LETTER: Despite costs, hiring four new Corvallis officers is important

Corvallis Gazette-Times LETTERS, February 10, 2009 by John H. Detweiler

How valuable are three minutes? Someone is trying to break into your house and you have just called the cops. If the cops can get to your house three minutes faster, it might save your life.

The Corvallis Budget Commission has $600,000 available to spend in the next fiscal year. Choices are going to have to be made because there is insufficient money for everything. One of the choices is to hire four patrol officers.

Hiring these officers absorbs almost one-half of the funds available. However, a very important — if not the most important — function of government is to protect its citizens; a function surely more important than hiring an administrative specialist for the senior center or subsidizing the aquatic center.

The Corvallis Police Department funded a study that collected the data required to analyze the time a citizen waits for service. However, the contractor did not actually compute the waiting time as a function of the number of patrol officers. Therefore, I did. I found that with 29 officers — the current staffing — the mean time a citizen waits for service is 6.6 minutes. If we hire four more officers, the mean time a citizen waits for service of 3.5 minutes — a reduction of 3.1 minutes.

My analysis can be found at www.peak.org/~detweij.

Readers who have had to call, or think they may have to call, the cops need to contact their city councilors and ask them to fund the four officers.

John H. Detweiler, Corvallis