The True Costs of Police Services

The figures are in on the recent controversy over the cost of police services in Lake Forest. But before we reveal the results, let’s recap –

A few months ago, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) who provides police services to Lake Forest announced an increase of nearly $900,000 per year in their contract, boosting our annual costs to more than $15,000,000. In seeking to get my colleagues to take a look at alternatives to the sole bidder, OCSD, the cost of Police services arose, particularly in comparing Lake Forest with Irvine. A representative from OCSD appeared at the Council meeting and told us that the costs per capita for Lake Forest were $170 while at Irvine it was $325. Councilman Dwight Robinson was extremely impressed with her work and her “giant binder with all the data”. He said “her numbers were spot on.” Then he used those figures to attack Councilman Nick and at one point called me an “imbecile” and an “idiot” among other engaging superlatives.

In my case, I had done the simple math – I took the number of people and the budgeted costs. My figures showed that Lake Forest’s costs were $191 per person while Irvine’s were $275.

Now that’s a lot of difference between what OCAD was claiming and what I figured!

OCSD is claiming that the cost of police services in Irvine is nearly twice as expensive as Lake Forest. I concluded that while Irvine is more expensive, it was only 43% higher. So OCSD claims the gap is more than twice as large as I estimated. Someone was badly mistaken.

So that was the controversy –

Councilman Robinson and OCSD insisted that the costs were $170 vs. $325 while I maintained that they were $191 vs $275.

Because of the controversy, I asked the City Manager to look into the issue and give us a better idea. The fact is that my method, while simple and transparent, was open to some errors, and unless you go diving into the data, the “true” figures may be obscured. Having been a research scientist and a management consultant I was aware of these dangers, but equally aware that in research such as this, the errors tend to cancel each other out, so the simple way is often a very good “best guess” that avoids some time consuming math.

But when OCSD’s figures were so radically different from my own, and when the issue was so important, I thought it prudent to ask the City Manager to check.

According to a recent report from the City Manager, and after doing what looked like a very good job of due diligence, the figures he came up with are $189 for Lake Forest and $298 for Irvine. Without a “forensic audit” I readily accept his figures as the best guestimate.

The City Manager’s figures are clearly closer to mine than to Robinson’s, whose figures are way off the mark. Robinson and the OCSD badly under-estimated the costs to Lake Forest and badly over-estimated the costs to Irvine. The City Manager and I agree almost to the dollar on Lake Forest’s costs, but I under-estimated the costs for Irvine by 8%, largely because some of the costs of Irvine’s police services are in other sections of their budget, which Lake Forest staff discovered after doing more work.

The point in all of this is not that I am more correct than my colleague, Councilman Robinson, but rather –

What the heck is going on when a representative from OCSD, accompanied by a “giant binder with all the data”shows up at our City Council meeting and authoritatively gives out blatantly false information.

OCSD contracts with our City and gets nearly 40% of our entire operating budget. This year they will get nearly $15,000,000 from us. Don’t we deserve accurate information, especially about the costs of the service?

And if they can’t do the simple math on costs per capita, where else are they making errors? We’re talking about nearly $15,000,000 per year going to OCSD, all of it based on the assumption that they can do math. But the first time we test their math, it comes up short. Worse than that, their errors are directional. Not merely are they wrong, but their errors are in such a direction as to prove the point that they are much much cheaper than Irvine. Errors alone are disturbing. Directional errors are very disturbing.

COMMENTS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 3 pm to 5 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be on December 12 at 2 pm at the El Toro Public Library.

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