D.A.’s Crab Caper Wasted Money

With great interest, I followed the Fake Crab Caper, as played out by our very own district attorney’s office.

It seems that, while the D.A.’s office doesn’t have enough time, money, or manpower to prosecute more than 800 misdemeanors, it can find the time to save us all from purveyors of Fake Crab. You see, us poor common folk out here in taxpayer land are too stupid to figure out you can’t get real crab for $4.95 a pound. We need the D.A. to help us with our shopping.

I imagine that Lucky Food Centers caved in to the tune of $200,000 to avoid any further negative publicity in the matter. And I suppose that made some dragon-slayers down at the D.A.’s office very happy.

It was widely reported in the media that the great Fake Crab Caper investigation took 13 months. Lawyers cost about $170 an hour in Ventura County. If only one deputy D.A. worked 13 months to catch the crab fakers with some investigative and administrative assistance at, say, $20 per hour, that adds up to $395,200.

Let’s presume that two man-hours at an average of $20 per hour were spent catching every crook that never got prosecuted. Another two man hours were probably spent filling out reports and preparing the cases for trial. That’s a grand total of 3,200 man hours at $20 per hour or $64,000 spent to let real criminals know that crime really does pay. If you add that to the $395,200 that the D.A. spent to extort $200,000 from Lucky, you get a grand total of $459,000 less the $200,000 extortion payment for a net waste of taxpayer dollars of $259,200. That would buy a lot of children hot lunches, wouldn’t it?

Maybe what it all boils down to is this. If we let government educate us with a bankrupt public education system, we must spend more and more to be protected from our resulting ignorance.

RON CUFF, Camarillo