Police Cars Repossessed Due To Falling Tax Revenues
To say that Cairo, the seat of Alexander County, Ill., has seen better days is a cruel understatement. […] The situation got so bad this month that the bank repossessed five of his seven cruisers. Four of them sit in the bank parking lot now, shorn of their emergency lights, antennas and seals. In addition to losing his cruisers, the sheriff lost three-fourths of his staff, most of them deputies, to budget cuts.
Wait, there’s more…
At its peak, the staff had 29 full and part timers.
It’s hard to see how they ran out of money.
(h/t Tom)
Here’s an Obama bailout waiting to happen.
Am I following this correctly? That little town had a police force with 29 staff? I looks smaller than Balzac.
This reminds me of David Ackles’ great song,”The Road to Cairo”. The place itself now seems as down and out as the song’s narrator.
I’ve been to Cairo, Illinois before! At one time there was hope by the town fathers that it would rival Chicago. Was never to be though.
It does have some spectacular old Victorian architecture.
By the way, just around the bend of the Ohio River from Cairo is Metropolis, Illinois, renamed in honour of Superman. Seems to me that even Mr. Clark Kent couldn’t help out America right now, not as long as Obama and his incompetent thugs remain in power.
29 police officers for 3600 people?
I remember when my father was on the Sydney, NS police. The city was around 35,000 and they had 50 cops.
Oops, my bad. Turns out the 3600 number was from 2000. The most recent number is 3100.
One cop for every 100 people, or close enough so it does not matter.
Cairo is a predominantly African-American community.
atric said:
“Cairo is a predominantly African-American community.”
So what is your point exactly?
They are typical working class people who have lost their jobs (and correspondingly pay zero in taxes now) to the government-orchestrated recession. There race is irrelevant.
It would be the county of which Cairo is the seat that is broke. County cops would patrol all 250 sq. km of the country, which has 8-9000 inhabitants. That still seems overstaffed by Canadian standards but, if Cairo is anything like, say Detroit, maybe not.
Having been in Cairo just this last November, it has continued to deteriorate in the last few decades. The Sheriff’s department is for Alexander County, and the county is basic agricultural with some smaller businesses. Most of the river traffic business is located farther north on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
The area has been going down for decades, but it has become extreme in the last few years. Boarded up buildings and closed businesses outnumber the open establishments. When the best buildings are government building then there is a problem in the community. All one has to do is cross the Ohio and go into Kentucky and find active and somewhat productive communities, such as Paducah and Wickliffe.
Cairo has been going down for years, and is looking like East St. Louis, both are not functioning municipalities. Cairo had some excellent homes and history, but that is going away.
Would these be the bitter people clinging to their bibles and guns that Obama mentioned?
“The county of 8,000 people is half-a-million dollars in the red, and the recession has made a bad situation worse.”
That’s a lot of people to protect with only 29 men!
My home town in N.Manitoba back in the 50’s and 60’s had two RCMP officers to enforce the law in six small communities and five Indian reservations. From one end of their patrol zone to the other must have been about a hundred and fifty miles.
Of course,we were pretty law abiding folks.
Sounds like a pyramid scheme of some kind.
As a point of interest, I have it on authority from a local resident that the name of the town is not pronounced ‘Cairo’, but ‘Karo’ as the syrup. Just in case you find yourself down that way and have to ask for directions. The area, however, is referred to as ‘Little Egypt’.
Haven’t been to Cairo but I’ve been to Egypt, Texas.
at first glance i think, “a police budget cut is bad, why?”
Gee…I guess they are sleeping well at night.
Do they get a tax break for having no protection against the theives?
Welcome to Obamamerica.
I see the PC police are out in force the guy simply stated it is predominately black community.
Uhm that would be a fact and one that helps paint a picture of the place.
Clearly, this community isn’t organized enough.
dmorris, 29 locals plus however many state troopers are assigned to the county, serving about 8000 people is a LOT of police per capita.
Canada averages around one sworn officer per 550 people.
This place had better than one per 275. Twice our coverage.
Twenty nine isn’t that many – to keep four cars on patrol 24/7 requires a minimum 16 officers, plus 4 dispatchers, a couple of administrators, janitorial staff, etc – doesn’t take long to get into the mid-twenties, and that river needs some boat patrols.
AtlanticJim counts “sworn” officers only, but with Canada’s penchant for unions, bureaucrats and feather bedding, I bet the full ratio of law enforcement to potential law breakers isn’t a lot different than Cairo’s.
Cairo is a cool town, a river town, on the corner of Mississippi and Ohio. I was past it once on a big OBL towboat back in the 70s. It is Karo.
Cairo, Illinois? I spent a weekend there one night.
Like a lot of small Illinois towns on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, they are slowly dying. Small farmers have sold out to larger concerns and moved away. What little industry there was has left for less taxing pastures.
Just for comparison, Toronto has 5700 uniforms and 2500 civilian personnel in its police force for about 2.3 million people. That’s slightly less than 1 per 300, which is on par with Cairo. Gotta agree with kakola – don’t see that much out of line here.
Missing Link. The demographic is a very important component in any analysis.
29 Cops in a town of 3600….6 cops would be lots to handle the workload in a town of this size, unless the whole town is full of crooks. I would think that this many cops is a fraud…where is the town council? One happy little community living off the taxpayers of the state and no doubt funding from the feds on some affirmative action program…
MikeL – six cops means only about two on duty at any given time. Not likely anybody is going to work under conditions like that.
Besides the natural economic forces which have led to its decline, race-riots in the summer of 68 by blacks protesting the murder of MLK, RFK, etc., sealed the town’s doom by destroying much of downdown and driving most of the few remaining small businessmen away. Cairo never really recovered from those riots although it was obviously in slow decline previously along with most of the small towns in the region. Charleston, Missouri, not far away just across the river looks only slightly better than Cairo, and it had no riots in 68.