The Citizens on Patrol program puts hundreds more eyes and ears on the streets of Fort Worth, watching out for crime. But they're driving on their own dime. Now the city is changing how they're reimbursed and it has some volunteers upset.
For 25 years now, the volunteers have put patrol stickers on their own cars to drive around, burning their own fuel, while they look for anything suspicious in the neighborhood.
It used to be that drivers like Tony Perez were reimbursed for their fuel as they went along. But, as NBC 5 first told you earlier this summer, the city discovered there were tax problems with that old system.
They recently settled on offering gift cards instead, $50 for every 25 hours logged on patrol. That comes out to $2 an hour and Perez says he used to make closer to $6 an hour. Plus, the money comes on a delay, so you have to cover it yourself for about a month.
That's tough for many of the volunteers who are retired and on a fixed income.
"We don't just drive into some place and spend several hours there, there are volunteer programs all over the city. In this one, we're specifically in vehicles burning our own fuel,” said Perez. “So it's very important to make that financial contribution because we are certainly providing a very important service, at a fraction, at a mere fraction, of what it costs to have a patrol officer drive around."
Fort Worth police tell NBC 5 they do value this program highly. It's been shown to help reduce crime. But their hands were tied because of those tax problems.
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They say they fought to find a way to keep reimbursing their volunteers, even if it's not as much as before and say so far, they haven't heard of volunteers dropping out.
