Chattanooga Pulse

Let me begin by ending the suspense: Yes, soon enough I’ll be resuming my role of telling terribly witty and unique stories born literally from our own dark, septic back yards and streets. Stories of heroism and incest that can only be told by pimps and thieves to those near and dear to them…and I’m not just talking about the mayor’s office. But not just yet.

This has been a tremendous week for local law enforcement and local government both, and as such I would like to take a departure from my normal fare of cynicism and disgust and show you my kinder, if not downright velveteen underside. You know it’s there, and I can prove it from some of my reader mail:

“Hey, I just wanted to say that I think you’re a really big asshole. Keep up the good work.”— Eric from Hixson

“I think you’re a terrible person and I hope you get some psychiatric help. I can’t believe we dated.” — Kathy from East Brainerd

“You are dangerous and should be fired. You need counseling, and not just for the booze.” —‘Lysol’ from East Chattanooga.

I could go on and on, but you see the common thread here: Everyone, even my harshest critics, in some way wishes the best for me. “Good work.” “Get help.” I love you too, folks…but I digress.

A tremendous week for local law enforcement, yes. The economy is in a bit of a downturn at the moment, which is itself something to laugh about. My grandparents lived through the first Great Depression and recalled things like soup lines, times when people fought each other for scraps of food in restaurant garbage cans, and men attacking trucks delivering food to hotels. Children took turns eating every other day so their siblings wouldn’t starve.

Twenty thousand people committed suicide in 1931 alone, and 2009 has been compared to that. I guess now the standard for “Great Depression” is being rejected for the next credit card with which you would rotate your credit, or reducing your family to one vehicle each, but it’s a problem all the same, so the mayor decided to cut costs by reducing the police department’s presence on the streets by 50 percent or cutting the cops’ pay by 5 percent (“Their choice!”).

The “tremendous” part is that the Chattanooga City Council took issue with this. As did the public, and not to mention the cops appearing on television and radio with apparent symptoms of rabies.

“There was simply no choice,” said the mayor. “This had to be done. There is no way around this. It’s absolutely impossible to avoid this. It is set in stone under a larger stone under a mountain of stones on a stone planet.”

So in 20 minutes, the City Council Budget, Personnel and Finance committee headed by Dr. Carol Berz found the funds from elsewhere and this problem was solved, and another created.

Money generated from the traffic enforcement cameras and speed vans would be used to keep the number of police cars doubled on the streets, but people were upset because those monies were reserved for driver education and enforcement programs. It was Jack Benson, council chairman, who said “I don’t know about ya’ll, but the best education I’ve ever received on slowing down was getting a dang ticket.” And so that, too, was settled.

The public may never know what a deal breaker this could have been, since the Generation X, Y (and whatever trendy Starbuck’s bullshit-jargon is used for the current one)—era of cops would have simply quit, slowly but surly. And thanks to the other short-term cost-saving effort of “not having a police academy”, there would be no one to replace them for a year and a half or so. And that’s the upside.

The downside was that immediately, there would have been no incoming or outgoing flow of police cars at each shift change seven days a week (hence the 50 percent reduction) upon which we predicate our patrol responses to 911. Even the SWAT team would have had to double its response time by driving to headquarters, THEN to the emergency, wherever it was. “For what savings?” you might be asking? $400,000.

Yup. Out of a $167,000,000 budget, the mayor wanted to save $400,000 by cutting the police responses in half. The council, however, has done something unprecedented and gone line by line over the proposed budget, and made changes. Reallocated money they were literally giving away, and focusing it on core issues like “safety” instead, since unlike their counterparts, they read somewhere that in economic downturns, crime goes up.

And training cops is as expensive as the lawsuits from failing miserably to answer 911 calls for help, which the city has a higher obligation to respond to than it does the creation of “spray parks”. And it is to this beleaguered end that I reveal my soft, ample and sensitive underbelly to say “Thank You, City Council.” For doing your jobs as the stewards of our tax dollars and our safety. For actually reading the charter and utilizing your statutory power.

And for as much as anything, using something sorely lacking in today’s society and the underlying issue in 90 percent of my diatribes upon the pages of the Pulse: Common Sense.

Well played, elected officials. Well played.

When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he is an occasional student at UTC, an up and coming carpenter, auto mechanic, prominent boating enthusiast, and spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.