At Tuesday’s State of the City address, Mayor Ardis announced a new initiative to see what it would take to combine the City and County police departments. This prompted the Journal Star to gather a few basic facts about the two forces:

The city’s Police Department has 214 employees and operates on a $21 million budget; the Sheriff’s Department has roughly 200 employees and operates on a $13 million budget.

A difference of 14 employees and $8 million seemed surprisingly large to me. So I asked Peoria Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard and Peoria County Sheriff Mike McCoy why there is such a disparity.

The first thing Settingsgaard wanted to clear up was that he actually has 248 total employees — the 214 number was the total of “sworn officers.” Even with that said, though, he still felt that a comparison of the two forces is “more apples to oranges than it is apples to apples.”

“[W]ithout a close comparison of both of our agencies, to include operations, budgets, staff, contracts, etc., it is impossible to tell you all the reasons there is a legitimate difference in budget numbers beyond just salaries,” Settingsgaard explained.

I would argue that the Sheriff’s Office and the Peoria Police Department are more dissimilar then they are similar. Yes we both have traditional patrol and traditional law enforcement functions but there are many more facets of what we do that is very different from one another. I don’t speak for the Sheriff and I would be interested to hear his take on it, but I believe the jail and the Court house account for the majority of his staff and his Office’s workload. I would guess that the “policing” part of law enforcement is a smaller part of his overall operation. In my Department, traditional “policing” is the vast majority of what we do and 217 of my 248 people are sworn officers as a result. I would not be surprised if a much higher percentage of my people are sworn versus civilian than what you would find on the County side and sworn staff are more costly.

There are other vast differences in areas of responsibility from crime rates, to total population, to calls for service, to poverty/income levels, etc.

It is critical to understand that I don’t point out these differences to say that one entity is better than the other. For everything I could tell you that I have to do more of, the Sheriff could probably list just as many that his staff is responsible for that I am not. I can’t tell you how many thousands of prisoners I didn’t have to house or feed that the Sheriff did. My point is that the two organizations are very different and a simple comparison of cost per employee borders on meaningless without an understanding of how different an urban municipal police department is from a sheriff’s office, and without drilling down into the level of great detail needed to understand those differences, drawing meaningful conclusions is risky at best.

Sheriff McCoy agreed. “Trying to compare agencies, on a wide level, does not work out. Comparing period …does not work out. We each have some similar functions and we have some unique functions.”

In addition to basic patrol services for 648 square miles and having contracts with nine different communities for police and dispatch services, the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office operates the ONLY Jail in Peoria County, booking in 17,000 people each year. We also serve all the civil papers for the courts as well as provide security for the Peoria Airport.

Nevertheless, McCoy did allow this observation: “In my opinion, cost differences primarily relate to individual pay and benefit packages. Peoria City Officers are paid at a higher rate than Peoria County Deputies, all thru the pay grades. Compounded, these costs become staggering for both agencies.”

And this is why the Peoria police union is not too excited about the prospect of combining forces. The given reason for combining forces is to save money, and clearly no money is going to be saved by bringing both forces up to the same salary level as city officers.

According to another Journal Star report, “A starting police officer who completes a probationary period earns $51,994 annually; a sheriff’s deputy’s starting salary is $43,227.” And there are also different pension programs: “the city’s police pension program is governed through contribution limits set by the General Assembly; sheriff’s deputies are part of the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund (IMRF).”

Undoubtedly, there can be some savings by eliminating redundancies and finding new efficiencies by working together, but that’s not going to save enough money to get the City out of its structural deficit. When talks turn to salaries, the police union has already made it clear that they will fight to keep the salaries and benefits they’ve won. I don’t envy the Chief or the Sheriff as they take on this consolidation initiative.