WANTED: Chief executive to lead large organization of 4,000 employees, providing service to 1.66 million customers on an annual operating budget of $981 million – unless government-appointed lawyers show up and suck hundreds of millions out of the organization and severely limit your ability to lead. Salary range: $200,000-$300,000.
That’s what the Indeed ad for Phoenix police chief would look like if the city’s HR department was being truthful. The city has been without a chief for almost three years, and that probably won’t change soon.
Interim chief Michael Sullivan, one of four finalists for the permanent position, resigned in April while taking himself out of the running for the job, so City Manager Jeff Barton restarted the chief-of-police-picking process – and told the other three finalists to re-apply.
But would anybody apply for a job knowing the federal government is waiting in the wings to reform (i.e. neuter and bankrupt) the PPD?
Yes, Phoenix police have problems. But many people, like Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, say a report issued by the Department of Justice last year (based on a “pattern-or-practice investigation”) is flawed and unfairly paints the department as a bunch of thugs.
Since more than 60 percent of DOJ pattern-or-practice investigations end with cities and/or agencies entering some form of federal monitoring, Petersen – a police funding advocate – sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, asking the DOJ to rescind its report. His letter is likely an attempt to protect budget dollars Arizona’s largest law enforcement agency stands to lose if the DOJ manages to put a federal monitor in place.
Consider what happened to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office: The legal and compliance costs of a DOJ racial profiling lawsuit launched during Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign in 2007 – which resulted in federal monitoring that’s still ongoing – are projected to reach $316 million this summer.
Makes you want to call the cops to report a robbery. But it’s worse than that. According to data compiled by Harvard economists Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi for the National Bureau of Economic Research, DOJ investigations and monitoring so remarkably change the way police do their job it leads to more crime.
Drs. Fryer and Devi said DOJ investigations and monitoring in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Ferguson, Missouri, and Riverside, California, caused “significant increases in both homicide and total crime… almost 34,000 excess felonies” and led to the loss of “893 total [lives]” in the cities studied.
If the DOJ assigns an overlord to Phoenix police, the only people theoretically fit for the chief’s job could be old TV cops, like Columbo or T.J. Hooker – because it would be an acting job, playing a role while the director-cum-DOJ-appointed lawyer yells his instructions through a megaphone.
“Defund the police” doesn’t belong in any serious conversation about police reform. But what’s worse is the DOJ running things – because that means more than missing millions. It means more dead bodies in your town.
