. To city officials the move makes logical fiscal sense.
So, if private police are less expensive, and the recession lingers, we might suspect that this trend will grow and private police will be everywhere especially in cities. Juxtapose this with a rise in crime also due to the recession and the bizarre world of the future starts taking more shape.
Paint your own scenario.
WSJ: Cash-Strapped Cities Try Private Guards Over Police
Oakland is joining other U.S. cities that are turning over more law-enforcement duties to private armed guards.
Hiring private guards is less expensive than hiring new officers.
"People want to go with armed guards because they believe it's cheaper, but they lack adequate training [and] background checks..."
2 comments:
An Editorial in my local paper today pts. out a huge and growing gap in NJ between Public and Private compensation. In NJ Public employees make over $11.00 an hr. more then the average Private employee. Is this sustainable in a Capitalist society? It appears that NJ is getting the proverbial cart in front of the horse here. I was taught and have come to believe, that it's the private sector that IS the "real" economy. Here's another fact that's even more interesting in the early 20th century NJ's State Gov'ts entire workforce could be counted in the low hundreds. Granted our population was not what it is today , nevertheless, today that same workforce is nearing 100K! The ratio: of public employees @ all levels in NJ to private employees is also way way out of whack. This might explain why NJ's Gov't at all levels is increasingly going bankrupt and is buried almost helplessly in debt. Add to this equation all the other thousands of jobs that depend on Public contracts given to private companies. These companies are in many cases simply wouldn't exist without public funding and could be classified as Quasi-public employment. What this adds up to in NJ is a rapidly expanding Public sector being fueled by as contracting Private sector in the midst of a deep Recession. Here's another scary fact of this raidly out of balance equation Public employees are twice as likely to be represented by a Union. I'm generally Pro-Union but in the Public sector where the system is not tied to profitability and the pols also directly benefit from the same system, where is their any incentive to manage this situation? When I was growing up the ETHIC was that if you decided to work for the Public sector it was a given you got less and this was because working for the Public was considered a secondary class of employment beneath the private sector that paid for it. This ethic has disappeared and in it's place a new ethic has grown up. is this a better situation? I don't know but it's what we now seem to have developing in NJ.
You are describing a system that sounds like it is about to implode on itself. Its so massive, unwieldy, and messed up. In those systems then you get all kinds of abuses and why is there a union.
This private police issue is tricky. Even with a regular police force we've had crooked cops and guys that were bad news, over aggressive and violent, this kind of thing. I guess its going to have to be a see what happens and evaluate it as it goes situation. It could very well b that my aversion to the idea has more to do with an ingrained notion of community responsibility that just doesn't exist. Something like, if you become a cop its because you care about your community and that's your main career interest. The privatization of the police force could very well do the same, but so far privatization has spelled problems and abuses as well.
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