The NYPD Spent $150 Million to Catch Farebeaters Who Cost the MTA $104,000
The NYPD Spent $150 Million to Catch Farebeaters Who Cost the MTA $104,000
The massive increase coincided with just a two percent decrease in serious crime.
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Yeah, police are a service, not a cost of goods sold. It's supposed to cost money, it's not supposed to pay for itself.
Very true but there is a line my man. If they had blown that much money going after serious criminals? Sure. But 150 fucking million to track down and catch what is essentially half a step above shoplifters?
Half step below, I'd say. Shoplifting is a more serious infraction (not that I care) because they're taking physical items.
This is just a small fraction of the cost of upkeep and maintenance and is intangible.
You might be right, and I'm not one to suggest we ought to spend more on police when an equivalent crime reduction could be the result of spending the money on social services.
All I'm saying is that you cannot measure its success or failures by comparing the cost to one type of arrest. The article mentioned a 2% reduction in major crimes, and while we can't really know if that's caused by theincreased spending, if one rape or one murder was stopped as a result of increased police presence or increased overtime, then what is that one crime worth?
But did they stop any of those things while on toll duty? I think someone should have gathered information like that before parading out a cost sink this big, that on the surface, has the look that they just pulled off the perfect in plan site crime of stealing NY tax dollars to punish a few people that for whatever reason didn't pay the toll.
If you could instead point to a chart that stated, while we had officers stationed watching for toll dodgers we caught X amount of people trying to rob people, or stopped X amount of potential rapes I could see the benefit. But tooting your own horn without any of that, over what looks like robbing the NY citizens of millions of taxes dollars should have the attorney general bringing charges.
But is it supposed to waste money?
The same thing is true for public transit! We shouldn't even be trying to charge for it in the first place, let alone spend money policing fare evasion.
I agree with you and I really do not like modern policing at all. Just like the post office we shouldn't evaluate it simply on the most discrete of monetary accounting. However in this case I prsonally feel like the response was disproportionate in both money and execution wise comapred to even the desired goal, which takes a little longer to say but has a teeny bit of nuance to it.
The downvotes you're getting are wild to me, I feel like everything you said was objectively true, and without personal opinion even. If someone has an issue with what the police are doing here it's not hard to look further than the money in vs. money out equation, and it is lazy to lean on only that financial argument.