Editor’s note: Parts of this editorial have been removed because they inaccurately attributed the number of fire trucks available to the city of East Lansing.
Students and the fire department have a love-hate relationship: Students love it when the fire department arrives but hate that something went so wrong they had to call the fire department. Students and police traditionally have a contentious relationship because the police bust parties, and students like parties.
With that said, even students have to appreciate the job both of these services do in keeping East Lansing a safe environment, despite the latest round of budget cuts.
With funding cuts to the administrative, detective, police support and records, parking and code enforcement and community policing divisions, the East Lansing Police Department has tightened its belt like everyone else in Michigan. The number of officers in the ELPD even has gone down slightly over the last decade (from 67 officers to 61 officers).
But they deserve acknowledgement for placing a priority on dispatch and patrol divisions.
The budgets of these divisions were not reduced, so give credit to the department for identifying the areas best suited to serve the community and keeping them intact.
Think about the dynamics of what a typical college town needs in terms of police services. It needs dispatchers to receive news of emergencies when they occur, officers to respond to those dispatches and patrols to discourage the malicious emergencies from happening.
East Lansing doesn’t have a high homicide rate or high rate of violent crimes (only nine murders from 2000-09 according to city data), so detectives are less necessary here than in other, more metropolitan cities. And although parking and code violations are a nice source of revenue for a department, the position of a car isn’t as important as an emergency call.
However, in the fire department, students and residents of East Lansing could feel the impact of budget cuts.
Although it’s difficult to predict the future, the city has to look at what it can do to be more prepared. A large-scale emergency might never happen in East Lansing, but should it happen, the city has to be able to respond. Whether that means applying for federal grants or cutting from other departments within the city, emergency response is too important to keeping a city safe.
It’s difficult to say which is worth more to the city, police officers, another ambulance or fire truck, but that might be the position the city finds itself in.
Overall, the city police and fire departments appear to be doing what they have to do to keep East Lansing a safe and healthy place to live, despite having less means to do so. And there’s nothing more the city can ask of them.
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