Not only did the New York City Police Department (NYPD) waste untold amounts of money to find the suspect in United Healthcare CEO Briam Thompson’s murder, but they seemingly felt the need to add to that cost by sending nearly two dozen cops, some in heavy tactical gear, to ‘confront’ the leading suspect Luigi Mangione who is being held in Pennsylvania.
The NYPD boasts the largest city police budget in the country at a whopping $5.8 billion. Like many other departments in the United States that act like they are at war with the people they are supposed to protect and serve, exorbitant wasteful spending on police toys like military-style vehicles, weapons, gear, and, yes, robots; drives up their costs while the city cuts funding for other crucial services like education to meet budget shortfalls.
It’s impossible to ignore how wasteful police departments are. Seeing video reports about more than a dozen cops driving 80 miles per hour for 300 miles to do what two detectives could have easily done, makes it blatantly obvious. While it’s unclear if any of those specific NYPD officers met Mangione, all two dozen almost certainly didn’t have a meet and greet with him like they were backstage at their favorite artist’s concert.
It was all a show and an expensive one at that.
New York City might be famous for Broadway (among many things), but did New York taxpayers need to fund this despotic expedition of tough-guy actors? The guys who showed up in tactical gear were clearly there to show off and possibly intimidate Mangione. That they needlessly drove at a high rate of speed – with lights and sirens on, no doubt – through two states to see a suspect who isn’t going anywhere makes the optics much worse.
Remember the Defund the Police slogan? This recent fiasco, along with NYPD’s failure to catch Mangione – who was caught by a McDonald’s employee – is precisely what that was about. It was about reallocating money from the exorbitant budgets of law enforcement agencies to education, addressing homelessness, providing opportunities for poor and marginalized communities, and so much more.
While the movement failed to see any tangible defunding of any police departments, far-right actors in the political world drove so many false narratives about it that President Joe Biden immediately handed law enforcement agencies $37 billion as part of the COVID-19 relief funds during the pandemic. He did so without pushing accountability measures as promised on the campaign trail leading up to the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, police departments and many officers on our streets felt emboldened by Biden’s attempt to appeal to a base of voters who will never vote for someone with a “D” next to their name. Police have killed a record number of civilians each year since 2020 and have brutalized an incomprehensible number of others – presumably using weapons and gear provided by the explosion in federal funds. Local and county jails have also taken a turn for the worse as have prisons after budget increases for incarceration – benefitting the private prison industry.
While people focus on Mangione, it behooves us to analyze the outright failures of billion-dollar law enforcement agencies failing at their jobs when posting pictures of the suspect in the news and online was all they had to do. Ultimately, a phone call from a civilian and a local Altoona, PA, police officer brought him in. That should be embarrassing for a department with more resources and access to federal agencies than any other in the U.S.
NOTE: NYPD will enjoy a $5.8 billion budget in Fiscal Year 2024 and $5.75 billion in FY 2025 while paying out more in police misconduct settlements than any other agency by far
NYPD Budget for Fiscal Years 2024 and 2025:
Discover more from The Antagonist Magazine
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.