21 Comments

And I'm sure the police are telling every single person they interact with that "well, we would have been here sooner, but you know...the mayor isn't making our jobs easier".

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It's really quite simple: Unions for authority figures are good, as they promote fraternity and mutual support among members. Conversely, unions for peons are bad, as they promote fraternity and mutual support among members.

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why did i get deleted? all i talked about was cops, de blasio and blond chicks.

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It is always time to urinate in public in NYC. The only time anyone ever gets arrested for it is when they are being a black guy. All those drunk white suburban teens in santa costumes, puking and pissing in the streets during SantaCon? They got a warning and a waggy finger.

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Police unions are a good thing. Cops deserve the right to collective bargaining and slow-downs like anyone else. It's unfortunate when a union is run by a dickhead like Lynch or a crook like Jimmy Hoffa, but the union is probably the only reason cops have even a few bulletproof vests and get paid overtime.

In short, this cop slowdown is all about the contract negotiation, like any other union action. They're just using the murder of two of their own to garner public sympathy, because the public is usually not so supportive of the right of cops and firefighters to strike. It's gross and creepy, but not stupid.

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With luck the union contract will be signed by mid-July at the latest.

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A slowdown is a strike, within the letter of the law. Police in NY can't walk out, under the Taylor Law. They would be fired; the union leadership would go to jail, as happened to the transit workers a few years ago.

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This is a straight-up revenue issue. All the low-level crap people get arrested for generates fines. Most people don't have the time or resources to go to court and contest the charges, so they pay up. Especially the parking violations.

I'm all in favor of arresting people who piss in the street, but the rest of it is mostly bullshit left over from the Giuliani years, when cops were supposed to arrest people if they left a bag on the seat next to them on the subway, and other such nonsense. (They hated that one and mostly refused to enforce it.)

The Poutragers on the right who moan about Michelle Obama's fascistic insistence that schools should serve decent food, or about Bloomberg's War on Big Gulps, conveniently forget that Giuliani was the biggest nanny-stater of them all: As an ex-prosecutor he was pretty sure everyone was guilty of something, and it was just a matter of writing enough laws to nail us all.

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but the anime demon girls are real, right?

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"using the murder of two of their own to garner public sympathy" Leave it to Lynch to fuck up even a no-brainer like that.

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Good point.

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Does that motto specify whose death?

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...corresponding decrease in police shootings? ...or are they keeping those numbers up?

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Can someone remind me again why union-busting is a bad thing?

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Pissing in public is illegal . . . pissing <i>on</i> the public, not so much.

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When the police union rep spoke about the Eric Garner death he said that when Garner gasped "I can't breath" it proved that he actually <i>could</i> breathe. Kind of like Garner intentionally asphyxiated himself just to spite the cops.

Also if you throw a woman in a pond and she drowns that proves she wasn't a witch.

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