Guest Blog — Occupy, um, Union Square

I was on my way to Forbidden Planet — one of the few delights that continues to always be a delight — the other day, and I got off the subway at the Union Square stop in Manhattan. And the OWSers were there.

I noticed one thing of particular interest. One young person was holding a small cardboard sign with a hand-lettered message about how the police are one layoff away from becoming part of the 99%.

First, OWS, take a look through the photo archives. The Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, any number of Klan rallies. There’s one unifying thing. The signs are almost always professionally printed. You live in the 21st century, in an age where the capacity to make a professional-looking sign is no further than your own personal printer. The blacks, the gays, the white supremacists of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, they all had to pay through the nose for professional-quality signs. You can crank them out for pennies. Does not one of you comprehend the notion of presentation?

Second, the person with the sign about how the cops are part of the 99% is wrong. The last layoffs in the NYPD were in the 1970s, weren’t they? A cop who was in his early 20s in 1975 would now be, well, first, he’d be out of the department having served his 20 years. But if he stayed, he’d now be, 37 years later, in his late 50s. With seniority and all the rest, his likelihood of being laid off is precisely, hold on, I want to look it up. Here it is: 0.00000. None of the NYPD officers accept that they will be laid off mainly because the likelihood is, for all intents and purposes, zero. In our post-9/11 world, where we need police to stop and frisk innocent black teenagers and guard Wall Street statues, we simply can’t take that risk. Close the schools, the hospitals, the libraries, but take away the police? Are you mad?

Take a look at the following, from the NYPD site, about pay and benefits for a police officer:

• $34,970 Starting salary (including holiday pay, uniform pay and night differential)
• Excellent Promotional Opportunities
• A choice of paid medical and dental programs
• 20 paid vacation days
• 27 paid vacation days after 5 years
• Unlimited sick leave with full pay
• Annuity Fund
• Optional Retirement at one half salary after 20 years of service

Wikipedia gives a higher starting pay. “The contract, which runs from August 1, 2006 to July 31, 2010, gives police officers a 17 percent pay raise over its four-year life, and raises starting pay from $35,881 to $41,975, and top pay from $65,382 to approximately $76,000 annually. With longevity pay, holiday pay, night shift differential and other non-guaranteed additions, the total annual compensation for officers receiving top pay will be approximately $90,829.”

Paid medical and dental programs. 20 paid vacation days. Unlimited sick leave with full pay. Optional retirement at 50% salary after 20 years.

Layoffs? Political suicide. Why? Because the police understand the power of a union. They might still prevent murders in a post-layoff situation. If someone staggered up with a knife in his back, I’d like to think that even the post-layoff police would get that guy to a hospital as fast as possible. But a smash-and-grab from an electronics store at 2 a.m.? “Yeah, dispatch, we didn’t make it in time to stop those three perps we didn’t see loading several dozen widescreen televisions into a 2009 white Ford panel van with Jersey plates. Yeah. You’d think we could have covered six city streets in less than 45 minutes, especially with our sirens and all. But, well, we are undermanned since the layoffs.”

The police might start off, right at the beginning, as part of the 99%, but once they get through the initial shakedown, they’re part of the 20-year plan. Job security, a pension, four weeks of vacation (do you get four weeks of vacation?). There’s a bumper sticker out there somewhere that says that there’s nothing worse than a crooked cop and nothing better than an honest one. And I genuinely believe that. I also believe the NYPD has cops that run the whole gamut: thieving bastards to selfless aw-shucks heroes. But even aw-shucks heroes are not going to say, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t get a pension after 20 years of work.”

The police didn’t get all their power just from their guns. In 200 years, something like 800 NYPD officers have died in the line of duty. That’s about four a year. Commercial fishing comes in at 116 per 100,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Four per 34,500 would be about 12 per 100,000 for the NYPD. So it’s about 10 times more dangerous being a commercial fisherman. When was the last time the news led with the story of the death of a fisherman?

OWS needs to start learning faster. They are simply taking too long to figure things out.