Lip Service To America’s Heroes

Don’t let the Democrats fool you with all their talk of a “massive federal deficit” and the crippling cuts in health and education. This country, my friends, is rolling in dough, and I don’t just mean the $87 billion more that will go to fund George W. Bush’s favorite virtual reality video-game, “Where in the World Is Saddam Hussein,” where W. bumbles through an international geography puzzle looking for Saddam who, with the help of Osama Bin Laden, has made off with WMDs. No, this government has so much money that it has just given preliminary approval for $650 million dollars in Liberty Bonds—the tax-free funding intended to help lower Manhattan recover from the Sept. 11 attacks—for a new office building in midtown, of all places. There is so much money in fact, that this 8-figure handout is practically a drop in the Liberty Bond bucket, which is giving away billions of dollars so that, among other things, more luxury apartments can be built downtown, and so that The New York Times—the venerable, and profitable, paper—can move into fancy new digs at the taxpayers expense. Good to see that heroes of Sept. 11, Wall Street yuppies looking for a shorter commute and newspaper magnates, are being treated well.

Let’s compare this, if you will, to the current plight of the real heroes of 9/11. I’ll admit that to this day in New York City people still wave at fire trucks when they drive by and are actually nice to the police officers they see on the street. My father, himself a Massachusetts police officer, was given something of a hero’s welcome by New Yorkers when he and his fellow officers visited the World Trade Center site over a year ago. “I don’t know if they realized we were from Massachusetts and didn’t do anything during the attacks, but it was fun and I wasn’t going to tell them,” he told me afterwards.

These are of course long overdue thanks for a group of public servants who, maybe because they are blue-collar workers who don’t necessarily have big salaries or college degrees, don’t get the respect they deserve. It is a sentiment that has come from the top down in American civic life, as politicians like President Bush quickly jumped on the praise bandwagon for police and firefighters. Yet in a move not uncharacteristic of U.S. politicians in general and the Bush administration in particular, the “common” men and women of the New York Police Department (NYPD) and New York Fire Department have been honored with little more than lip service.

The NYPD has been essentially operating for the last three years without a new contract and had to organize a large protest in Times Square last summer just to get a retroactive contract for the previous two years, but which did not extend into the future. A police officer I was talking to on the New York subway this summer said he almost hopes that they don’t have a new contract by next summer so that they can have another rally during the Republican National Convention.

“The Giuliani administration and Bloomberg administration have paid lip service to the police officers of this city,” Policeman’s Benevolent Association spokesperson Joseph Mancini said three weeks ago. “The police force is getting smaller too, they’ve lost some 4,000 cops over four years because of recruitment and retention problems.”

Mancini said that the NYPD offers $34,514 starting salaries, among the lowest for large metropolitan forces in the country. Meanwhile this smaller, less experienced force has been asked to work harder covering everything from traffic accidents to counter-terrorism, to give up vacation days for further training in these far-flung fields, and all this without proper equipment or a contract.

With negotiations heating up between the city and its labor force, including teachers, police and firefighters, Mayor Bloomberg threw down the gauntlet last month at a meeting of the Municipal Labor Committee, saying that there would be no pay increases for the city’s workers without productivity increases. This comment comes as part of a proud tradition of comments from the Bloomberg administration concerning the productivity of city workers that started with Deputy Mayor Marc V. Shaw’s calls last year to close several firehouses and his comment that city firefighters were inefficient because they only fought fires 5 percent of the time they were on duty and “are hanging around doing nothing the other 95 percent of the time.”

Police officers’ wages, though, are not just a problem in New York or the fault of the Bloomberg Administration. At the same time as the Bush administration is demanding rigorous and expensive training for police and firefighters on how to prevent terrorism and to save lives in the event of an attack, it is cutting the very funds that go to pay for such measures.

Like police and firefighters, the soldiers in Iraq Bush so often calls heroes need only visit a local Veteran’s Hospital or look at the government’s refusal to acknowledge the damage of Gulf War Syndrome to see just how much the government takes its own cries of “Support the Troops” to heart. It’s time for our political officials—city, state and federal—to put their money where their mouths are and do more to celebrate those who risk their lives for a living than buy them off with hollow praise. That, or let’s hope a giant speed trap staffed by the contract-less members of the NYPD awaits the buses of the Republican Party’s Antiquarian Road Show come convention-time next summer. Preferably somewhere in Harlem.

Joe Flood ’04 is an English concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.