Cops prove they aren't really needed: NY's Mayor Should Fire All Protesting Cops and Apply Payroll Savings to Better Things

By Dave Lindorff

A huge number of entitled, mostly white cops in New York City, who have apparently been engaging in a two-week job action to protest their boss's (that's Mayor Bill deBlasio's) support for protesters against the police killing of Eric Garner, a black man busted for selling "loosie" cigarettes on the street on Staten Island, may be unintentionally offering the public a demonstration of their own irrelevance.

For two weeks now, the largest police force in the nation has essentially stopped making arrests. According to a lead story in the New York Timestoday, ticket issuance by police in this city of 8.4 million is down by 90 percent. The paper reports [1] that:
 

Most precincts' weekly tallies for criminal infractions -- typically about 4,000 a week citywide -- were close to zero.
 

And yet, New York continues to function normally, with people going about their business, secure on sidewalk, street, public transit and in their homes.

Could it be that the city has been wasting much of the nearly $5 billion it spends annually on its over 34,000 uniformed cops (15% of the city's budget)? Could it be that having all those cops cruising around neighborhoods harassing people -- mostly, statistics show, people of color and poor people -- by stopping them and frisking them, by busting them for "crimes" like public urination, smoking a joint, drinking a beer outside, selliing trinkets or "lossie" cigs, or just "looking suspicious" -- has been doing nothing to reduce major crimes and violence after all?

If this job action keeps up, and the city doesn't descend into a spasm of crime and mayhem, maybe Mayor deBlasio should live up to his early billing as a former radical activist and start sacking the protesting cops. He could start by retasking the NYPD intelligence staff (which has been wasting its time playing CIA and infiltrating mosques and Islamic centers). He should have them instead look over the photos of the officers, nearly all of them white, who publicly dissed him by turning their backs on his eulogies for the two cops who were murdered by a nut-job from Baltimore who decided to kill New York cops to avenge Garner's and Ferguson teen Michael Brown's slayings by police, and summarily fire them.

He could instruct his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, to have his precinct captains submit him a list of all the officers under their jurisdiction who are refusing to do their jobs or who had disobeyed his order not to turn their backs, while in uniform, on Mayor deBlasio, and he should fire them too.

That would cut the bloated police force in the city down to size, and, because almost all of those dropped from the payroll would be white, it would go a long way towards making the NYPD much more reflective, racially, of the city they are policing...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromising, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2621

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