Killing libraries is not about saving money, it’s about restricting knowledge. Beware the leader that doesn’t want the people to read.
If the city cares about aaving money theu would be buying useless military hardware for the NYPD. Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, and Osaka all do fine without blowing massive amounts if the municipal budget on military gear for their police departments. The NYPD "officially’ had a 2022 budget over $5billion with aroind 36,000 officers. That’s comparable to the entire military budget of Romania. Hell, the NYPD has field offices in 6 foreign countries.
I mean, I dunno, ACAB and fuck tha police and all that jazz, but 5 bil for 36k is 138k/each, and that’s not too unreasonably bad for NYC cost of living vs the inherent danger and work regime of the job as a police officer in such a populous city.
They’ve got 55 police per 10,000 residents. That’s more than twice as many as LA per capita with a 3% decrease in violent crime per capita. That tells me we could, but definitely shouldn’t, grind up one fifth of them into a fine powder freeing up a whole bunch of money in the budget. NYC does seem to have a significantly smaller property crime rate than the national average but that number is suspect. How much of that is them just not dealing with property crime and not filing the paperwork?
And that $5b? That’s not their whole budget, that’s their personnel budget. Total budget for FY2025 is closer to $11.9b/yr. Their salary is closer to 80k/yr/officer on average.
So you’re telling me that if we just started grinding cops into a fine powder we’d not only save on their salaries and benefits, we’d also save on the amount of equipment they need and could fund things like libraries and social safety nets? And that we could sell that fine powder for uses such as food for heads, surgery, delousing, cosmetics, bomb disposal, firepower, and head transplants and fund even more things?
I’m not saying we should be grinding cops into a fine powder. I’m saying let’s take a look at where we could save more money while helping more people.
Torgo’s Police Powder is certainly not a thing we should turn those fucking pigs into. No sir. And if someone tries laying this at my feet I’ll deny it.
You’ll have to spend some of those savings on industrial dehydrators though. It can be very difficult to get the texture of the powder right when you start grinding all willy nilly.
