It is budget time again and the city is facing some unprecedented problems, namely the collapse in property value due to out migration and foreclosures, and no areas left to annex. City government/leaders are not equipped to handle these and related issues, whether it be political/economic polarization or ability to break free from intellectual existing frameworks (i.e. the Creative Class hasn't and will not save us). I don't feel like getting into ideological arguments now though. Since it is budget season, lets just stick to what is the driving forces of expenditures, besides lots of political appointees and a top heavy government. Public safety consumes 62% of the operating budget. The police department's budget is projected to be $234 million and the fire department's $155 million. One driver of the increase in public safety budgets is the increased size of the city. About everybody in Memphis knows this now, but here is a chart to show the increase.
There has been well over a 40% increase in the area of the city. This relates to the over 40% drop in population density.
While the area and density have been changing, there has also been a couple other changes. Memphis became a black majority city and the population living in poverty has increased dramatically.
It seems the racial change and increased number of poor people sparked a reaction for a larger and larger police force. Crime was bad in the eighties and nineties, but the city kept a relatively proportional police force compared to its area and density. In 1970, the city had 865 commissioned police officers to patrol 178 square miles. Using that proportion, the city today is 315 square miles and would require about 1,531 officers. We have 949 more officers than that. The city stayed close to its traditional police to area ratio until the late nineties and it exploded in the past twelve years. No wonder the city has to recruit cops from outside the city, it is hard to find the extra 900 people to be cops. (Sorry for some missing years, it isn't that easy to find data like this.)
So we have created an army of cops to occupy the city and spent millions on surveillance cameras and Blue Crush, has anyone stopped to ask if this has made the city safer?
It doesn't seem like the militarization and vast resources dedicated to the MPD has made the city much safer. Yet, MPD's budget is like the defense department's, untouchable, which you will see shortly.
The Memphis Fire Department is big and traces its largeness back to Boss Crump days. You can see the density of fire stations in the old urban core of the city compared to the eastern areas outside the 240 loop.
Fire Stations
Amazingly, in 1974, the MFD's budget was larger than the MPD's. Haow things changed. Adjusted for inflation to 2010 dollars, the MFD's budget was $94.6 million compared to MPD's $99.6 million. Even into the early nineties there was budget parity and flat growth. The late nineties saw an explosion, especially for MPD. It now dwarfs the fire department.
Budgets
Budgets are sometimes called moral documents because they reflect what the society values. For over a decade we have been pouring money into the MPD beyond reasonable growth rates. During this same time, the City has done and continues to do little with its own money to strengthen neighborhoods or address increasing poverty. Most all of the resources to do those things come from the Federal government. Even today, the Mayor talks about his great plan to end homelessness yet not one penny of City money goes to it. We live in a city with 48,000 empty houses and still have a huge problem of affordable housing. Poverty is and has been the most pressing issue in this city for 100 years. We used to just isolate the poor. We can't do that anymore. What has changed is that we now criminalize it and use counterinsurgency tactics to keep the shit at shoe level. Civilizations that have collapsed generally couldn't recognize the reasons for decline and misallocate dwindling resources, only to speed the collapse. We have proven to be no different.
