Because the New York Police Department "is the cornerstone on which the city’s economic viability depends," current staffing cuts must be reversed, argues Heather MacDonald in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. If crime starts going up and stays up, she says, the entrepreneurs who still plan to open restaurants and retail stores in the near future should radically recalibrate their chances of economic success, and "the city could see the mass exodus of residents and businesses of the 1970s and 1980s start up again."
Whoppingly large police pensions, along with those of other city employees, are bankrupting the city and burdening the police department, MacDonald says. The proposed raising officers’ salaries and lowering their pension expectations. The most creative response to the recession, she says, would be to turn the entire city into a so-called crime Impact Zone by greatly increasing the police department’s size. The impact program shows that officers on the beat, deployed according to rigorous and ongoing crime analysis, can suppress outdoor crime beyond what the department has already achieved citywide, MacDonald concludes,
