Originally Posted by
rastuscat
I wonder how long it would take for the NZTA to withdraw the funding if every FTE (Full Time Equivalent employee) they paid for was used to chase up historic burglaries?
See, here's how it works. The body responsible for road safety in NZ is the NZTA. They work with the Ministry of Transport to hatch planes to reduce the road crashes.
They do education, engineering and enforcement, contracting other bodies and agencies to actually deliver the stuff they can't do. For example, they employ a company to manufacture number plates.
In terms of enforcement, they contract the Police to deliver certain categories of enforcement that they want done, in order to meet their goals e.g. they want 75000 hours of restraint enforcement done, so they pay the Police to go and do it.
Right. Now, a few years back, 21% of the total Police funding came from the LAND TRANSPORT FUND. That's a bucket of cash that the gubbermint wants to spend on road safety. It comes from each annual budget. Money arrives into the Land Transport Fund from all sorts of places, including petrol taxes, fines, project funds etc etc etc. NZTA then distributes that according to their strategy.
So the Police get about 21% (4 year old figure, don't know what it is now) of their funding specifically to road policing enforcement. The Police management then have to allocate resources to do that work. Like, no delivert oif enforcement, no 21%.
It appears that road policing gets lots of funding, but it's actually, in my experience, less than 21% of the total Police spend. The Armed Offenders Squad costs quite a few dollars each year, but it's low profile, so people don't realise it's happening. Another example of unseen spending is the watchhouse, the cells at each nick. Staffing that is expensive, but folk don't see it happening unless they get banged up. In this way, the cops people see doing road policing appear to be the only ones actually doing much, as that's how it appears to the outsider.
In reality, I suspect that less than 21% of our resources are spent on road policing. That means that road policing is part funding other sections of the police. For example, if all the road policing staff were sent to investigate the things that the public wants done, how long to yo suppose it would be before NZTA pulled the 21% of the funding? We'd be committing fraud, claiming our 21% and doing no road enforcement.
The answer in regard to getting the real police work done is to increase the total budget, maintaining the road policing spend, but increasing the general policing spend.
Now, in case you hadn't noticed, the gubbermint has been effectively reducing the depts budget by not increasing it. We keep getting told to work smarter with what we've got, as we won't be getting more. At times like these, it's easy to look at road policing and say that we are doing too much of it. The fact is that we are paid to do it, and if we don't the funding will dry up. It certainly won't benefit other police outputs if road policing shrinks.
Still, never let facts stand in the way of a good old KB whinge.
Opinions are like arseholes: Everybody has got one, but that doesn't mean you got to air it in public all the time....
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