Margaret Martin, over at Minneapolis Crime Watch, notes the ongoing furor over in Minnesota’s most dangerous city about Mayor Rybak’s failure to hire more police officers.

Last week, it was the police federation – granted, hardly an action against their own interests, but still.

And now, the most unlikely union of all (I add emphasis):

Today another challenge was issued to the Mayor. This time in a joint press release from the Independence Party and Republican Party of the 5th Congressional District. The chairs of both organizations attended a meeting last night where police coverage was a key topic of discussion.

The release takes Mayor Rybak to task for not living up to one of his campaign promises and for not putting a priority on public safety.

We support the police federation in their campaign to bring more cops to Minneapolis . We believe that the mayor’s first priority should be to keep the promise he made one year ago. The city’s police department should be restored to 893 sworn officers, the number of officers that existed just four years ago, before the city’s drastic cuts to police department staffing. Even though the mayor promised to restore the department to 893 officers, and the city council budgeted the funds to achieve that commitment, we now stand 50 officers short of the goal. By year end, with no plans to hire additional officers, the department is likely to be at least 65 officers short of the goal.

It appears from the release that the mayor once again leaned heavily on the “but they cut LGA” crutch. This is a cop out (no pun intended) by the mayor. True, LGA was cut in 2003, but there have not been cuts since. The truth is that the mayor and the city council have deemed public safety a lower priority than other budget items, or they could have simply shifted funds from those projects into public safety. On top of that, LGA is well above earlier years which had greater coverage and the police budget was a higher percentage of the overall city budget.

Read the whole thing.

When the MNGOP and the “Independence Party” (think “DFL Lite”) team up on a DFL mayor, you know things are getting hairy.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under Crime and Punishment, Minneapolis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.