Even 388 miles away, Steven Greenhut can't help but piss off Orange County law enforcement.
Greenhut–who used to work full time for the OC Register but now supplies guest editorials from his Sacramento perch–recently blasted cops in California for claiming that continual increases in police department budgets is the way to reduce crime.
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Police, according to Greenhut, “are trying to scare the public into lobbying city councils and county boards to spare them” from budget cuts.
“Yet it's best not to get too worried about all this fear-mongering,” wrote Greenhut in “
Police budget cuts won't spike crime” on July 2. “I'm not arguing that policing issues have no effect on crime rates, but it's far from clear that hiring more police (or passing more tough-on-crime laws) reduces crime . . . It's OK to ignore the self-interested emotional arguments made by cops and politicians and debate each new anti-crime proposal and budget plan on its merits.”
I can imagine that Wayne Quint, head of the OC sheriff's deputy union, is once again cursing Greenhut, a major critic of taxpayer-funded deputy pensions that allow the officers to retire at the age of 50 with 90 percent of their top pay for the rest of their lives.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
