At What Cost?

It seems like the media has to some extent lost interest in wringing its hands over exactly what Occupy Wall Street wants.  The big questions now seem to be more tactical in nature: when are governments of major cities going to crack down on occupation sites and how much is it costing cities to police those sites in the meantime – especially in this economy.

The issue of cost has popped up in Oakland, in the midst of coverage addressing the Quan administration’s rapidly shifting stance on Occupy Oakland – from public support to sanctioned police brutality to contrite acceptance.  In an article addressing these issues, the Bay Citizen quotes “city finance officials” who refocus the discussion towards the financial burden the city has undertaken in “dealing with” the movement:

City finance officials now expect the costs of the eviction, cleanup and response to the protests to surpass $1 million, with at least half going to police overtime, according to sources familiar with the projections.

“Wall Street’s not going broke, but the city of Oakland will,” one finance official said. “We’re spending money on resources we definitely don’t have.”

ABC’s coverage is a bit more blatant:

Similarly, New York City officials bemoan the overtime expense the NYPD is incurring for OWS crowd control, which is apparently not just an problem for the strapped city budget, but also a public safety issue:

As of early October, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly publicly put the price tag for police overtime at $2 million, but Public Safety chair Councilman Peter Vallone said that number has since ballooned to $5 million.

Vallone believes the additional overtime comes at time when the police department has 7,000 fewer officers than it did a decade ago. The Queens councilman said the additional officers needed to secure the protest area and financial district comes at the expense of crime fighting in the outer boroughs.

“This is costing us, not just in money,” Vallone said. “It is costing us over $5 million dollars now and that may cost us the next police class, but it is also costing us in our safety.”

The president of the NYPD’s Sergeant’s Benevolent Association also cites OWS as a font of economic and physical violence:

I am deeply concerned that protesters will be emboldened by the recent rash of violent acts against police officers in other cities. New York’s police officers are working around the clock as the already overburdened economy in New York is being drained by ‘occupiers’ who intentionally and maliciously instigate needless and violent confrontations with the police

And it’s not just violence at protest events being tracked back to the protesters.  The NYPD recently blamed an increase in gun violence on the fact that police priorities had been redirected to crowd control at Occupy Wall Street and away from “special borough task forces” that focus on high-crime neighborhoods.

Of course, there’s an obvious question that goes unanswered in all of these reports: What are so many police doing at OWS?

Most police and city officials would probably argue that the police are there to prevent violence, protect the safety of protesters and bystanders, and to prevent other illegal activity such as property damage.   It seems clear, however, that since the beginning of the Occupation the vast majority of the violence occurring at OWS has been a direct result of aggressive policing tactics, and the most intense acts of violence have been carried out by police against protesters.  As such, maintaining a heavy police presence seems like a patently bad idea for reducing violence.  It would be really interesting to get some statistics about civilian-on-civilian violence at OWS-related events.  I’m betting it exists, but that it is not statistically higher than background levels for an urban area.

It could also be that the sheer number of people milling about during OWS rallies seems to justify a visible police presence.  But then there are also a ton of people milling about at the Ikea in Red Hook and you don’t see chemical deterrents or flash-bang grenades there.  Yes, there are some people participating in these movements that want to smash windows, but surely it doesn’t take an army of riot cops to keep an eye out for those individuals.  There are thousands of people at a baseball game; some of them are drunk and some of them are angry.  And yet there are not generally riot cops at baseball games (though the NYPD does sometimes get up to some hijinks at Yankee Stadium).

There are a ton of police at Occupy Wall Street expressly because it is a protest, not a shopping trip.  This is obvious.  They are there because the city is either afraid that there is something inherently violent about popular social movements – even when their participants steadfastly adhere to nonviolent strategies – or they want to paint the movement as potentially violent even though they do not really believe it to be so.

In either case, city officials should realize that it’s dangerous to make the argument that protests are draining resources away from cities (both money and police), because doing so highlights that it was this same set of officials who decided to dedicate these resources in this particular way.  And the more the reasons for those decisions are revealed as political rather than public safety-oriented, the more this drain of resources becomes something that politicians, not protesters, must answer for.