Peterson to Hire More Cops?
Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson is holding a news conference tomorrow to make a major announcement regarding the future of crime fighting and financial stability in Indianapolis.
If you will allow me to engage in some freely admitted speculation, I would not be surprised if the Mayor announces he’s going to take that some of the public safety tax money and channel it into more cops on the street. I say this because the Mayor has already said the $85 million dollars will go for pension relief, courts and prosecutors and crime prevention programs. So there would be no real reason to hold a news conference unless he was making a substantive change. And the only real change which would matter would be for the Mayor to announce he was hiring more police. A spokeswoman for the Mayor would neither confirm nor deny he was going to try to hire more police officers.
I can’t say this surprises me with taxpayer revolt on the horizon in Marion County. What better way to sell a tax increase than to say it is for public safety and the hiring of actual live police officers? However, these are also the same people who said we were not short police officers, even though internal documents revealed a shortage of about 130 cops.
Tomorrow will tell the full story, and I’ll definitely be listening.
