Yeah, that "We're gonna do a work slow down - RAWR!!" thing shows just how brutally clueless a majority in the NYPD have become.
This has been bugging me for a while, until someone pointed out the (in hindsight) obvious:
Most important, the NYPD hasn’t “proved the opposite” of why they’re needed. They’re not trying to prove anything to the average citizen. What they’re trying to do is prove to the mayor and city government that they’re needed - and the reason the mayor and city government need them is that the fines they collect for minor offenses make up a lot of the city’s revenue. They’re probably doing a perfectly good job of proving to the mayor that he needs them for this. Our opinions are irrelevant.
True, and it points out that the city has come to depend on the police essentially mugging citizens to get that income. And yet, I'd be curious to see by how much savings from fewer jail inmates to support offsets the current drop in fine revenue.
Need to find the fines revenue figures first, but there's a possible cost per inmate per year report of $168,000, or $460 a day per inmate. A big chunk of that would be labor and infrastructure overhead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/nyregion/citys-annual-cost-per-inmate-is-nearly-168000-study-says.html?_r=0I did find an article on NYC's IBO (Independent Budget Office) that discusses fine income in general, without delineating the fines generated by criminal charges or the stop and frisk crap that has so many people outraged.
http://ibo.nyc.ny.us/cgi-park/?p=733Since the current NYPD slowdown includes the cops not ticketing for parking violations and littering, etc., the income loss for the City must be huge atm.