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Arresting Godzillacostly
Repeat offenders taxing burden for Manteca
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It’s one of those freak things that somebody ends up saying while heavily intoxicated and ends up getting printed simply because it was said. 

There are a lot of names attributed to Scott Swafford – the Manteca man that was arrested 58 times in a 24-month period – on the booking slips that the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department posts on its website. 

Almost all of them are varying forms and spellings of his name. 

But there, all the way at the bottom of the long list, sits a single word. An alias. Something tremendously out of place. 

“Godzilla.”

Whether the nickname has any credence with the people he comes in contact with on a regular basis is beyond me, but one thing has become abundantly clear to me since we started tracking the arrests that the Manteca Police Department makes on a daily basis – Swafford gets arrested. A lot. 

Outside of those 58 times in a two-year stretch – sometimes being arrested multiple times in the same week – he’s racked up at least a handful of arrests in the last six months that I’m aware of. Nearly all of the charges involve alcohol, and after a few hours in the drunk tank he’s discharged back out into the world. 

Hello cycle – please repeat. 

It could be said that the behavior, as long as it doesn’t affect anybody else, is harmless to the general public – the only person who has to suffer any consequences is Swafford himself. Standing tall before a judge isn’t exactly a walk in the park. 

But the catch is that it does have an impact on the general public even if Swafford never speaks to a single person other than law enforcement on the days that he gets handcuffed and hauled away to the San Joaquin County Jail. 

Because getting arrested costs money. 

And somebody has to foot that bill. 

Here’s a little bit of the cost breakdown associated with going from the streets of Manteca to a holding cell at the San Joaquin County Jail:

• The initial call – Depending on the circumstance, most arrests start with a call to police dispatch, and those dispatchers make a minimum of $23.27 an hour. By the time that the call comes in, the dispatcher contacts the officer, and works as a liaison between the caller and the officer – depending on how quickly he’s able to locate the suspect – it’s not unlikely that an hour can pass. And that hourly rate does not include the city’s benefits package. 

• The responding officer(s) – If it’s a drunk and belligerent person wandering the street – especially at night – there’s a pretty good chance that you’re going to have more than one officer respond. Their pay starts at $32.96 an hour – excluding benefits – and rises all the way up to $46.35 an hour. And if there’s a confrontation and the sergeant needs to come out, he gets paid between $48.70 and $59.23 an hour. Spending an hour on scene isn’t out of the realm of possibility, and the lead officer will more than likely spend another hour working on the report. 

• Getting booked – This expense depends on where you get arrested. Manteca has its own booking officer that gets paid between $23.94 and $29.10 an hour and focuses primarily on the administrative side of the arrest. That person then needs to be transported – again, in a run often by the same booking officer – to the San Joaquin County Jail. That costs both time and money since you’re burning fuel for the trip – at least $10 to get back and forth to French Camp with a V8 under the hood. And if you’re going to booked and held at the San Joaquin County Jail, additional costs are added – it’s $347.30 for those who don’t get to go home because of the nature of their crimes. Those who are booked at the county jail and then released end up costing the taxpayers $42.

• The Grey Bar Hotel – Things have changed drastically since AB 109 – California’s realignment bill – changed the way that violators were classified and housed after a Supreme Court ruling said that the state’s prisons were unconstitutional because of overcrowding. That means that people like “Godzilla” are the lowest rung on the criminal totem pole – a short sobering-up hold is all that he typically gets before being released. Those that end up serving a sentence or waiting a prolonged period of time for a trial carry an additional expense for the time that they spend behind lock-and-key.

And all of those expenses are based on everything going smoothly. If a fight breaks out or somebody drinks so much that their life is in danger an ambulance is introduced into the equation and if the person being transported doesn’t have the money to foot the bill, that cost gets eaten up and eventually passed back on to the consumer in one way or another. An officer involved in a struggle will draw a wide response, and if the fire department has to respond then the hourly rate that they get paid is also introduced into the equation. 

So who foots the bill?

Taxpayers. Sales tax and developer fees and property tax and other forms of revenue generation for municipalities are tapped into to cover the cost of dealing with the regulars like “Godzilla” and the terror that he brings with him. It might not be the destruction of Tokyo, but when you average an arrest every two weeks, you’re not only sticking your fellow residents with the bill but also tying up resources that could go to preventing legitimate crime in the community. 

Lots of balls are in motion when somebody gets arrested. Lots of people are in that chain of custody and that blanket that comes when those silver bracelets come out. And all of those people command a paycheck. All of those people need to be paid. 

So is it still a victimless crime, even if he doesn’t come into contact with anybody?

It all depends on how much you’re willing to spend. 

At least 63 arrests has to extend his tab with the City of Manteca and the County of San Joaquin into the tens of thousands of dollars – if not more. 

That’s a mighty big bar tab for all of us to share.