I recently came across the craziest of cray stories - crazy even by Texas standards.
First off, there's the name. Coffee City.
City?
Coffee City's population is 250-ish.
That doesn't even make it a town or a village. We're talking hamlet.
But Coffee City it is, which came into being after Lake Palestine was manmade in the early 1960's. Because the "city" was located in a wet county bordering on a couple of dry counties, some enterprising folks opened liquor stores there.
That business dried up when one of those dry counties went wet, siphoning off a good swath of their customer base.
In searching for a new source of funding, Coffee City did what so many good-ol'-boy-towns do. It turned itself into a speed trap, and last year the "city" took in $1M in court fees from its speed ticket business - not bad, considering their itsy-bitsy population. Roughly $4K per capita Not bad at all, at all.
But in terms of efficiency, they were using an awful lot of police officers to staff their speed trap. Quite wildly, this "city" of 250 had 50 police officers. That's one cop for every 5 residents.
This makes no sense whatsoever. None.
Maybe if the "city" were raking in, say, $10M from their speed traps. Even $5M would at least cover the costs of having all those police officers. But a measly $1M, while a reasonably robust revenue take for a "city" with only 250 residents, is a piddly $20K per cop.
Fifty cops for a town of 250???? Boston, in contrast, has a bit over 2,000 cops for a population a bit over 650K, a ratio of 1 police officer per 325 citizens. If we had the Coffee City ratio, we'd have police force of 130,000!!!! NYC, which has a police force of 36,000 to keep its 8.5M residents safe and sound would have a police force of 1.7M!!!!!
Anyway, Coffee City no longer has a police force of 50.
Thanks to an investigative report by a Houston TV station, the "city" no longer has a police force at all. For the time being, they'll be counting on the county sheriff's office to keep the "city" safe and, presumably, collect the speed trap loot.
It wasn't just the excessive number of cops in the City that KHOU focused on. They also turned their lens onto who exactly was manning the ranks:
The ranks of the Coffee City police have ballooned with bad-apple cops, who had reportedly received demotions and even dishonorable discharges from other jurisdictions for a litany of egregious behavior, including aggravated assault and endangering a child. (Source: Rolling Stone)
Among the other goodies that KHOU found:
Remarkably, the KHOU investigation found that several officers on the Coffee City force do not even work in Coffee City. Instead, they work in a division in Houston, 200 miles to the south, tracking down big-city residents with outstanding traffic fines or for a failure to appear in Coffee City court.
Within a few days of the KHOU expose, the city powers sprung into action, firing Chief of Police JohnJay Portillo and laying off the entire police force.
Mayor Jeff Blackstone said that:
...the city decided to disband the police department rather than conduct individual investigations into every officer. Any officer who wants to stay with the department must reapply once the city hires a new police chief, CBS reported.
"We're going to have a new police department that everybody in the community can trust," Blackstone told the outlet.
..."We're going to have a new police department that everybody in the community can trust," Blackstone told [KHOU]. (Source: Insider)
All well and good, but where was the "city" when the august police chief was in hiring mode, quadrupling the police force in a scant two years time? No one noticed that a good portion of the town budget was paying for 50 police officers? I don't care how poorly the Coffee City police officers were paid, it had to be more than the $20K per cop that all the speed trapping placed in the "city" coffers.
Fifty police officers for a "city" with a population of 250? This is just crazy-ville.
Good that Coffee City has come to its senses.
But, jeez...
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