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“I don’t think they have a sense of what it means when tax dollars are spent in this way,” a spokeswoman for the Oakland, Calif., city government, Karen Boyd, told The Daily. “Oakland is very much a city that has been devastated by the economic downturn. We don’t have an extra $2.5 million to spend.”
Oakland police estimate that overtime eventually will top $3 million, and Boyd said this may lead to cuts in senior services and libraries. Last year, Oakland laid off 500 city workers, including 80 police officers, to close a $58 million deficit.
I can’t be the only one who thinks this is the point of the Occupy movement, no? That, far from passive resistance, this is exposing the flaws in the current structure based entirely on cold hard economic reality? If there’s no way to make a legal complaint to get these systemic inequalities realized, the equivalent of a reverse-boycott on policing / emergency services DOES make it important to actually address these issues, if only to slap a tourniquet on what, for some states / cities, seems to be a severed artery of costs.
