September 12, 2008
New Jersey charging rural towns for State Police patrols
Two neighboring states, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, are rethinking their long-time practice of providing free state police protection to communities without their own police forces.
New Jersey plans to charge 89 communities nearly $13 million for state police patrols, a service that has been free since 1921, reports Stateline.org, an online publication of the Pew Research Center.
"The state has been paying for (patrols) for many decades, and now they're reneging on that commitment. We feel that that is an unfunded mandate," said William G. Dressel Jr., executive director of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities....
But New Jersey officials, while acknowledging that charging for rural policing is a way for the state to cut costs at a time when it desperately needs to do so, also say it is a matter of fairness. About 96 percent of New Jersey residents pay taxes for both state police and local police forces, so the 4 percent that relies exclusively on the state should pay for the extra patrols they have been receiving for free, said Tom Bell, a spokesman with the state Department of the Treasury.
A bill before the Pennsylvania Legislature would impose a $100-per-resident fee for state police patrols in municipalities with 10,000 or more residents and no police force of their own.
According to the 2007 annual report of the New York State Police:
In many rural areas the New York State Police is today, as it was at
the time of its establishment in 1917, the principal--sometimes only
-- department providing police services to the public. In other areas
it shares jurisdiction and works cooperatively with local agencies.
Some of those once-rural areas in New York have since blossomed into thriving suburban communities yet they continue to rely heavily on the State Police protection.
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