Mike Chamberlain has a great post questioning the mission creep of the Clark County School District Police, who are writing tickets far beyond their jurisdictions. He’s right to question the costs of them coloring outside of their lines.
But the larger question should be this – why do we have separate school police departments at all?
Each distinct organization has its own overhead expenses – Chiefs, HR people, administrative people, equipment (bought in smaller amounts, which means it’s probably more expensive), etc. Why are we incurring this additional expense? Why in the world can’t the regular Metro cops handle issues as they may arise at the schools?
(The same is true for Washoe – the WCSD has its own police force, as does UNR and TMCC.)
I understand the argument for keeping, say, Reno and Sparks PD different. These organizations should be accountable to the people they protect and serve, and strengthening the voting power of each person in each jurisdiction goes a long way to doing that. Decentralization is a critical component of a responsive government that protects liberty instead of threatening it. And one can certainly argue that the consolidated Metro Police Department in Las Vegas is not as accountable to the people as they should be.
But there is no separate voting population for the school district. Indeed, because these officers don’t have a readily identifiable “constituency” of voters, they’re less accountable than regular city police or county deputies.
And it’s not like our schools are far away geographically, or are themselves particularly large, making communications and dispatch a problem.
I’m not even arguing against having cops in and around our schools. If we kept the same number of uniformed officers (with some just being assigned a certain school, say), but eliminated the redundant bureaucracies needed to administer them in a completely separate organization, we would save millions of dollars over the years in personnel costs with no loss of service. And the school police wouldn’t even be tied to their campuses in case they really were needed elsewhere on non-emergency matters, which means we’d potentially get better service for fewer tax dollars.
It’s time we get serious about eliminating redundancies like this in government at every level. Particularly when, as Mike pointed out, the redundant folks are being so open about the fact that they don’t have enough to do within the confines of their own fiefdoms.
