Is $714 per resident a fair yearly price for funding the NYPD?

On June 10, 2020 AOC published a tweet that not only caught the eye of my teenage daughters, but had them convinced that $6 billion is a gross amount of money to fund the City of New York Police Department (NYPD).

My wife and I have three daughters and we encourage each of them to identify and follow female role models on social media. As a 30-something year old, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has certainly caught their attention.

Our challenge, like many parents, is guiding our children to look through an objective lens from different angles. The post by AOC raised my brow to check if my daughters’ had actually read past the headline and thought about the bigger picture?

For those who may not be not familiar with New York City (NYC) I'll offer a few significant data points:
*  NYC Size: 468.484 sq mi (1,213.37 km2)
*  NYC consists of five boroughs: Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island
*  NYC population: ~8.4 millionNote: Do not confuse NYC with the New York Metropolitan area, which in addition to NYC, includes Long Island and the Mid and Lower Hudson Valley, with a population greater than 18 million.

So I asked my middle daughter how much would you pay a year for police protection if you lived in NYC? — “Not sure, maybe $1,000-$2000 a year, since it’s so expensive to live there”, she replied.

I then asked, how many people live in NYC? — She quickly looked up the answer on her iPhone, “… about 8.4 million.”

“Okay”, I said. “Six billion dollars is a lot of money for an individual like you and I. But to run the City of New York Police Department (NYPD)to support all of the officers, civilian staff, offices, cruisers, boats, helicopters, horses, and dogs do you think that’s still a lot of money?” — “Yes”, was her response.

Fair enough. Let’s look at the math.

$6,000,000,000 / 8,400,000 residents = $714.29 per resident per year

How does $714.29/year ($59.52/month) compare to the average person’s spend for other bills over the course of a year? — We looked at decisiondata.org where they claim, “The average household cable package is now $217.42 per month. The average household spends $205.50 per month on all major utilities combined (electricity, gas, water, sewage, garbage).” To be fair, the utilities are per household, not per resident and therefore not an apples-to-apples comparison. However, an argument could be made that $59/month is comparable to other necessities; the underlying question is, how do most people view police safety? — as a necessity, or a luxury like the cable bill?

So, what does your money support towards the $6 billion budget? — Quite a lot, actually.

Wikipedia shows the following for 2020…

Sworn officers: 38,421
Civilian employees: 19,000
Commands:
  77 precincts
  12 transit districts
  9 housing police service areas
Police cars: 9,624
Police boats: 11
Helicopters: 8
Horses: 45
Dogs: 34

One last discussion point we explored was, how big is New York City in comparison to other countries around the world? The purpose of which was to address the Public Citizen’s tweet stating NYC would be the 33rd largest military spend on the planet. To answer that question, we looked at worldometers.info [2020] which posts there are 101 countries and dependent territories with a population greater than 8.4 million people. And there are 134 countries and dependent territories which have a population less than 8.4 million people.

So some might say New York City is a fairly large footprint on the planet, based on population, and worthy of the budget in question.

You decide.

If nothing else, I trust you’ve found this article interesting and some of the data points insightful.