Attorney General Marty Jackley presented his agency’s budget to the Joint Appropriations committee this morning, and there’s a lot of criminal justice stuff to chew on there.
Essentially, the Jackley’s employees are doing more work and the state ispaying them less than local agencies for that work.
Here’s a link to Jackley’s budget slideshow.
Among the more interesting factoids:
- SD cops seized 48 pounds of meth in 2012, the most seized since 2002. Meth arrests stood at 669, the highest since 2005’s record-setting 724 arrests
- DCI cases jumped from 842 in 2011 to 923 in 2012. The Electronic Crimes Unit had the biggest year-over-year increase in new case reports, with a jump from 157 to 525 reports
- The number of sex offenders registered in 2012 increased from 2,894 to 3,052
-Agents traveled 933,831 miles in 2012, compared to 804,498 miles in 2011
- 27,993 people were on 24/7 in 2012. In 2011, the number was 20,808
- State forensic lab technicians make significantly less money than their counterparts in Sioux Falls and Rapid City labs. Compared to other labs in the Midwest, the numbers look even worse. Starting salary for a state scientist is $29,911 in South Dakota. The Missouri State Police, with the second-lowest lab tech pay in the Midwest, start their scientists at $38,040. A scientist moving to Nebraska’s state lab would start at $55,080.
-Attorneys who work for Jackley average $74,694. Salaries for state’s attorneys in South Dakota’s top five counties average $97,408. The average pay for the lawyers in the U.S. Attorney’s Office is $117,000
Jackley bemoaned the salary situation in particular, talking about how South Dakota’s state lab trains techs and loses them to Sioux Falls, Rapid City and Omaha at a rapid rate.
“I’m getting beat out in almost every category,” Jackley said. “The question becomes ‘why would I go work in Pierre when I could go work in Sioux Falls and make more money?’”
The ones who’ve done work for the state lab and jump ship charge counties or the DCI by the hour to testify in court about the work they did in Pierre.
“We get them trained up, somebody else hires them, then they go somewhere else and the counties or the state has to pay for them to come back and testify in a grand jury hearing,” Jackley said.
Bringing his people up to “the bottom” by offering raises of five percent for DCI agents and attorneys and 7-10 percent for scientists would cost $484,824 in FY 2014, he said.
He did not, however, ask for those increased salaries.
