Sacramento has to hire cops right now.

It's true it would be prudent to bank $8.1 million that Sacramento just landed in grants from the U.S. Department of Justice, but hiring 25 cops with that money is the right thing to do.

There aren't enough cops on city streets right now, and the federal money would pay the salary and benefits of 25 cops for three years.

Presumably, the city could rehire some of the 42 cops it laid off earlier this year due to budget cuts and a police union that refused to accept reasonable concessions to save jobs.

To get the money, the city must commit to keeping the cops on the payroll for at least a fourth year.

There are no good answers for how Sacramento can do that until it revives its ailing tax base. In the meantime, tapping three-year federal money for cops is better than using a one-time reserve of city money, an option a council majority voted down this spring.

As The Bee's Ryan Lillis recently wrote: "In addition to the 42 cops laid off earlier this year, the Police Department has cut more than 80 uniformed officer positions from its ranks over the past three years. With 657 officers, the department's staffing is at 1990s levels."

While Sacramento recorded an 18 percent drop in serious crime for a four-year period ending in December, those numbers were tabulated when the Police Department was bigger.

Meanwhile, Sacramento County, like all counties, will begin to receive hundreds of offenders diverted from state prisons under a massive realignment of state and county prisoner responsibilities.

"More offenders on the streets, with little or no supervision, coupled with a statistical certainty of a recidivism rate of about 70 percent leads to a logical conclusion of more crime," Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones wrote in a commentary published by The Bee.

Why would hiring 25 cops be controversial? Aside from budget concerns, cop politics in the capital are weird.

Most movers and shakers live a safe distance from high-crime areas.

Sacramento's police union hasn't helped with strident tactics and a refusal for cops to contribute to their own pensions to save police jobs earlier this year.

The more you pull on this string, the more tangled it becomes. Some cops are jealous of the firefighters union, which gets better deals for its members.

Some city politicos are resentful of cops, who largely live outside the city. Four council members and the mayor are up for re-election. Some fear cops going door to door to unseat the council members. Blah, blah, blah.

If you cashed the feds' check and officers paid into their pensions, you'd hire back more than 25 cops.

The issue comes before the council soon, and the question for all remains: Do you care about public safety or not?

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Call The Bee's Marcos Breton, (916) 321-1096.

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