New York Spends $225 Million On Its Own “Cop City” — To Make The Whole City Run On Cops

A proposed New York training facility shows how establishment politicians only understand governance through policing.

By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced last Friday that the city would spend at least $225 million on a new police training facility in the borough of Queens. The mayor’s decision to pour further public funding into policing comes as he slashed services to the city’s most vulnerable, including cutting library budgets by $58.3 million.

The priorities could not be clearer. Like many politicians across the country, the mayor wants to disinvest from public services and privatize them, while instead increasing mass policing and carceral enforcement as a response to social problems.

To see just how much Adams has become the paragon of governance through policing, one need only look at the intended purposes of the police training facility. The site will be used to train law enforcement officers for all the city’s agencies — including the departments of Sanitation, Homeless Services, the Administration for Children’s Services, and the Taxi and Limousine Commission — under one roof, alongside New York Police Department officers.