Examining City Budgets and the Ripple Effect of Officer Shortages

And, removing law enforcement from schools. Right? Because we're, you know, mostly focused on the school security space. So what are your thoughts on that? You know, when I first started working with law enforcement, you know, I thought that they had the financial resources or, you know, they could go and get the money that they needed. And now you know, being intimately involved in that purchasing process and and getting into the financials and looking at, you know, cities budgets and things like that. These numbers for police and fire are huge numbers. Mhmm. Right? And sometimes people just focus on the number and not what makes that number up. When you get into, some of these law enforcement agencies across the country that we've dealt with. Right? Where does that money go? A lot of these departments are running their entire operation on single digit percentages. Mhmm. For the entire organization. And that includes technology, buildings, vehicles, training, weapons, everything is in those single digit numbers, and the remaining ninety plus percent of that budget goes to payroll. Right? And so we have less officers today on the street than we used to have. And the the funding just set back the entire law enforcement world, across the country. Right? Because as the states and cities went to go defund some of the funding from this the federal level also slowed down some of those grants And so where we already had constrained law enforcement budgets and resources, they were constrained even more. And so then you add in things like civil unrest or protests. COVID, all of these things where now we need more officers, and they have less And they don't have the budget to go in there, even if they were able to go through and train and find candidates and get them ready to put them out on the street, they don't have the money to pay the officers. Well, and the rate of retention, they can't keep up. Right? They're constantly trying to backfill. Well, And that narrative's gotta change. So, you know, we started just talked a little bit about the George Floyd officers. Right? It and that was a situation where absolutely those officers to overstep the lines. Right? But there's so many other times where an incident happens and immediately the media runs with it and they're found guilty in the media before the facts are even out before anybody's even seen a video seen any of the body cam footage, knows the situation, all of the things that happened that goes over it instantly, you know, oh, this is police brutality, and it's it's it's no longer innocent and proven guilty -- For police officers. -- for police officers. Right? So why would you wanna be a police officer? It's directly impacting that. Right? And Some of these people, even when they were found innocent, had to move over death threats and their family, you know, being threatened by physical violence, they've had to change their names. They've had to move. And they were found innocent. And there there is no support for them. And and there is no these more and more people have, less, respect for them than ever before. And so as we, you know, you look at that, These impact those recruiting numbers. Right? Like how they come back and do that.