Premium should be on safety

Premium should be on safety

Mahoning County Sheriff Ran- dall Wellington and his spokesmen can claim that shutting down video arraignments for Youngstown Municipal Court is not a stunt to force the county to come up with more money to run his department. They can shout it from the roof of the county jail. That doesn’t make it so.

The lack of proportionality between what Wellington wants — $1.1 million to recall 23 of 34 laid-off deputies — and the few hours a week it takes to run video arraignments speaks more eloquently than Wellington or any of his spokesmen about what’s going on.

If video arraignments are discontinued, deputies will still be obliged to fetch prisoners from their cells and deliver them to city police officers in a booking area. They will have to be signed out for transport by city police officers to Youngstown Municipal Court. After court, deputies will have to meet city police at the door again, sign the prisoners back in and return them to their cell blocks.

That seems more labor intensive than transporting prisoners from their cells to the video arraignment room within the county jail.

Video arraignments normally take a matter of minutes for each defendant. But if Wellington can’t spare the manpower to wait those few minutes, city police officers should be allowed to oversee the arraignments.

But that, we’re told, raises a union jurisdictional issue.

We understand jurisdictional issues. Steelworkers and autoworkers used to walk out over jurisdiction regularly. After much pain, they learned that having a job is better than marking territory. If Wellington and his deputies are as concerned about safety as they say, they should recognize that safety trumps jurisdiction.