Denver’s city government, minus safety operations, is shut down today as its workers take yet another unpaid furlough day to help balance the budget.
So news that Denver sheriff’s deputies are continuing to push for costly — and unnecessary — new arrest powers strikes us as highly self-serving.
The deputies’ union made the correct and courageous move earlier this week when it agreed to delay its pay raise to next year in order to help battle the city’s budget shortfall.
We commend them for that, and urge their membership to make the delay official with a vote next week.
But now deputies say they have collected more than 60,000 signatures to require a special election to ask voters to give them the authority to make arrests outside of the jail, which, along with the courts, is their assigned jurisdiction.
The vote alone would add as much as $1 million to city spending at a time when city officials are trying to fill a $160 million budget deficit through 2010.
And should voters approve the new arrest powers, some estimates say it could cost the city an extra $9.5 million each year in higher salaries and training.
It’s unnecessary. The city and county of Denver share boundaries and therefore don’t contain the kind of unincorporated areas traditionally patrolled by a sheriff’s department.
Rather, the deputies play an important role keeping peace in the jail and in transporting suspects between jail cells and trial appearances.
Now the deputies want to expand that role to allow for arrests outside the jail, if in the course of driving home, say, a uniformed deputy sees wrongdoing.
The deputies contend if they tried to make an arrest in such a situation now, they would be penalized. Yet we doubt that such a good-faith action would be punished — or that such a scenario often exists.
One outcome of the new arrest powers, if granted, is that not much would change in Denver, aside from higher training costs for deputies and a new bargaining chip in setting future contracts with the union, thus further expanding the demand on Denver taxpayers.
We urge the deputies to stand down and send the petitions they collected to the round file.
