You Get What You Pay For
Our money pays for Israel to bomb Gaza, and it also pays for cops to assault us if we protest that.
I am a proud New Yorker, and I pay my taxes without fail every year. In fact, New Yorkers pay more city and state taxes than anyone else in America. I’m fine with that in theory; as the old saying goes, taxes are (again, in theory) the price we pay for a civilized society.
Lately, though, New York City society has felt less civilized. The Eric Adams administration is very eager to slash away at many of the services that help make it easier and better to live here. Adams has cut funding for libraries, and wants to cut more, potentially eliminating weekend service altogether. He’s gone after early childhood education. He’s going after our parks, which would be cruel for any city but particularly one as ultra-urbanized as New York. He’s cut services for seniors. He’s trying to cut services for people with HIV, for emergency food programs, and for the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. He’s even ended the city’s composting scheme. (Adams blames spending on the influx of migrants for all of this, despite evidence that they are costing the city much less than he contends.)
A city where people can’t go to the library, where kids don’t get as much support in school, where parks aren’t looked after, where there’s less help for the elderly and the hungry and the sick and the marginalized, and where rent is out of control, is a city turning its back on all but its most privileged and well-connected residents. It is a city intent on destroying the things that make life worth living, or even that make life possible at all.
But if so many people are losing out in New York City right now, who is winning?
This violent police officer, for one.
This video was shot by independent journalist Katie Smith during a Palestine protest in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on Saturday. Among other things, it shows a New York City cop repeatedly punching someone lying flat-out on the sidewalk. (He’s the one in the picture at the top of this post.)
The NYPD is no doubt busy coming up with some reason why this officer needed to wail on someone who, according to Smith and other journalists at the scene, had been grabbed out of the crowd “seemingly at random” and who “never once resisted.” Or maybe they’re not coming up with a reason. After all, the march barely made the local news; ABC 7 spent a total of 24 seconds on it, merely saying that people had “clashed” with police and that officers had been seen “restraining” someone on the ground. (Again, you can watch the video. Whatever this is, it’s not restraint.) And the cops waved off any suggestion that something untoward had happened.
So maybe this officer will get a slap on the wrist. More likely, he will pay no price at all. Instead, the person the cop assaulted will pay a price—either from being injured or being arrested and potentially prosecuted, or both. And so will every single one of us who lives and pays taxes in New York City.
We will pay the officer’s salary, which will have increased in the last year. That doesn’t count any overtime, which we will also pay for. (We have paid an estimated $788 million on NYPD overtime so far in the current fiscal year.) If, by chance, the officer or the NYPD gets sued for such an obvious case of police brutality, and there is some kind of legal settlement, we’re on the hook for that too. We should be used to that by now, given that we’ve paid over half a billion dollars to settle NYPD misconduct suits in just the past six years.
We pay for all of it. We pay for police officers to rampage through the streets and beat protesters. We pay for them to hang around in subway stations staring at their phones. We pay for them to write some of the most nakedly fascist drivel possible on social media. And, on the relatively rare occasions when someone tries to hold them accountable, we pay to make it go away.
But it’s even worse than that. Look at that video again. Let’s assume the person who got beat up was a New York City resident protesting the genocide in Gaza. Through their local taxes, they were paying the salary of the officer who assaulted them. Through their federal taxes, they were paying to send weapons to Israel in service of the very genocide they were marching against. They were helping to fund every part of this abomination. So were the rest of us New Yorkers. So is everyone else in every city and state across the United States.
At a City Council hearing in March defending his department’s wild overtime budget, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban maintained that this was just what it costs for the city to be safe. “You get what you pay for,” he said.
We certainly do.
The police profession tends to draw a lot of people who have a need to inflict pain on others. In my days working at a bar in Ocean City Maryland, I can't tell you how many times I saw cops arresting someone who had been over served, or had been in a scuffle, and they would just beat the crap out of someone. The scene that I'll never forget is 3 cops on top of one guy, with the civilian having both arms wrenched way up behind their back, and they were writhing in pain, and one cop just kept delivering knee strikes to the ribs, yelling at the guy to stop resisting. They beat the shit out of him for no reason.
This is an honest question, as someone who’s never lived north of the mason dixon. How is it that NYC continually elects the weirdest/most incompetent/corrupt politicians to lead such a diverse city? I don’t expect them to choose out and out socialists but how is is that bill de blasio is the most liberal nyc mayor in my lifetime? Is it truly down to the political machines? Because I genuinely cannot understand how someone as bad at politicking as Adams climbed to the top of the heap.