All police departments are evil but the NYPD is exponentially more evil than any other PD in the country.
The NYPD has an annual budget if $6 billion. A lot of this budget goes into excessive overtime. When you have such a large budget, it translates into over-policing and dramatically shifts the type of policing that happens. Cops will be more interested in issuing fines as opposed to spending time solving actual crime. This affects poor people and neighborhoods (often people of color) at a disproportionate rate. So over policing for revenue collection and under policing for serious crime ends up becoming a loop.
So when you hear that the NYPD needs an annual budget of $6 billion because “NYC has a high crime rate” just know that it’s like this on purpose. The NYPD drains tax revenue and distributes it internally through excessive overtime and uses fines and fees (officers literally have quotas) to justify it’s need for such a large annual budget.
If the NYPD budget was cut, I promise you they wouldn’t impose an 8pm curfew and have 8000 officers on duty collecting overtime. A budget cut for the NYPD means we could allocate much needed funding to help small local businesses hurt by COVID. We could fund programs on homelessness, mental health, youth services, combating overcrowding in schools and transportation.
If you live in NYC, I urge you to call/email the New York City Council and ask them to cut NYPD funding. This is your right as a tax payer.
The current chair of the Finance Committee is council member Daniel Dromm
Email: dromm@council.nyc.gov
District office phone: 718 803 6373
Legislative office phone: 212 788 7076
an addition! defund12.org is a tool that allows you to send an email to ALL of your representatives (there are versions for NYC and other cities) with a script calling for defunding.