A budget crisis in Oregon has forced the state police to abandon 24-hour patrols. Some rural highways in the state won’t be covered at all. Even before the recent cuts–the layoffs of 129 officers out of a force of 349–state-patrol ranks were down to their lowest level in four decades. The police-staffing woes in Oregon mirror law-enforcement-personnel problems across the United States. The result of a sour economy, the cuts are being imposed even as local departments are being asked to muscle up for antiterror security. Further worsening the crisis: some cops are military reservists now being called to active duty. At one point, the police and fire departments in Niagara Falls, N.Y., were without squad chiefs–both had been called to active duty.
One in four police departments nationally are now facing cuts–a “real threat to hometown America,” says John DeStefano Jr., the president of the National League of Cities and mayor of New Haven, Conn. Besides coping with shrinking tax receipts, cities have spent about $3 billion on antiterror efforts since 9-11, much of it for overtime pay for police officers working at airports, DeStefano said. For cities and police departments, the financial reckoning is painful. In Buffalo, where police ranks have shrunk by 100 officers in the past year, the city has dropped patrols that focus solely on catching drunken drivers. (Just this week, the city announced it would trim the force by 200 more officers over the next three years.) “We’re going back to the bare basics of policing,” says Buffalo, N.Y., Mayor Anthony M. Masiello. In Santa Clara County in California, the anticipated layoffs of 81 officers–out of a force of 550–may force cancellation of a program tracking sexual predators. And if Indianapolis doesn’t find extra funding in the next few weeks, it’ll disband its public-housing police by this summer.
Nowhere are the cuts more draconian than in Oregon. Voters in January rejected an emergency tax measure as a stopgap, and now police services are bearing the brunt. The forensic operation run by the state police has been decimated. Many regional crime labs have shut down. “We’re in a new world now,” says Kevin Campbell, the president of the Oregon Association Chiefs of Police. “These are murders we’re talking about that won’t get solved.” In little places like Enterprise, now unprotected for long stretches in the darkness, residents can only hope they won’t need the forensics experts.
