You get what you pay for
By Will Collette
Conservatives hold it as an article of faith that public
workers, especially unionized public workers, are ripping off taxpayers through
undeserved high wages and pensions.
And high on the list of public workers to be vilified are
police and firefighters. Personally, I don’t get it. How do you put a price on
the work of men and women who run into burning buildings or go after armed bad
guys or scrape accident victims off the road? How can you begrudge people who
put their lives on the line for you or even think about reneging on the terms of employment that were promised
them in return for their valor?
So far in 2012, 70 police officers have been killed in the line of duty, including Sgt. Maxwell Dorley of the Providence Police. Click here to see the list. At least 55 firefighters have been killed in the line of duty this year. Click here to read their names.
But ethics and morality aside, there’s a commonsense aspect
to the debate.
I was recently loaned a copy of 50 State Comparisons, 2012
edition, a booklet published by the Taxpayers
Network. They have compiled data tables that examine the hard numbers
behind many current public policy questions. Each data table is clearly marked
with the source of the data.
I was especially curious about looking at public safety, how
Rhode Island compares in terms of expenditures and whether the data tells us
anything about what we get for the money.
Here’s what I found:
Rhode Island is indeed high in the state rankings for how
much we pay for police protection. We pay an average per capita cost of $73.39
a year for police protection. Some of the states that pay more for police
protection are Alaska at #1, Massachusetts at #4 and Louisiana at #8. The
lowest amounts paid for police protection are paid by Florida and Arkansas.
Rhode Island ranks #19 in the cost of imprisoning criminals.
We pay an average of $166.42 each to keep people in jail, more than double what
we pay for police protection. Arizona is first. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut
spend more than we do.
In return for our relatively high costs for police
protection and keeping people behind bars, Rhode Island is ranked #36 in
violent crime (88 such crimes per 100,000) compared to Florida, which ranks fifth in the nation.
Rhode Island ranks #44 in crimes against property (339 per
100,000). By contrast, Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama rank first, second and third,
respectively.
For arrests, we rank #47 in the nation, while New Hampshire
ranks first. So much for “Live Free or Die.”
We also jail far fewer people than most states – we rank
#48, though we pay more per prisoner. At the other end of the scale, Louisiana
and Mississippi rank first and second and Florida comes in seventh.
I am a firm believer in the saying that “statistics are like
a captured spy – torture them enough and they’ll say anything.” So right-wing skeptics will certainly say, "yeah, but..." and trot out their usual anecdotal "proof."
But before you buy into the right-wing rhetoric or the silly
and sensational TV news report on some ex-cop getting a disability pension
while still able to work (as if that applied to all police retirees), let’s
remember two considerations.
First, they signed on to the job prepared to put their lives
at risk and we gave them the promised terms of employment that we now want to take back. Talk about reneging on your “moral,
ethical and legal” obligations.
Second, the numbers show that we are a lot safer than people
in those states that are unwilling to reward their police for their hard and
dangerous work.