A majority of the Selma City Council voted last week to make finding the money for a $194,000 AmeriCorps grant a “funding priority” in next year’s budget.

While it’s possible to have multiple priorities in a $20 million budget, the vote sends a bad message to city employees who haven’t had a permanent raise in eight years.

Furthermore, it’s a slap in the face to the city’s police department officers, who delivered a letter to the council the same night demanding immediate raises.

Officers shouldn’t have walked off the job, but it’s easy to understand their frustration given the council spent three times as much time talking about funding AmeriCorps than they did their letter demanding raises.

The city’s top priority right now should be public safety. Nothing else really matters as long as Selma is consistently ranked as one of the most violent and dangerous cities in the state. Those kind of statistics affect the economy, tourism and so many other areas.

The city needs to pay first responders more and to raise starting salaries. The turnover rate in the police department is through the roof. We have to find a way to keep officers here and not just make the department a training ground.

The city of Selma has had nine murders this year. Sadly, we’re not sure that having more officers on the street would have prevented a single one of those.

But having more officers across the city would no doubt cut down on crime and start to turn those numbers around. The city budgets every year for 60 officers but only has 47 right now.

There’s no way the city can hit that benchmark without increasing compensation and making the department more competitive with others across the region.