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?
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.
