There are many public and economic advantages to allowing police officers to take their cruisers home when their shifts end. Still, it’s not surprising that the City Council agreed on Tuesday with the mayor to end the free take-home-car policy. Initially, the city should be able to save some money, and that bit of short-term savings is what the city needs to meet a tight budget. Alas, the budget gains will be outrun by higher future dollar costs, and the loss of morale and volunteer emergency response capacity will be immediate.
Allowing police officers to take their patrol cars home effectively puts more police cars on the street around the clock. The public and long-term cost benefits of that alone are huge. The long-term dollar savings are probably equally significant.
The visual presence of police cars, including those driven by off-duty officers, clearly deters both potential traffic offenders and criminal activity. The specific cost savings of that deterrent value may be hard to quantify, but it’s indisputable.
By the same measure, having off-duty police officers in patrol cars also allows more officers to respond more quickly to serious emergencies and crime events. Off-duty officers in their cruisers can instantly communicate with a dispatcher, turn on their emergency lights and move rapidly to the scene of an emergency – or, as the case may be, respond to a crime that they see occur. That’s not so easy, or as likely to occur, when officers are commuting or on personal business in their private vehicles.
The long-term cost savings of allowing officers to take their patrol cars home is significant, as well. Studies have long shown that when officers are the only users of their patrol cars, the cars last significantly longer and go with fewer repairs than if they are used continuously by officers on different shifts who have no personal interest in taking better care of a pool car.
Once a city makes the initial investment in patrol cars for every officer – as the city has already done – the city accrues significant savings in future vehicle costs over time.
Having personally assigned cars, moreover, lets officers report more quickly to their duty sectors and eliminates the time needed by officers to drive to a central location, pick up a pool car, transfer their personal police gear, and drive to their duty sector. It’s simply a more efficient use of officers’ and taxpayers’ time.
In addition, the city’s action in revoking the use of take-home cars hurts morale because it amounts to a take-back of a useful privilege that was initiated, at least partly, in lieu of a higher raise some years ago. That hurts officer morale, and like it or not, poorer morale adds its own costs. When officers, like any other employees, feel devalued or wronged, their willingness to offer voluntary help in emergency situations or crime events in their off-duty hours will likely, and understandably, be undermined.
City officials came up with the plan to take back the take-home car privilege as an austerity measure to reduce the tax increase last summer. That was a mistake, and city officials ought to acknowledge it.
Mayor Ron Littlefield’s proposal Tuesday to re-establish the take-home-car program in the next budget year for officers who reside in the city is essentially an admission of the mistaken new policy. But city officials shouldn’t have made this mistake in the first place.