Under police chief Heath Scott, you will never be safe enough and you will never stop paying more for it.
Now the police are into the pot of money that pays for the public library, Chilkat Center Haines Museum and swimming pool for $177,000 and more each year. That’s right. If you can’t get into the pool or museum, it’s because money for them is now going to police.
How much is $177,000? It’s more than half the $292,000 the borough has budgeted for all fire department service in the borough in the coming year. It’s enough to keep the pool open in the summer AND fund a curator at our museum.
This is what happened.
In 2018, after people living outside of downtown voted against having police service, Chief Scott prevailed on the Haines Borough Assembly to allow him to respond to calls out the Haines Highway, Lutak and Mud Bay anyway.
People were phoning 911, Scott told the assembly, and every time they call from those areas that voted not to have police service, I am duty bound to go, Scott said.
But there was a catch. Despite his deeply felt pangs of duty, Scott wasn’t about to respond to areas outside police jurisdiction without some payola – and what a windfall that has turned out to be. In the past year, police responded outside their jurisdiction just 27 times and charged the rest of us $167,000. That’s more than $6,000 per call.
Serving the area where residents voted not to have police service will cost our town $177,000 next year, according to the proposed budget the assembly is scheduled to pass on Tuesday.
Ka-ching.
That’s not all. Since Scott arrived here in 2016, this is what has happened to the police budget for 5 officers:
FY 17 $520,270
FY 18 $674,644
FY 19 $691,680
FY 20 $722,885
FY 21 $642,213
FY 22 $777,720
FY 23 $813,104 (proposed)
Ka-ching.
Detect a trend? That one year in the past seven – 2021 – that the police budget actually went down? That was the year that former assembly member Brenda Josephson had the temerity to suggest that police might be able to live with a little less. Josephson was not re-elected, partly due to the misguided votes of environmentalists whose blindly green local politics sometimes costs them in other areas.
Now, of course, it may be that crime has been rampant in Haines and that the police department, now properly funded, is bagging all the criminals and making us more safe. Is that so? If it were, you’d expect police would be arresting and charging many more criminals than we were before Heath Scott arrived.
So let’s look at the numbers of misdemeanor and felony cases filed in the Haines District Court in the past 10 years.
Calendar Year – Total Criminal Cases Filed in Haines Court
2011-73
2012-77
2103-71
2014-57
2015-44
2016-76
2017-39
2018-34
2019-41
2020-43
2021-21
2022-13 (to date)
Another trend, but this one significantly downward in the numbers of crimes prosecuted in Haines. So Haines lawmen are making more money than ever before and prosecuting fewer crimes. That’s either because our police are not working so hard or perhaps because we just don’t have as much crime in our retirement community with a median age of 49 that we had 10 or 20 years ago.
Or maybe it’s that the cops are so fearsome, the criminals in town are now afraid to commit crimes. Be sure that Heath Scott has a perfectly plausible explanation for these numbers. He’s a good talker and has bamboozled several Haines Borough Assemblies already.
But the numbers don’t lie. Cops cost our town significantly more with each passing year but the number of crimes cops prosecute here drops. Now for the third year, cops are being handsomely rewarded for their insistence on serving an area where people voted against cop service.
And the money they’re charging to respond to calls in that area where they’re unwanted is now costing us so much that we are unable to fully fund our swimming pool, museum or other facilities.
If this doesn’t jibe with your idea of Haines, contact your assembly members and the mayor now. The assembly is scheduled to approve next year’s police budget — and the budgets for our facilities like the swimming pool — on Tuesday, May 24.