Mtown, thanks for that lesson on average. I think you must be talking about my questioning the 4 to 5 minute average response time of the police department. What I meant was that if an officer’s response time on one call is 1.5 hours (90 minutes) and his next ten calls all have a response time of three minutes (unheard of in Middletown-but this is just an example). That is 90 minutes for the first call, plus 30 minutes for the next ten call. 90 + 30 = 120 minutes for 11 response times. 120 minutes divided by 11 calls equals 10.90909 minutes (about 11 minutes) for the average response time. Ten response times at three minutes is unheard of in Middletown, but 90 minutes is closer to the average response time.

I think that our city building has its own math system that we commoners can not understand. Maybe they put some of those minutes in another fund so we can’t find them. Or maybe they have the people that estimate the crowds a our events estimate average response time.

This is not the fault of the patrol officers, this is because that out of about 80 officers, we only have seven patrol officers on the street at a time. I’m sure that all of you non-government citizens have read that when we hire a patrol officer another patrol officer moves up to sergeant, sergeant moves up….. So when we add a patrol officer it cost us at a much higher rate and we get another supervisor sitting around the coffee pot in the city building. This is also the reason the average policeman in Middletown cost us more than the average policeman in New York City. If we let the union keep having its way, in a few more years we will have 20 supervisors each costing us one million dollars each. I can hear them saying, “if you people want patrol officers on the street, you have to be willing to pay for them. Middletown will have high crime areas if you aren’t willing to pay for police with another safety levy.”

Did you notice at the last council meeting that about 80 policemen in Middletown cost us over $12 million. That is an average cost of about $150,000 each. Also the dog catcher cost us about $84,000 if I remember correctly. Mike, Vet, Paul, please correct this figure if my memory is failing me.