Attorney: 'Abject Failure' of New York Police is No Time to Increase Their Budget, Power
'You need to explain what the 3,500 [subway] officers you have were doing,' Olayemi Olurin says
Former police officer and new New York City Mayor Eric Adams has already begun calls to give additional money to the municipality’s police department in the wake of this week’s mass shooting. New York resident and defense Attorney Olayemi Olurin says she saw this coming, and says that the city’s police department - already bloated with increased budgets and sweeping surveillance power and infrastructure - failed the people they are sworn to protect and so this is no time to increase their funding or power.
“We knew that Eric Adams would use this opportunity to ask for more police in the subways when, in fact, this is an abject reflection of police failure. Not only do we already put $10.4 billion into the NYPD, not only do we have 35,000 officers, but we have 3,500 officers committed to the subways alone and Eric Adams recently added a thousand more,” Olurin recently said on The Hill (video, below).
“And yet, they weren’t able to see this incident coming, prevent this incident, [or] even get a proper description. In fact, it was every day New Yorkers that were helping people that had been shot on the platform. It was every day New Yorkers who caught bystander video to even get them a description. What did [police] do, here? This is a failure.”
Rewarding New York’s police department with more power and cash for their complete failure leading up to, during, and after this recent mass-shooting makes no sense to Olurin.
“Instead of saying, ‘oh, we want to double the amount of police presence we have in subways,’ you need to explain what the 3,500 officers you have were doing. Why didn’t their cameras work? Why didn’t their phones work? It went as far as every day New Yorkers were told by police officers that were present on the platform - because their were police there that failed to do something - those police told them, ‘can you call 9-1-1, our radios don’t work,’” she recounts.
“All of the video cameras and security footage that we paid billions of dollars to be there didn’t work. There was no evidence that NYPD could find, yet every day civilians are who had to help the people who were being shot, who had to help the police to come up with suspects and that is a policing failure, not a call to get more police.”