Looks like they haven’t updated their site since January of 2008 but for that month the IFPD handled 5441 incidents. Now I did notice that nearly 500 of those were messages to the officer. And I’m sure a few others here and there weren’t actual calls. But you do easily have 4000+ calls for service and traffic stops that month. And January is a slow time of year relative to the summer when its busy. Traffic stops also pick up in the summer as the bad roads in the winter tend to keep people’s speed down. And this is just the IFPD by the way, you can see the BCSO’s stats elsewhere at the same address.

As mentioned at any given time there are about 1,000,000 cops nationwide. And that number is constantly in flux as some retire, others resign, others get fired, and replacements come in. Idaho Falls PD handles on average over 100 calls for service a day and probably makes twice that many traffic stops. Thats 300+ contacts a day in just the IFPD alone. Nationwide there are going to be tens of millions of calls / traffic stops every day. No one, not even cops, deny there will be bad events as cops are just human with human faults and it would be utterly naive to think that all 1,000,000 were good all the time. As I said earlier in the thread though there are actually very few bad incidents considering the tens of millions of calls per day. That means well over 99.99% of the time the cops are doing a good job.

One other thing – some of your stories mentioned lawsuits settled and thats really meaningless. Often its cheaper for governments, just like it is for businesses, to buy off (i.e. settle with) a plaintiff than pay years of attorneys fees to fight off the frivolous claim. Obviously some were valid but just as many were by sue happy people.

City officers who live in town pay $25.00 a month for their take home cars. Officers who live out of town pay more based on how many miles away they are. Some pay as much as $80.00 a month. As was mentioned, take home cars are the standard for the majority of departments nowadays as its actually cheaper for the departments to have take home cars for the officers as the cars last four to five times longer than they do being driven 24/7. And officers are accountable now for the damage where its hard to pin damage to an officer when its a fleet car being shared by multiple officers. So again as has been mentioned, the IFPD is not gaining some extrordinary benefit over other departments, they are merely getting a similar benefit.

http://www.twitter.com/injusticenews

for a couple of weeks now and let me tell you it is disturbing how many criminals there are with a badge and the power of the state behind them. What’s being done about this?