Sheriff Announces New Budget Proposal

Yesterday, Riverside County Sheriff-Coroner Bob Doyle presented the Board of Supervisors with his budget proposal.

You can review the entire proposal online here...
http://www.riversidesheriff.org/budget/index.html

To summarize the key points made by Sheriff Doyle...

1. The new Perris Sheriff Substation is expected to open this August.



2. Requesting slightly over $2 million to hire an additional 34 deputies to patrol the unincorporated areas. This is to maintain a current policy of having an average of 1.2 officers for every 1,000 residents.



3. Requesting $2 million to assign tazer guns to every deputy.



4. Open up a new "Cold Case Unit" staffed by three investigators to address some 2,400 unsolved murder cases dating as far back as 1941.



5. Requesting over $7.2 million to hire another 179 positions in the Corrections division



6. Requesting $3.5 million to buy a replacement helicopter for an older helicopter they have now, which will become unserviceable in two years. It takes about a year-and-a-half for a new one to come in.



7. Requesting $335,018 to hire three new positions into the County Gang Task Force.

There's several more items, but I think the ones above are the bigger items, and the ones that particularly impact Menifee Valley the most.

In item #2 above, the policy of 1.2 officers for every 1,000 residents in the unincorporated areas is a new policy that the Board of Supervisors put into effect last year, when the old ratio was 0.96 officers. It required the Sheriff to hire additional 241 deputies, and since that time, the Sheriff reports that crime has dropped by 3%. This year's request for another 34 deputies allows the Sheriff to maintain the 1.2 ratio.