When the audit makes you look bad, blame the audit

So sayeth Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke:

Freeway accidents and wait times for help from Milwaukee County sheriff's deputies have risen significantly in recent years, while tickets for speeding and other violations are way down, a new county audit shows. [. . .]

Response times to all types of calls for service on the freeway went up less than a half-minute, from 10.5 minutes to 10.9 minutes. But wait times for injury-accident calls rose from 5 minutes to 7 minutes, or 40%, and almost doubled for property-damage calls, from 7 minutes to 13 minutes, auditors found.

Deputies in 2004 wrote about half the number of speeding tickets issued in 2001, a drop of more than 13,000 citations. [. . .]

The audit cited a variety of factors for the trends, including a 29% increase in calls for service; a 5% increase in freeway traffic; and a shift in priorities under Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. Clarke reassigned 11% of the department's freeway-patrol deputies to jail duty in 2002. He also has asked deputies on the patrol to handle other duties, such as making warrant arrests and conveying prisoners. [. . .]

Clarke criticized the audit methodology as "not first-rate" and said it was overly focused on statistical outcomes.

He initially disputed the uptick in accidents, which auditors based on state Department of Transportation figures. He later said if the trend was reported correctly, the increase was because the department had been too focused on speeding tickets as its primary safety tool.

If you were focused on writing tickets, sir, why was your ticket production down, hm? And if you were re-assigning deputies to jail duty, why was the county found in contempt of court for 16,662 violations of all sorts of things at the jail, most of which were on your watch? Shouldn't someone over there have taken care of that? If, as you say elsewhere in the article, "It's kind of a no-win situation for me, but I had to get this budget under control," why is your own expense account so out of control, with all of your personal bodyguards and more?

There are so many reasons not to vote for Clarke when he's up again in November. Vince Bobot (no website yet that I can find) is a decent, law-and-order kind of guy. I wasn't so hot on Bobot for mayor, but he would have to do a better job as sheriff than Clarke.