Criminal law, Politics, Society

East St. Louis Lays Off Roughly One-Third of Police Force

Cities continue to shutdown basic services as the country spends billions abroad on two wars. Just a couple weeks after Oakland announced a plan to no longer respond to calls for such crimes as grand theft auto and burglary, East St. Louis is laying off roughly one-third of its police force as well as part of its fire department.


East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks announced that the city will layoff 19 of its 62 police officers and 11 firefighters.

One officer is quoted as saying that he will be the only officer on duty during the night shift.

There appears to be a complete disconnect from reality in Washington as Congress continues to gush billions of dollars while cities are suspending or curtailing basic services.

Source: STLToday

84 thoughts on “East St. Louis Lays Off Roughly One-Third of Police Force”

  1. Jill the tea party is not the solution. The republicans are horrible. I am sticking with the democrats. As I said above 102 democrats for to end the funding for the war. It is a good start. I am too old too be a “purist”, and if you really are one, how can you support the tea party?

  2. In my city, aid boxes were just handed out over the weekend. There weren’t enough to go around, just as our food banks are empty. Some people don’t look racist because they don’t call black people niggers out loud. But that isn’t the whole story. There’s the smooth racism of the well dressed and well heeled who know better than to call a black person a nigger openly, but with the stroke of a pen they wipe out an entire black neighborhood by foreclosing on that neighborhood’s people. I believe these are the people Mr. Obama called, “savvy businessmen”.

    If you wage wars on brown people isn’t that being racist? If your economic policies disproportionately effect black and brown people, isn’t that being a racist? If your ICE arrests citizens based on the color of their skin, deports them if they have a mental illness, and keeps some citizens incommunicado for several days, isn’t that being racist? The most dangerous racism isn’t always that which screams the loudest. Look at actions. There lies the truth.

  4. During the boom times budgets grew dramatically instead of preparing for the inevitable bust. Cutting teachers, police and other first responders is just a tactic to scare to population into paying more taxes. I’m sure to city of E. St. Louis and the state of IL have all sorts of business subsidies that go to donors that can be eliminated before basic functions of government. Cut waste before squeezing taxpayers further.

  5. Will be interesting to see if murders go up or down in places that are laying off big, like Oakland and East St. Louis. There used to be a lot fewer police officers than there are now. Then again, crime has gone down. If the number of police officers and the murder rate is really correlated the way everybody seems to think, then the murder rate in East St. Louis will rise. I hope it doesn’t rise, and think that it may not.

  6. We don’t need police, do we? And what about Miranda rights?

    **********

    Miranda Rights Trimmed Down By Supreme Court
    JESSE J. HOLLAND | 08/ 2/10 10:46 AM |
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/02/miranda-rights-trimmed-do_n_667023.html

    WASHINGTON — You have the right to remain silent, but only if you tell the police that you’re remaining silent.
    You have a right to a lawyer – before, during and after questioning, even though the police don’t have to tell you exactly when the lawyer can be with you. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you, which, by the way, are only good for the next two weeks?

    The Supreme Court made major revisions to the now familiar Miranda warnings this year. The rulings will change the ways police, lawyers and criminal suspects interact amid what experts call an attempt to pull back some of the rights that Americans have become used to over recent decades.

    The high court has made clear it’s not going to eliminate the requirement that police officers give suspects a Miranda warning, so it is tinkering around the edges, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, co-chair of the amicus committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

    “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Fisher said. “For the past 20-25 years, as the court has turned more conservative on law and order issues, it has been whittling away at Miranda and doing everything it can to ease the admissibility of confessions that police wriggle out of suspects.”

  7. Last time 32 democrats vote against the Afghan war. This time 102 voted against the spending. The tide is turning among the democrats. Virtually all republicans voted for the funding. The bill would not have passed unless the republicans voted for it.

  10. I think this is a nice summary of what is really going on. It’s in Glenn Greenwald’s new column, This week in change: “First, in Collapsing Empire News, the Democratic House — not deterred or even slowed in the least by what the WikiLeak-ed documents revealed — voted overwhelmingly to appropriate unconditionally another $37 billion for the war in Afghanistan while the political class prepares massive teacher lay-offs and (coming soon) slashing cuts to Social Security; this action — with 102 Democrats and 12 Republicans opposed — was taken in violation of the emphatic pledge of virtually every Democratic politician not to fund wars through supplemental appropriations. Perfectly illustrating how our political culture functions, one of the GOP House members to vote against the war funding (Jason Chaffetz of Utah) is now being attacked by his Democratic challenger, Karen Hayer, with the type of Rovian rhetoric that poisoned the country for the last decade (Chaffetz is “irresponsibly” failing to “support our men in uniform who are currently in harm’s way”

  11. Yissil,

    I think the best way to put it is “The Bush tax cuts increase the deficit with no benefit to the general economy.” SOMEBODY benefits, the question is who.

  12. michael P Byrne
    1, August 2, 2010 at 5:01 am
    I know ..it’s great eh…here’s an idea …lets not pay any taxes, and see how long the thing lasts before it burns down…I think, I might say the anti-tax lobby, could be responsible for the biggest fantasy of the last 40 years in this country….Have your cake, eat it, but don’t pay for it…

    ================================================================

    Truer words were never spoken … conservative republicans stuffing their mouths with cake they refuse to pay for is something that’s been going on since good ol’ Ronnie rolled into town. Now the entire country must pay for their Stage Two Diabetes treatments.

  13. My favorite cost-saving measure was California laying off tax collectors. Sounds appealing but of course it cost more money than it saved because less taxes were collected.

    A tax cut by any other name.

    The Bush tax cuts increase the deficit with no benefit. Federal money used to stop layoffs by states and municipalities stimulate the economy.

  14. I think I would lay off everyone else before laying off the police:

    Year: 2006 number of crimes per 100,000.
    Crime East Saint Louis National average
    Murder 101.9 5.6
    Rape 251.3 32.2
    Robbery 1,347.0 195.4
    Assault 5,847.3 340.1
    Burglary 2,442.8 814.5
    Auto theft 2,067.5 526.5

  16. East St. Louis is not St. Louis. They aren’t even in the same state. St. Louis is in Missouri. East St. Louis is in Illinois. You need to correct the headline.

  17. We need additional stimulus to reignite the economy and save city and state jobs and to retain teacher’s jobs.

  18. I know ..it’s great eh…here’s an idea …lets not pay any taxes, and see how long the thing lasts before it burns down…I think, I might say the anti-tax lobby, could be responsible for the biggest fantasy of the last 40 years in this country….Have your cake, eat it, but don’t pay for it…

  20. Well, you never wanna trim the fat, unless it someone elses….WA Senators 3 ball, 2 strikes and 15,000,000,000,00 fowls a day…..

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