Many of us have asked, “I heard ASUPD has an 11 million dollar budget! Where does all that money go?”.
We know nearly all of the excess funds in the department have NOT gone toward improving morale in the department by increasing the salary for line level officers or civilian employees. Many of the vehicles and equipment at the auxiliary campuses are old and in desperate need of repair…the money definitely isn’t going there. What about to pay for more training for officers/civilians? Pay for secured parking? No and no.
Where does all that money go, then?
It pays for insignificant garbage. Instead of trimming the fat and paying its employees a more competitive wage, ASUPD has decided to give its officers a 10-cent pay raise and spend the rest of the department funds on nonsense.
This is only a sneak preview of what we were able to uncover….the rest will be in a much larger post.
That’s nearly a HALF MILLION DOLLARS for security at the BioDesign building, 2 “spy cameras” for Det. Dunwoody (costing 295 and 379, respectively)…and a pair of black elbow pads for the Chief, at a whopping $21.81. No knee pads?
Just shy of a cool half million for Biodesign monthly security?!? Wtf?!? What the hell is the chief of police doing with elbow pads? Is that to hit the deck in case an employee goes nuts from his crap management style?
Dumbwoody and secret spy cameras. Now are those to catch high rise burglars, thieving janitor contract employees, or to spy on our own employees? What other nonsense was uncovered?
The chief and his clown posse find all sorts of things to blow department money on besides employees outside the circle of friends. Command has no problem making sure they are at or above pay when compared to their munincipal counterparts.
Officers are still below standard in salary comparisons, when was the last time any of the civilians received a significant raise to bring them up to other department standards?
I bet there are plenty more rediculous things that add up to no good excuse not to give your lowest poverty line employees raises. Maybe they might consider sticking around longer than overnight. Our turnover rate exceeds…McDonald’s.
A half million for Biodesign…what? How much does a security guard for Securitas make? Not much, so that figure must include surplus predator drones from Pentagon surplus right?
Is Dunwoody using any of the equipment he orders? He doesn’t do shit for patrol, the dog has yet to be useful on a call, so other than baseball cards and publicity why do we have it? U of A has 6 multi-trained dogs, ones that find drugs, for building/subject searches, they work.
After more exposures like this, more egg on the face from mismanagement, the chief is going to need the knee pads to compliment the elbow pad purchase to crawl over to the Fulton center and beg for a contract renewal.
Sorry I made you look like an ass again Mike. What a great job I’m doing Mike, people are leaving faster than I can hire them, so I can make more than any chief in Arizona to be the most ineffective and unqualified of the bunch.
The half million for a single bio-design building monthly expense rate makes me wonder what the itemized expenses are. We all know the security guards are making peanuts, so what exactly costs so much? your guess is as good as mine.
I know there’s so much more inflammatory stuff in the budget. Look for the 100’s of 1000’s that can’t be accounted for dropped in vague categories that seem to go nowhere. Some people might be going to jail before this is over. The man at the top is morally bankrupt and his tag alongs are not far behind. Hopefully the little games they are playing with officer’s careers gets them more of a spotlight for their lacking ethics.
They find all sorts of shit to waste money on, everything but the employees who need it the most. I want to see what they were wasting money on the whole time nobody on the bottom of the department was getting a raise.
Amen to that. People have been saying this for years because it’s true and impossible not to notice.
It’s a good thing we have those flat screens all on the third floor for the so called emergency preparedness room or the useless license plate readers with all the stolen vehicles we found with them. The list goes on and on. How many cost of living increases could have been made with all the waste? Plenty.
Kneepads for chief make much more sense than elbow pads. All that pandering and excuse making create an occupational hazard. If Dunwoody got off his ass and did what the rest of us call patrol he would have less time to surfing the internet looking for things to buy. How many active police calls have him and his dog been on in the last few years? It can’t even smell drugs, what good is it on hangover school party campus?
If it could alert on drugs maybe AZDPS wouldn’t have been making the X factory bust at Vista Del Sol making us look like crap? Maybe we could have made it? Having said that the equipment could be used for a legitimate purpose, hopefully it’s not to spy on employees, but would any of us put it past our leadership?
I bet an audit would find all the tell tale signs of ___________. Incredibly vague statements where money is going out and little to no explanation of where it’s going and being used for. Publish more if you got it! Publish the whole damn thing!
YES! I want to see it all.
I wouldn’t doubt if we will see some of them getting hauled off in handcuffs or at least fired for the unethical decisions they make and abusing their positions.
Holy Toledo! Recurring monthly security for the Biodesign Institute facility: $488,943.00!?
Nice lucrative contract for Securitas; raw deal for the taxpayers.
Something smells foul with this taxpayer-funded contract; someone needs to delve into this and find out why the outrageously high-dollar amount being paid to Securitas.
Dr. Morgan R. Olsen, what’s up with this? You’re the treasurer and chief financial officer.
For about 500 grand a month, we could give patrol the raises they deserve AND hire about 75 more officers at a competitive rate. Does Biodesign have 250 or so Securitas employees working there full time? Why is ASUPD paying for private security, shouldn’t that come out of Biodesign’s budget? I’m pretty sure Biodesign rakes in around 50 million per year in grants; why is this coming out of the PD budget? What’s next, will PD be paying for the student employee’s Downtown, or perhaps pick up the utilities bill at Coor Hall?
Something isn’t adding up here. This whole place needs an independent audit/ investigation.
Whatever happened to a budget showing a cumulative breakdown? Random PO’s here and there show so little. This should be just like bank account, debits and credits which show exactly when and where every cent is spent.
That’s what private citizens have with relatively small amounts of their money. When it comes to 11 million of their money they get no breakdown, just random receipts. Where is the accountability? Is anyone auditing this? The opportunity for embezzlement is written all over this. What do the petty cash accounts how?
You really need a forensic accountant that would be willing to search through the whole budget. Anyone who has seen parts of it has mentioned there are a number of generic titles for accounts with large sums of money being moved around without accounting where it went.
This was even mentioned during the 2010/2011 accreditation meetings. (For the non-insiders this is an independent review of certain aspects of the department and this was brought up by the reviewers and dropped thereafter. I believe Sgt. J Thompson worked with them on this.) The chief guards the budget from curious employees knowing they would be furious about what they would find and where, to whom, their no raises are being allocated.
Every red cent should be accounted for, but you’re talking about people who think they are above the law.
When the chief is the only one controlling the budget, his own command not being able to see it, what’s the reason for that I wonder?
Why is the struggling police department paying for the mega funded Bio Design private contract security that we have no communication with or control over?
When Chief decides to spend a half million with a company was there a bidding process? If there was a bidding process how often does this take place?
Is there a line item listing of expenditures or just large blanket numbers with vague descriptions?
Publish everything. Let every employee and the public see what Chief Pickens is spending the 11 million on. According to their unofficial spokesman on here they simply can’t pay officers as much money as city agencies and that’s why people run for the hills once their year probation is up. Sound right to you? No, didn’t think so.
The Security at Bio design are payed 10.00 and are being cut dramatically in July. Securitas contracts do not cost half a mill… Normally its 20 dollars per man hour.