Whatever a New Yorker’s grievance of choice with the city may be – our shambolic farce of a transit system, overdrawn social services on their way to complete collapse, the rapid vanishing of state-subsidized third spaces – everybody’s really talking about the same thing.
The issue at the heart of every societal ill is budgeting, and the issue at the heart of budgeting is the misallocation of funds to the staggeringly swollen coffers of the New York Police Department. Burning through upwards of $10bn annually, the NYPD’s waste causes vaster, more insidious damage than the program of person-to-person violence and systemic harassment that’s sparked protests of greater frequency and passion in recent years. By hoarding such a hefty fraction of the taxpayers’ money, they’re sending the people and city they claim to protect into the poorhouse.
