What a difference a day, or two, makes.
On Monday, Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian, who also is president of the California Police Chiefs Association, said he was adamantly opposed to the Schwarzenegger administration’s plan to reduce the prison population by 27,000 — a plan that still threatens the entire budget package agreed to by the “big five” leadership in Sacramento.
He told the Sacramento Bee’s Jim Sanders that “wholesale release of inmates simply to achieve a fiscal end is not good public policy” — and his group would work to make sure the plan was killed in the Legislature.
“Quite frankly, I dont think the public is fully aware of just how close this is to becoming a reality,” he told the Bee.
Two days later (Wednesday) he had changed his tune — completely. The board of the police chiefs’ association voted unanimously to support the release plan.
He told the Los Angeles Times that the plan “takes huge steps in the right direction.”
“We think that we’ve made a lot of progress,” Melekian said. “We are very pleased about that, and we anticipate working very closely … to implement this.”
Melekian ascribed the police chiefs’ apparent turnabout on the methodical way they would be released. It’s likely that they were informed in no uncertain terms that if they opposed the prison population reduction plan, any further savings could further reduce the budgets of local enforcement agencies like theirs.
Whatever the reason, the police chiefs’ conversion to the prison savings proposal was crucial to blunting Republican opposition to it — and salvaging the entire budget compromise agreed to earlier this week.
