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I feel like the bigger question here is how we got to this point rather than the question of how it's being dealt with. Why are only 28% of the busses are operational now and as few as 7% have been operational?
Like, I get that they require maintenance, but are these particularly breakdown-prone? If they had a surge in demand that overwhelmed whoever currently handles maintenance, is it practical to have some private organization do maintenance on the busses?
So that's maybe $14k to $20k a year per bus in maintenance. Is that a reasonable expenditure, or unexpectedly high relative to other busses?
Because no one gives a fuck about prisoners (brown ppl) in this country. Treating prisoners as human beings means you won't get reelected. We like to blame politicians but this is the US as a whole.
In posts on lemmy you'll see ppl frothing at the mouth for prisoners to be executed by the state, or raped/murdered in prison. The only thing keeping this country from looking like a lynch mob is the pageantry of the courts.
For a commercial vehicle that's cheap AF. But this is LA, one of the poorest cities in the w.......... wait a minute.
googles
This is talking about school busses, but I'd assume that they're pretty much the same:
https://www.busboss.com/blog/school-bus-maintenance-an-analysis-of-costs
The article did say that they were older, but it sounds like the maintenance expenditure on the prison busses is 3x to 4x that.
The money isn't the problem. It's people skimming off the top of the prison industry that are the problem.
A business lease and insurance on an F150 is going to run you around 10-20k a year.
Maybe. If they're spending 3x to 4x and have less than a quarter of the fleet functioning, that does seem like a kind of large discrepancy. I'd kind of want to see what the correlation with age is, and the bus age.
That might be true, but the $1.2m to $1.6m per year figure is maintenance, which is a different expense from financing on the bus or insurance; they shouldn't be directly comparable. Someone isn't going to average $10-20k a year on maintenance for an F150 (or at least I'd hope they aren't).
EDIT: apparently this has been an ongoing problem. This article says that availability was down to close to 60% in 2022.
https://laist.com/news/criminal-justice/nearly-40-of-lasd-jail-buses-are-out-of-service-and-some-incarcerated-people-are-missing-court-dates
It also has the name of the company that does the maintenance; it's apparently not a part of the sheriff's office.
They interviewed a mechanic that chalked it up to COVID-19:
The Sheriff's Department said that the problem was that it hadn't bought new busses for five years:
But my point is, somehow in two years, they apparently went from a little over 60% availability, which was considered a newsworthy concern then, to something like 7% at the nadir to apparently 28% now.
I don't think that matters, because it's not an excuse. If the buses are expensive to maintain because they're old, then the negligence or corruption simply stems from failing to replace the buses in a timely fashion instead of failing to maintain them. Either way, the people in charge are to blame.
Because the LASD is a corrupt organisation and their funding is used to buy shiny toys for the cops.
It should be illegal for corrupt police organizations to to receive any public funding.
the US keeps voting in leaders that either promise to fix issues like this or does not do anything period but stir the pot like Trump
this was Biden's last campaign promise by the way to do something about the police issues
Biden has to be able to take responsibility at some point
"It is the Republican's and or Democrat's fault my job performance sucks." should not be enough to get someone to the whitehouse
This guy's comment history suggests to me they're trying to instill hopelessness so people don't vote. And when people don't vote... well, we get another shit show.