Marine Patrol Woes...LDS

[John Mercier]

Originally Posted by Descant

Don't we have similar problems with F & G and State Police? ~20 years ago we changed from MP as the Division of Safety Services to be part of State Police. The incentive was, we got a lot of money from Homeland security to patrol the coast 12 months a year. Concord's eyes lit up. Maine, on the other hand, with hundreds of miles of coast, let the USCG do that job and combined Inland marine services with Fish and Wildlife. More year round jobs with similar duties. We should have taken that route IMHO.
We have ~4500 miles of state highways and ~6500 miles of snowmobile/ATV trails, and 960 lakes and ponds. I'd be happy to see more CO's and MP's. As for State Police, their numbers are down too, but it appears they do things like accident investigation and construction site monitoring, that don't require a fully trained, gun carrying trooper.

I think the F&G issue is a bit different. They have more to do than law enforcement. So they have a lot of personnel that are not LEO, or even vaguely related.