I am cop, hear me roar

Do you want to kill Patrolman Adam Baker? Are you coldblooded enough to whip out a box cutter, slash him in the neck and watch him bleed out before your eyes? Can you live with yourself by letting all the fucking crazies at Four Winds run roughshod across Saratoga Springs, raping and pillaging at their leisure? Will you stand by idly while the strolling masses attending the Victorian Street Walk this year are hacked into itty-bitty bite sized pieces as they attempt to enjoy this goddamn Christ-loving Democracy of ours? Are you in for a bit of the old, ultraviolence?

Well if you’ve answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you’re probably the brand of sick-o fighting against the more than 25,000 hours of police overtime doled out by the Public Safety Department this year. Or you’re just flat-out unpatriotic; maybe the commie-type freak who likes hunting bald eagles and roasting their gutted bodies over a fire stoked with bibles and fanned with a shit-stained American flag.

Residents of Saratoga Springs, take heed: If you cut the police overtime, you’ll all face a grisly demise at the scarred hands of the barbarian hordes, which now bang their clubs at the heavily fortified gates of the city. Move one officer from these entrances, and they’ll all come in for sure. They’ll be reclining in your baraclounger and chugging your aged Chianti collection like it were a case of the finest Pabst Blue Ribbon money can buy.

Your only salvation –your only way to remain free in America –is to dump out your wallet at the Lake Avenue police station and pray to Police Chief Ed Moore. Give him what he wants, and it’s not much. Just hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime and a new, $17 million dollar police station for his officers to rollick in when they’re not hitting on the Skidmore chicks or corn-holing the Caroline Street drunks.

Not convinced yet? Well then take Lew Benton’s word for it. Because if there’s one thing the city’s patronage sponge knows, it’s how to suck up tax dollars like the Bounty quicker-picker-upper. And hey, we’re all making out like bandits because of our vastly overvalued homes, right? We can all afford to pay just a bit more during these trying times, Benton told the Daily Gazette Tuesday.

Yes, the fear campaign is in full effect now, as anyone who sat through Moore’s two-hour presentation Tuesday could attest. The fact that he tried to justify his department’s rampant overspending is grounds for termination in most lines of work. But the fact that he prattled on from the early afternoon until the mid-evening is grounds for him to be throw into a center-square pillory for a week or two.

It would have helped if Moore’s presentation echoed with an ounce of truth. Instead, he fear-mongered the city council with the panicky 911-call placed after Baker was slashed in the throat by Seth Dawson, a fellow who wasn’t keen on his mother admitting him to an out-patient mental health clinic. His sick and twisted implication: Absent overtime payments to the police, who knows if he would have survived?

Well, let’s set the record straight. Were it not for a quick-acting 13-year-old girl giving Baker a towel to thwart at least some of the bleeding from his mortal gash, the outcome would have been a lot different. Even Moore himself credited the youngster’s actions with saving the officer’s life. At least he did one year ago.

But with the conversation on overtime, the credit quickly shifted to the veritable invasion force that crowded Jefferson Street to apprehend a mental patient on the loose. Were it not for police overtime, there would have been no one at the station able to help the badly injured Baker, Moore seemed to imply; there would have been no evidence collected, and it is likely Dawson would still be slashing his way through downtown to date.

Of course, the key word is ‘imply.’ And Moore’s speech had no shortage of implications if he doesn’t get his way. The main one was that the Spa City will somehow descend into the throngs of a crime wave without an inflated level of police overtime.

The less spoken message is that Moore is literally poised to hold the city ransom for more funding. First, he’s going to bang the taxpayers for an over-budgeted $11 million “public safety” facility, which will ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain. Then, he’s going to have Public Safety Pushover Ron Kim stamp a new police contract that will earn his officers a very comfortable living when they do work regular hours. Lastly, he’ll push through the overtime component, so those on the bottom rungs of the pay scale can net what most other departments pay only their high-ranking senior officers.

True, safety is a key component of a healthy downtown. But to consider Saratoga Springs a high- or even moderate-crime area is just mind-boggling. Thanks to ridiculously high property taxes –ironically spurred in part by police overtime –the criminal element simply can’t afford to live here, much less ply their trade. Increasingly, it seems what the department is taking home in pay is the real criminal element in the city. And it seems this cash could be better allocated than being used to stock an over-sized station with 10 times the number of cops needed to take down a 130-pound hyper-paranoid razor-wielding anti-authoritarian.