Gaines Twp. â Gaines Township voters have pulled the plug on the township police department.
  The small, rural department had been on life support since funding dried up March 31, the end of the previous fiscal year. The only hope of survival was the request for 0.89 mils, which failed by a vote of 1,223 to 594 with just less than a third of the 5,558 registered voters casting ballots in Tuesdayâs election.
  âEverything went down here,â said Treasurer Diane Hyrman. âThe 911 millage (and) mental health (millage) was voted down in our township. At least we got protection from mosquitos. But we wonât have any police in our township.â
Chairman Lathrop, Vice-Chair Pansing-Brooks, and members of the Judiciary Committee, my name is Alan Smith, and I am a senior fellow and Midwest director at the R Street Institute, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization. Our mission is to engage in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government in many areas.
R Street has a robust criminal justice portfolio and staff who have extensively researched the utility, efficacy, expense and innovation around practices of cash bail.[1] [1] We see room for improving the circumstances of pretrial detention for not only the accused, but also the government and the taxpayer in all of those areas as multiple jurisdictions around the nation modernize the system, which has been essentially unchanged for decades and has existed in some form for about 1,500 years.[2] [2]