The facts on overstaffing

To anyone who believes that, here are the facts:

• The San Carlos Police Department is so thinly staffed that it must frequently call for outside assistance from neighboring police agencies. This happens regularly when we have weekend bar brawls as well as shootings and armed robberies. Serious crimes in this city, by the way, increased 25 percent in 2009, according to a recent report to the City Council from Police Chief Greg Rothaus.

• Successive cutbacks in the number of sworn officers, combined with unfilled vacancies, illnesses and court appearances, mean that 12-hour shifts and compulsory overtime are frequently the norm. Tired officers are too often faced with stopping suspicious vehicles late at night without the availability of a second officer as backup, and when is that going to lead to disaster?

• If you compare San Carlos Police Department with its counterparts in four other comparably-sized cities — Burlingame, Belmont, Foster City and Los Gatos — San Carlos has the lowest number of officers per capita: 1.1 per thousand residents. In Burlingame and Foster City, it’s 1.4 officers per thousand.

• In the Belmont-San Carlos Fire Department, the combined staffing of the city’s only two fire stations is six for each shift. There can be situations, as in a recent fatal residential fire, when this is not enough, especially if people need to be rescued. Thus, precious minutes are wasted waiting for reinforcements to come from Belmont or Redwood City.

• Belmont-San Carlos Fire Department Chief Doug Fry confirms that Station No. 13 on Laurel Street downtown has no firefighting capability this year, and thus there is no first-response protection to the entire north and central part of the city from this station — a truly worrisome state of affairs. That’s because the station has only one large ladder truck that carries no water, no hose and no pumps. Although it was never designed to be a first-response vehicle — but to work in tandem with a pump engine — in fact the ladder truck is all that’s available for this section of town. The truck is rotated each year between Belmont and San Carlos, and this year it’s San Carlos’ turn to man the vehicle.

• Our present reduced staffing of three firefighters per vehicle is not enough for any first-response team to enter a burning building, even if the structure could be saved in the initial minutes of the blaze. That’s because state safety regulations require the presence of four firefighters — two to go in and two to remain outside as backup. So the first company to arrive has to wait for a second company and, in that time, even if it’s just 30 seconds or a minute, it may be too late to save a building.

Make no mistake about it, we are playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette with our public safety agencies by thinking that we can continue to chop with impunity.

Ken Castle is the organizer of White Oaks Neighborhood Watch in San Carlos.