RON DAVIS -- Through My Eyes

We’ve probably all stood in a long line at a market or bank waiting to

conduct our business. Sometimes the interminable wait is the product of

an unanticipated rush, and sometimes because the business just doesn’t

employ enough people to serve the number of customers.

It really galls me when I finally make it to the front of the line only

to meet a clerk with the IQ of a floor mat. Some businesses are proud of

the fact that they have the lowest ratio of employees to customers. Some

businesses are also proud that their employee compensation packages are

thinner than the air on Mt. Everest, resulting in employees with the

personality of a lemon and the intelligence of a bar of soap. You get

what you pay for.

When it comes to businesses that make these kinds of decisions, we can

either put up with it or go elsewhere. But when it comes to public

safety, we can’t just dial 911 and insist on highly trained, experienced,

smart cops; immediate service; or cops who will be able to avoid the

miscues that result in expensive lawsuits, lost cases, and worker’s

compensation claims.

Nor can we insist on cops who have the intelligence to provide public

safety without becoming a police state -- we get what we’ve previously

paid for.

While Huntington Beach is proud of its ratio of 1.2 sworn officers per

1,000 residents, compared to a statewide average of 1.7 officers per 1,000, and about two officers per 1,000 in beach communities, I’m not

convinced that pride is justified.

While Huntington Beach tries to supplement the ratio by using overtime,

that is expensive and gets very old. Regular hours for cops means working

holidays, weekends, birthdays, anniversaries, swing shifts and night

shifts. Asking these same cops to do more of the same to compensate for

the lower-than-average cops-to-residents ratio is probably too much.

Worse yet, a low ratio not only means slower response times but exposes

officers because there may not be sufficient backup. Huntington Beach

compounds the problem by coupling too few officers per resident with the

lowest salary and benefit package in the county, according a countywide

police salary and benefit survey. I put great faith in this Garden Grove

survey, since its objective wasn’t to justify raises or maintain the

status quo in Huntington Beach.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I certainly don’t want to be dead last

when hiring anyone -- particularly public safety officers. While

Huntington Beach is a great place to live with a low crime rate, so are

other cities, which by virtue of their salary and benefit packages are

able to select from the cream of the crop for both new officers and

experienced lateral transfer officers.

I think it is fair to ask whether Huntington Beach’s structure is

designed to hire only those officers who can’t get jobs elsewhere. If

that’s true, we incur all of the training costs and allow them to make

whatever costly mistakes rookies make while they submit applications to

other departments. And guess what happens after we’ve trained them? If

they still can’t get a better paying job at another department, we get to

keep them in ours.

We’ll only have the level of public safety we pay for. Whether it

consists of bright, well-educated officers who make fewer mistakes and

save us from costly lawsuits is completely up to us. We have to hire the

finest if we are to have the finest public safety.

Given today’s highly competitive job market and need for public safety

officers throughout all of Southern California, that may mean more than

simply providing the best salary and benefits in the county, but paying

bonuses designed to entice top-notch lateral officers to consider

Huntington Beach.

The test for public safety isn’t whether we’ve had problems in the past

but a constant examination of what we have presently and how we’re

maintaining it. We’re not the safest city today because we received an

award yesterday, but because we continue to hire and retain quality

public safety employees who can produce the safest city today and

tomorrow.

* RON DAVIS is a private attorney who lives in Huntington Beach. He can

be reached by e-mail at o7 [email protected] .