The severity of economic pressures hitting the city of Spokane was illustrated this month when the City Council eliminated six new police positions from Mayor Mary Verner’s proposed 2009 budget. Verner had deferred the hirings until the second half of the year, when fiscal conditions could be reevaluated, but the council decided even that approach was too optimistic.

Seven months earlier, though, local voters did not let early indications of a coming recession prevent them from approving a sales tax increase that would pay for an updated emergency communications system used by local fire and police officials.

As a result, the Crime Check system that went silent in 2004 will be revived on Jan. 5. Once again, residents will have a round-the-clock way to report crimes and other incidents that lack the immediate urgency that would justify a 911 call.

If someone is breaking into your home, you call 911. If you get home from the movie and find that someone broke in while you were gone, you call 456-2233. That’s the number that was printed on Spokane police cars for 30 years before funding cuts caused the Spokane Police Department and the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office to drop the program.

In its absence, authorities took those lower-priority crime reports only during business hours, Monday through Friday. Crime reports went down, not because law-breaking was in decline, but because people figured, why bother? Among the benefits lost when Crime Check was discontinued was the ability of law-enforcement officials to gather information about patterns and trends of criminal activity – information normally useful in the kind of analysis that can help officials solve crimes.

Actually, restoring Crime Check was a relatively small part of the tax proposal that voters narrowly rejected last year. The campaign focused on bigger-ticket elements of the package, mainly upgrading the ability of public-safety agencies throughout the region to communicate efficiently during emergencies. That and the need to comply with new federal rules regarding digital communications technology were the main campaign themes.

When the decision was made to resubmit the proposal, a couple of significant changes were made. For one, a 10-year sunset clause was added, meaning the tax will expire after a decade and government officials will need to let it lapse or make their case to voters that they’ve performed well.

Second, last spring’s campaign managers realized the error of not giving Crime Check a starring role in the message to voters.

So soon, a trusted, efficient crime-reporting resource will be back in place, even though hopes of enlarging the Spokane Police Department are on indefinite hold.

Nevertheless, the system will be there when economic recovery arrives, and in the meantime crime analysts will have access to information that will help them in the aggregate, even if they aren’t always able to help the individual caller.