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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

This is correct, and to elaborate: the NYPD (1) is largely staffed by employees who live outside of the city, and (2) has an openly revanchist attitude towards the citizens they ostensibly protect and serve.

Under the current scheme, there is no incentive structure that "fixes" the NYPD; the NYPD is functioning as intended, and in broad conflict with the roles that constrain every other NYC civil servant (e.g., around living in the city).

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> by employees who live outside of the city

I think that's addressed in Cop Land (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118887/). Excellent movie.

Can NYPD police officers even reasonably afford living in NYC?

Indeed.com reports an average salary of 82k a year for NYPD officers, 49% above what it considers the average annual income in the US.

I recently looked into moving to NYC and was shocked to see prices similar to my middle of nowhere, significantly lower quality city. I could work in a pizzeria and live in NYC, this "it's too expensive" is really a suburban view of the sqft.

So why don't the civil servants making four times as much armed with lethal weapons live there?

Frankly, I'm amazed they consider it worth the commute to live outside the city.

It seems to be a policy thing across the nation to have police not live in the communities they police. Part of it I'm sure is some amount of fear of retribution but I think it's really to avoid the officers from developing empathy towards the community members. I recall years ago my roommate working at a fast food restaurant and he advanced to manager level and they immediately moved him from the store he worked at to another to make sure he was more detached with his underlings and it seems like a similar tactic.

It's more a reflection of the general trend for middle-class folks in the US to flee to the suburbs, plus the fact that a cop job generally makes one middle-class (in both directions: the weeding process of getting hired tends to exclude the lower classes, and the pay scale tends to make one able to afford a middle-class dwelling arrangement).

Not only USA.

which doesn't include the overtime (which for nypd was 2.2 billion last year https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/overtime-overview/ )

> I could work in a pizzeria and live in NYC, this "it's too expensive" is really a suburban view of the sqft.

Not everyone enjoys living in a shoe box or having a dozen roommates, for instance, and not everyone enjoys living in big cities either. Suburbs are amazing, despite what all the big city folks will tell you.

$82k a year in NYC is not amazing by any stretch. Could you realistically work in a pizzeria ($30k-$50k) and have a fulfilled life? Of course - but you will not be living well. There is a difference.

> 49% above what it considers the average annual income in the US.

You're comparing one of the highest cost of living areas with a national average. That's a very wrong comparison, and conclusion to make.

Yes[1]. Millions of people survive in this city on salaries far below the average (and even starting) NYPD salaries, even before you factor in overtime.

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-ben...

Police officers are some of the most well paid workers in the country, they make insane amount off overtime on top of already comfortable salaries

and get a well funded pension with many cops retiring in their late 40s to early 50s.

yeah they get paid a decent middle class salary. Can they afford a nice apartment in the West Village? No. Can they afford a nice 3BR/2BA in a decent neighborhood in Brooklyn/Queens/Bronx/Staten Island if their partner is also a civil servant like a teacher? I think so yes.

(not that teachers shouldn't get paid more, they should)

Many NYPD officers own super cars and have unusually high salaries. They leech money off the communities they lord over. They are an organized gang of criminals.

This is not unique to the NYPD. Without dox'ing myself I have first-hand experience working with a police officer who drove a GT-R worth more than they made in a year on paper. Maybe he had family money, maybe he had saved a bunch of money from earlier in his career getting overtime on the street. But it certainly wasn't a good look regardless.

If you consider Staten as part of the city, then yeah :/

"Revanchist"? What territory did they ever posses and lose? What exactly would be the revanche here?

"Revanchist"? What territory did they ever posses and lose? What would be the revanche?

Revanchism doesn't require physical territory, only a sense of loss and a corresponding drive for revenge.

The NYPD sees itself as an occupying force in a hostile city. What they've lost (or believe they've lost) is the respect of the natives; rather than questioning why that is, they've decided that the appropriate course of action is to extract all the value they can from the city while diminishing the natives' qualities of life to the greatest extent possible. Revanchism is the appropriate descriptor.

Even if taken as a general "sense of loss" what did they lose? They didn't lose anything. They weren't "defunded", there was no structural reform or consents decrees. The protests stopped and it went back to business as usual for them. In fact as of last week they exceeded their already notorious annual overtime budget by 100 million dollars![1]][2]

Again what loss do they to avenge exactly?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blow...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-...

Quoting relevant part of comment you just replied to:

> What they've lost (or believe they've lost) is the respect of the natives;

I'm sorry but "the natives"? That's a hollow cliche. What does that mean? Just native New Yorkers? Because it's a city of transplants and immigrants. Tense relations between citizens and NYPD is not new. See Amodou Diallo, the 2004 Republican National Convention protests, "Stop and Frisk", Eric Garner, the list spans many decades. People also realize that realize that crime and public safety are a concern and that police have an important job. The tension between police and residents has been a near constant for decades. It ebbs and flows and there's fundamentally no more or and no less respect now.

"Natives" was just a euphemism for residents.

I don't know why you're performing such a hostile reading: it can be simultaneously true that tension for police and residents has been present for decades, and that the police have shed a degree of respect and baseline approval that they've historically held[1], regardless of whether that approval was ever actually justified.

Which is what has happened[2].

[1]: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/205619.pdf

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/us/gallup-poll-police.htm...

There's nothing euphemistic about it at all. It bizarre to me that you seem to be going out of your way for specific word selection but then you go on to use those words incorrectly. It makes for confusing reading which is where my original question came. There's nothing "hostile" about asking for clarification.

It's the second definition[1], and a common use in English.

The euphemism was more subtle, but is also a known one[2].

I'm sorry if you found either confusing; that wasn't my goal.

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/revanchist

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2612677

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