InevitableSwing [none/use name]
acabThe first paragraph
MPD records show that the department deployed at least 101 personnel to Renee Good’s memorial on the morning of January 9th, where records identified just seven people holding vigil. The deployment was part of Operation Trust and Safety, which generated $1.92 million in overtime in four days. It involved SWAT and Strike teams as well as drones, city cameras, body-worn and helmet cameras, command-post intelligence, person and vehicle checks, and the preservation of footage and other information as police evidence.
WE CAN'T ABOLISH POLICE, WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THEM?
That's a lot of school lunches. That's a lot of community healthcare. That's a lot of after school programs. That's a lot of big brother/big sister type mentorship programs. That's a lot of homeless outreach. That's a lot of food bank foodstuffs.
None of those things happened because pigs gotta be pigs. Fuck cops, every single one of them.
They burned the precinct once, they should do it again.
Police and military are like the only two career paths that provide a living wage for the poor. Fucked.
They have the cushiest retirement plans outside of corporate executives too. They get full pension benefits after 25 years of service, which means many retire at 50 or even younger.
That’s 274k for each cop, for 4 days of work? Wtf?
The math isn't that clean.
the department deployed at least 101 personnel to Renee Good’s memorial... The deployment was part of Operation Trust and Safety
From later in the article:
MPD’s own cost memos written at the time continued tracking overtime under Operation Trust and Safety after Jan. 11, with costs accumulating through at least Jan. 25.
So the overtime hours were over a longer period than four days and involved more than 101 cops. There's mention of drone pilots, for example, which probably aren't included in that 101 number.
I think a better headline for the article would have been "MPD uses nearly its entire overtime budget on policing protests," which the article gets to eventually. Emphasizing just 101 cops and 4 days is either sloppy or getting loose with the facts in a way we'd jump on if it wasn't from a friendly source.
truly the legal form of protection racket
I've been watching The Wire lately and all of the cops in the show practically pee their pants in excitement when they learn there's an opportunity to make overtime pay to do nothing
Wild that it's been an open secret for so long, I guess the capitalists understand they need to keep their enforcers fat and happy
we all sort of know it, but it is rarely laid out openly: how much of the public sector budget for various entities is gobbled up by cop shit. it's obscured by federal grants and state pass through funds, and sometimes lumped in with other public sector spending.
if people could look up, in plain language, exactly what it costs for all this overpolicing and what these dirt bags take home compared to actually important shit like maintenance/sanitation workers, city engineers, etc, it would blow a lot of people's minds and make the "defund the police" language a lot more poignant.
clearly institutional powers are threatened by that conversation in their efforts to obscure the facts around these funds and their work to make "defund the police" mean something unrealistic and impractical.
California has a public database with state and local salary information; maybe your state does, too. https://transparentcalifornia.com/
looking up individuals is one thing, but to actually have the full dataset would be something else. and even that is a degree removed from having the dataset analyzed and broken out to show exactly how money is allocated across the spectrum of public services, which is a skillset not every person has.
a searchable spreadsheet is the absolute bare minimum of transparency, and frankly its more like when a law firm sends over a bunch of printed papers to bury opposing counsel rather than a thumb drive that can be indexed, searched, and analyzed. an individual would have to do a shitload of legwork here to actually uncover the patterns or do any critical analysis.
i used to work at a public institution that had "transparency" for its salaries in this same way. what it did not include was overtime or bonus structure information. and it obscured certain "sensitive" information and let some transfer payments be hidden as contracts. so, really we could look up any individual, standard employee for that specific year, but did not have access to a dataset that we could analyze ourselves. and it did not reveal contract information or larger budget allocations.
looking up individuals is one thing, but to actually have the full dataset would be something else.
You can download the full datasets, though, at least by city / county / agency. The site I linked to is just one of many pooling from the same source. Local newspapers will run a story with that data once a year or so, which they sometimes put into charts or more readily searchable tables. This graph is missing from the Archive version, but each bubble pops up with this info:
an individual would have to do a shitload of legwork here to actually uncover the patterns or do any critical analysis.
Well, yes. Maybe with non-corporate journalists and coders we could further separate the SF Chronicle's chart so as to move pigs out of the "public safety employee" category.
Back around 2020 the town my brother lives in was paying about 30% of the entire city budget to the police department. Unrelated: they still don't have safe drinking water after about a decade of inaction
It's actually "only" 19k per cop (1,920,000/101).
but I literally cannot believe that number. If we assume they worked 40 10 hour shifts at time and a half that's... 19000/40 = 475 475/1.5 = $317/hr typical wage!!!
That comes out to a yearly salary of over $650,000 which, no.
Somebody's gotta pay for the donuts.
