Black Humor
I was reminded of this Lee Judge cartoon when I read in the Local Puppy Trainer that the school board is going to fund school resource officers.
The school district is broke, but they are committed to coming up with $500,000 to put sheriff deputies in the 26 elementary schools until school is out in June. The Sheriff has said that coverage for this semester will actually cost about $1 million, but he would split the cost with the district.
In Zero’s gun control proposal [.PDF] he talks about ‘incentives’, but I seriously doubt he is going to get enough money from Congress to cover the real costs of putting resource officers in elementary schools, even if someone could convince me that it was good idea.
The proposal covers the obvious stuff and plugs a few of the serious loopholes in our current laws. It also has the CDC return to reporting on firearm violence. The CDC had issued reports about it for years until the NRA twisted some arms in Congress and got it stopped. The NRA didn’t like the numbers that were being reported, so they killed the reports.
Speaking of reports, they must have seriously changed the input form used as the basis for the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report because in nearly a decade of filling it out for my little department I don’t remember any questions about the type of firearm used in crimes. That would have been a real PITA, because that is in the case files, not the summary sheets that I worked from. The big city departments might have the manpower to track that sort of thing, but most local police departments are happy if they can find someone who is able to fill out the required form and get the state police off their back.
4 comments
If the small police departments are anything like the small school districts I used to work with on state reporting, any resemblance of what is reported to what actually happened is coincidental at best. Everybody’s way too overworked to gather every single minutiae of data needed to fulfill the state report. So a kid disappeared from your school between spring and fall and you don’t know where he went because there’s no money for truant officers to follow up on him not showing up at school? Report him as “Moved Out Of State” so he doesn’t appear on your dropout report, yo. These rural areas apparently had really mobile kids :).
“Resource Officers”? What kind of PR bullcrap is that? Why not call a spade a spade, ie “guards”? Schools these days already resemble prison camps, with 12 foot fences and locked gates in the hallways. And in some places, metal detectors and RFID-equipped neck hangers. Might as well go all the way I guess, get them used to their proper roles living in a security state.
Speaking of reports, they must have seriously changed the input form used as the basis for the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report because in nearly a decade of filling it out for my little department I don’t remember any questions about the type of firearm used in crimes.
i found this back when i was looking up gun statistics:
It’s the same, Badtux – you do the minimum you have to do to keep the state off your back and take short cuts whenever possible.
Well, PJ, the term ‘lock-down’ does come from the corrections procedure manual 😈
They do look a lot like medium security prisons, now that you mention it.
Hell, Hipparchia, the crime statistics before the 1970s were guesses, because reporting was optional and almost everyone opted out. After it became a requirement there was no money to comply with it, so only the largest departments would have the systems in place to file all of that information. It wouldn’t have been bad with forms that included that information on a summary sheet, but that wasn’t the way it worked in New York [outside of NYC which does everything differently than the rest of the state]. You have to assume that the supplemental data came primarily from large urban departments.