Michele McNeil, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article entitled Fewer state troopers are patrolling the road.
Money is so tight at the Indiana State Police that the superintendent is making his headquarters staff hit the road, patrolling state highways and interstates.
Indiana’s top law enforcement agency, which does everything from cruising hundreds of miles of interstates to busting methamphetamine labs, is down 200 troopers from the authorized strength of 1,334. By the end of this year, the number of vacancies could climb to 300.
To me, Hurricane Katrina puts this sort of thing in a new perspective. I know around the blogosphere and elsewhere, it has been “All Katrina, all the time.” But, to a large extent, that is appropriate. Certainly, after 9/11, we were constantly told “9/11 changed everything.” The scope of destruction from Hurricane Katrina is larger than 9/11, even if our sense of violation may not be.
The disaster in the South, particularly New Orleans, shows us that government is necessary, and it must be funded. On this page, I am not inclined to get into who is responsible for the inadequate preparation and how much it would have helped. But the “sink or swim,” every man for himself view that government is an unnecessary evil; that taxes are just so much money flushed down the toilet, has to be reconsidered.
We’re asking for trouble, albeit not on a Katrina sized scale, when we cut our police forces, cut our health departments, cut our public transportation, and fail to maintain our infrastructure.
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