Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims has been using the early release of inmates from the county jail as a bargaining chip in her effort to stave off budget cuts the Board of Supervisors wants. The city got into the brawl when Mayor Alan Autry raised the prospect of the city suing the county and the sheriff over the releases.
Mims halted the releases on Friday, pending a meeting of the county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
But there's an answer on the table that all sides are doing their very best to ignore: consolidation. That's the subject of our editorial today.
It's an old idea: Pool resources from the county Sheriff's Department and the Fresno Police Department to save money and create efficiencies that can actually improve public safety in the region.
But that eminently sensible idea always runs smack into the wall of bureaucratic turf protection. For public consumption, the principals in city and county hem and haw over the advantages of consolidation, but always come up with reasons why it can't be done.
So the sheriff releases accused felons onto the city streets in order to count coup in her budget wars. The supervisors gnaw at her ankles over her spending habits. And the mayor of Fresno shouts "lawsuit." This is what we call "leadership."
The Republicans need a police-state for their own safety - a sign of the times.
A hell, what we need to do with all the criminals is send them into the military to fight wars or start making them all work on a chain gangs, maybe that will deter other by making examples of current criminals incarcerated. Perhaps this will put a decline in offenders that continue to commit repeated criminal offenses. You never know it just might work, It should be an experiment, that just might work out to better the community?