Police union response to Mayor's press release

It's copied here:

SAN BERNARDINO, CALIF. - The San Bernardino Police Officers Association's president, Richard Lawhead, made the following statement, on behalf of the Association's members, in response to Mayor Pat Morris' press release from earlier today:

"It is unfortunate that Mayor Pat Morris and Chief Michael Billdt continue to misrepresent the position of the Association when it comes to the city's current fiscal problems and the drastic steps the city has proposed to balance the budget by sacrificing public safety. What the Mayor and his team call 'minimal impacts' to the department are in reality eliminating 49 officers, forcing an additional 22 officer to take a demotion or face termination, and a mandatory 10 percent cut in our salaries. These proposed budget 'solutions' will risk the gains we have made in reducing crime in our city.

While Mayor Morris and Chief Billdt try to portray this issue as one of the city versus the Association's leadership, what they fail to understand is that more than 200 members of the Association uniformly expressed that they are tired of the broken promises by our city's elected officials.

The Association's members do not consider reducing our ranks and destroying the morale of our department a 'minimal impact.' These cuts will not only have a major impact on the people that protect our city, but on our residents as well. These are our concerns, and our focus has been on protecting these jobs and continuing to provide top-notch service to our community.

Put simply, the Mayor and Chief are trying to fix our city's budget, which they helped create with their mismanagement, by balancing the budget on the backs of our city's cops. We have provided them with concrete steps to reduce costs and raise revenues, without terminating officers or impacting our public safety capabilities, but they refuse to listen to our suggestions or work with us to find solutions that would benefit our community and the people that we work everyday to protect.

We have always been willing to sit down and have honest, open discussions about how we can help with the city's financial situation. Unfortunately, we never get straight answers and have little faith that what we are being told is accurate. The city's current proposed 'solution' is bad for the police department, bad for the city, and ultimately bad for the residents and business owners of San Bernardino."