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Akron police is now going to be under control of Sheriff Drew Alexander from the Summit County Sheriff's Department. I have never heard of anything like this before. The police and sheriff should be seperate. Akron should be in control of their own department. We voted the sheriff into office to be in control of Summit County, not Akron. Additionally, the Sheriff's budget is considerably larger than Akron's budget, who's going to flip the bill? The tax payers. We will. Also, who will be liable now in the event something goes wrong? I would imagine Summit County Sheriff's Department would be liable, the buck usually stops with who is in charge, and then gets passed to the tax payers. The only benefit that I could see is if they were beefing up Sheriff patrols in Akron. I doubt that will be the case. Logistically, I would imagine they communicate already on certain tasks, so I doubt that would be improved.
Article about Summit County and Akron PD
Akron police is stretched thin and underfunded. What they need to do is to stop spending money on pointless things, like the "Cop in a box" program. A camera that takes pictures of liscene plates of speeders does not provide any beneift in the event of a robbery. The City of Akron leases these "Cop in a box" systems from a company called Nestor. Their contract is not widly available. However, we can speculate that is something like the City of Los Angeles. LA's lease is $96,000 per camera per year. Akron has 9 of them, thats $864,000 per year. The company Nestor also charges a per ticket cost. LA's contract is $3/ticket printed. Now, most police departments don't cite you if you are going over the speed limit by 5 MPH or less. They don't give tickets for those because of odometer issues, tire pressure, etc. So, the City of Akron throws all of those tickets away. It is estimated that each camera will generate about $93,000/year in tickets for the city. So the cost to the city for these stupid cameras is astronomical.
The cost alone is ridiculus. What about the fact of whose responsible for paying these tickets? What if someone else is driving your car? Right now, it has been upheld in Akron that the vehicle owner is responsible.
Now they are dumping their mismanagement onto all of Summit county's taxpayers. RIDICULUS!
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