How to save money on Police Services

Since I've been talking about the city budget and how much of the pie (36% or more then $319 million) goes to police services I thought I'd direct y'all to a great idea for saving money on  police services suggested by Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast.

Scott suggests that the police only get sent out to verified alarm calls. 

If you're talking about cutting officers or eliminating overtime, here's a suggestion to put more officers on the street essentially for free: Implement verified response for burglar alarms. About 98-99% of residential burglar alarm callas are false alarms and nearly all the rest of the time the suspect is long gone when officers arrive. Implementing verified response would be like expanding the police force by 10% or more, allowing officers to focus on more important tasks. The reason this suggestion is free to the city, incidentally, is that it essentially eliminates a special-interest subsidy to the private alarm industry that's unjustified based on any cost-benefit analysis. It also would create jobs because the alarm companies must hire staff to verify alarms.

I think this is a great suggestion that would be relatively painless for the city to implement and would free up the police for more important duties. Check out rest of the post here.