As a money-saving measure, Jacksonville Sheriff's Officers may be able to take their cruisers home with them for a weekly fee.
Right now police in Miami-Dade county pay $50 every 2 weeks to take their cop cars home with them, but that's only for officers who take their cars out of the county. Sheriff John Rutherford is considering a proposal that would do the same thing in Duval for officers who drive outside the county. It would charge $25-$30 per week, which could save taxpayers $2 million dollars a year.
Police officers would see the fee come out of their paychecks. They'd be forking over about $1,300 a year each.
"When you hear people talk about taking away their cars, you have to understand there's a reason why we have it. It's a force multiplier. It makes it seem there's more police officers than there really are when they're out there driving around on their off time," says FOP president Nelson Cuba.
Cuba says if all officers had to pay a fee for driving their cruisers home, some would decide not to. The advantage to taking the cruiser home is that officers will sometimes respond to a call while they're off duty and won't clock in for overtime. Cuba says if you start charging them, they might start clocking in. If they start doing that, he says, it would end up costing the city more money to pay the officers than charging them for the cruisers would bring in annually.
"If you just look at the 153,000 calls so far this year these guys have responded to and you just say they spend an average of 15 minutes [on each call], you break that down and that's probably about 30,000 to 35,000 man hours. And at about 25 dollars a pop? Yeah, it's going to end up costing the city more."
Right now about 1600 JSO officers are taking cruisers home.
