42°
CLIFFVIEW PILOT PHOTO
Once again, big media takes an election-season bag of crumbs from the politicians and turns it into glorious salvation.
The highly touted $20 million COPS grant announced yesterday doesn’t send so much as an inch of police tape to Paterson, or to Englewood, Hackensack or Teaneck, or to Paramus and any number of towns up our way who’ve seen their ranks dramatically thinned.
And this is celebrated?
“This funding will help make sure we have police on the beat and keep families in New Jersey safe from crime,” Sen. Frank Lautenberg said of the Department of Justice’s COPS hiring grant that went to a dozen New Jersey towns.
Did he say this with a straight face?
Jerry DeMarco Publisher/Editor
Y’know what $20 million is worth in a state of our density? It’s like your dad giving you a dollar and telling you not to spend it all in one place.
And what happens when that money runs out? That’s right: After the third year, those municipalities will have to pony up the salaries.
But no one thinks of that – least of all Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, who was doing cyber backflips on Twitter yesterday.
I can understand the newspapers and TV people not getting it. The collective IQ of the majority of them in our area is lower than the Mets’ win total this season.
But how gullible is the public? Do people really see what’s going on here? “So, Chris Christie hacked cops off your rosters?” the Democrats say. “We’re giving them back to you!”
No, they’re not.
Think about it: New Jersey has 8.8 million people in nearly 600 towns.
Protecting and serving those towns, going into 2011, were more than 20,000 municipal police officers – not counting the county police and sheriff’s officers and other law enforcement personnel.
As a result of budget cuts, nearly 1,000 police officers of all stripes in New Jersey lost their jobs this year – one twentieth of the municipal law enforcement workforce.
And we’re supposed to get excited about 78 new positions, most of them going to Newark and Camden?
Boy, are we lucky we have such great representatives in Washington!
We’d have been better off if Lautenberg and company got a discount on 8.8 million stun guns. Only trouble is: Most people would have turned them on him.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Hackensack and receive free news updates.
