By Howard Pankratz, Denver Post
The cost of fuel has become so prohibitive that El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa has asked his officers working the graveyard shift to stop routine patrols, shut their cars off and respond only to emergency calls.
“We have told them to cease all routine or random patrols - which means that residents won’t see marked units driving through their neighborhoods being proactive,” Maketa said. “We’ve essentially had to turn back to being reactive, primarily because the county doesn’t have the revenue to keep our fleet being fueled.”
Other departments across the state are caught in the budget pinch, but the full brunt of the problem may not hit until next year.
The sputtering economy and soaring cost of fuel will force sheriff’s departments to make fundamental changes in the way they conduct business, said Don Christensen, executive director of the County Sheriffs of Colorado.
“They have hard decisions to make. They are trying to figure out where the hard cuts are,” Christensen said.
Maketa said that in 2003, the El Paso department’s fuel bill was $160,000. By the end of 2004, it was $300,000, and it is now $700,000. By the end of next year, he said, it will be more than a million.
Maketa says he is witnessing is a “real cultural change,” one that makes him sad.
“I anticipate our response times increasing. I also anticipate our arrests dropping because we are not patrolling our streets and that’s when you run into people with traffic violations, people with warrants as well as DUIs. That means our neighborhoods and our streets are just a little less safe.”
Maketa said the loss of 10,000 to 15,000 citizens at a time - deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan - and citizens’ refusal to pass property-tax increases has put El Paso County in a $9 million hole.
“Unless the public stands up and decides that they want a higher level of public safety, then this is the wave of the future,” he said.
In Jefferson County, officials said the cost for fueling patrol cars has more than doubled in 18 months, from $450,000 to more than $1 million today. In April 2007, the average cost per vehicle was $2.03 a gallon, and now it is $3.55.
Jim Shires, spokesman for the Jefferson County sheriff, said no cutbacks in patrols are planned.
“We are not going to jeopardize services to our citizens,” he said.
Christensen said some state departments may employ a concept called “omnipresence” where deputies drive patrol cars home and park them in driveways.
“It’s a deterrent,” said Christensen, a former undersheriff in Douglas County.
By seeing a patrol car in their neighborhood, residents literally have “a policeman in sight” and know where to go to find a cop, Christensen said.
Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said he doesn’t foresee having to cut back patrols in the near future.
Cooke said his department was helped because it bought fuel in “massive bulk quantities before the huge jump in prices.”
In Larimer County, Sheriff James Alderden is getting ready to make fleet purchases and has thought about downsizing the vehicles. But he said that is feasible only for deputies assigned to serving court papers and others who have nonpatrol functions.
Alderden said patrol vehicles responding to emergencies need to be larger so they can both accommodate, and have the power to feed, the police radios, scanners and emergency lights that the cruisers must have.
Another problem, said Christensen, is that even if there is downsizing, it would take “three years to rotate the cars out.”