Storm-Wracked Parish Considers Hired Guns

[LiviaOlivia]

Storm-Wracked Parish Considers Hired Guns
Contractors in Louisiana Would Make Arrests, Carry Weapons

By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006

ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. -- Maj. Pete Tufaro scanned the fenced lot packed with hundreds of stark white trailers soon to be inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Shaking his head, he predicted the cramped quarters would ignite fights, hide criminals and become an incubator for crime, posing another test for his cash-strapped sheriff's department, which furloughed 206 of its 390 officers after the storm. Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms. "You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between us and them," said Tufaro, who developed the proposal.

But while the plan is for the DynCorp employees to eat and live with the other deputies in the same trailer camp, the hired guns would earn "significantly more" than the $18,000 annual salary of an entry-level deputy and the $30,000-a-year salary of a seasoned officer. For DynCorp and other private security companies, the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, like Iraq, is a land of opportunity. Hired shortly after the storm to protect several New Orleans hospitals, its first domestic security job, the Texas firm has earned about $14 million from work in the Gulf Coast since Katrina, not all of which has involved security. Blackwater USA, which protected the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and lost four employees in a brutal ambush in Fallujah in 2004, earned about $42 million through the end of December on a contract with Federal Protective Service, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, to provide security to FEMA sites. Most of the 330 contract guards now working in Louisiana are employed by the company.

The Homeland Security Department's Inspector General said the company's costs in its FEMA contract -- it earns $950 a day for each employee -- were "clearly very high," and it expressed hope that competition would lower them. But costs are not the only concerns raised by critics of the companies. "Katrina broke all of the rules. It was the first time you had the deployment of armed private security contractors in the U.S.," said Peter W. Singer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry."

Singer said the proposed contract with DynCorp raises a number of questions, including whether the DynCorp officers will be properly supervised, whether the pay difference will cause tension in the sheriff's department and whether it suggests that even government jobs that assume a level of public service can be done by private corporations. Danielle Brian, executive director of Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group, said that instead of using the money to hire contractors, the sheriff's department in St. Bernard should invest in training more officers or try to rehire those they furloughed. "Our law enforcement system is based on public service employees and not private contractors pretending to be law enforcement," Brian said.

~snip~

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301777.html

[Virginia Dare]

1. This is the face of our future folks, it ain't pretty. EOM

[wakeme2008]

2. Let's do the Math

70,000,000 / 3 = 23,333,000 per year.

23,333,000 / 65,000 per year per reg cop including benies = 358 COPS that could be hired temporary.

[LiviaOlivia]

3. Yeah that's the Bush economy

Pure corruption. Let's make rich Texans and their companies richer.

So are we to guess that the furloughed employees of the St. Bernard parish Sheriff's Dept found better jobs?

[notadmblnd]

4. How did we miss this?

I ran across this thread while doing a search on the army hiring criminals for security at army bases.

I was just talking to a friend (who is a cop) tonight, telling him that they want to privatize police departments. He laughed at me. he thinks I'm a nut.

So I'm just going to shove this little article down his throat and see if I get an apology.