Earnest question here. I got offered a job with public works inventory management for a city. I thought it would be limited to just public works, but it also includes inventory for the police fleet. Part of applying was to salt for the municipal workers union. Would doing inventory management partially for cop cars make me a pig?
I have hired dis cat to smell u and he says yes, u stonky
Oh no the cat’s never wrong
Am so sorry u had to find out like dis
If you smell like bacon you may be on fire.
You can do bad inventory management and order shoddy parts. Order from the slowest, sloppliest suppliers and treat their salespeople like shit so they don’t want to work with you. Work to rule on all maintence requestions.
I’m bad at treating people poorly but I’m really good at being sloppy
Yeah, do the job real half-assed when it comes to the fuzz
Maybe even quarter-assed
Dare i say perhaps the mythical eighth-assed
Just enough so you don’t get fired, but enough so that they have problems
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Eighth-assed is my middle name
My opinion: not quite, but you’re getting up against the borderline. You can get “creative” with it if you want, but more importantly do good work in the other aspects of the job and salt the union and you’ll have more than made up for any “sins” you may commit.
Just do your job badly
It puts you in a position where you can prevent them from doing creative accounting.
That’s true. I can police the police. That’s good, right? On that note, are internal affairs officers bastards?
You are working for the municipality at large. Doesn’t an IAO work under the chief of police?
Yeah I’m not talking about my job offer here, I’m just curious if IAO counts as bastards
is inventory info already public? in addition to salting (cool af), maybe a journalist could just happen to publish a “we spent $x on bearcats” piece during your tenure
If it’s just inventory management for cop cars does this mean you’re just tracking make, model etc for each vehicle?
This sounds like a great way to learn what is useful about such a thing for the cops and then subtly disrupt it in favor of the people. I recommend taking the job and giving yourself a learning phase where you get a handle on what is what and how this information is actually used.
For example, if it really is about fleet management then it’s probably about oil changes and that kind of crap. Tracking this info is mostly about saving money for the city and so they might quickly trace problems back to you so this is more subtle than simply helping cops or throwing a wrench in their operations by doing a bad job. You’l want to ask tactical questions. What happens if a specofic kind of info is missing? Late? Wrong? What if it is tracked better, with a high degree of fidelity and timeliness? Is anything hidden from budgeting? The public? Could it be revealed?
I would bet that most info is relatively neutral or will take serious thinking to evaluate. Let’s say you find a way to make life more expensive for the police department. What happens next? Well, this depends on your city council. Will they simply increase the police budget? If someone removes the wrench you threw in, will the cops’ budget decrease or will you have effectively just helped increase the police budget that they can use for buying tactical gear and covering up their crimes?
The power to overtly and coherently fight the police lies in political organization. In preventing city council from increasing the police budget. If you make the PD more expensive at the same time that city council refuses to increase its budget, you will have done good work. If you do this when they will increase its budget, you might have just de facto defunded a good program, as city councils will usually shift money around to fund cops.
So I recommend learning as much as you can and being strategic. You are probably not helping cops very much in the first place but as you understand the role better you might be able to hurt them in the right way at the right time, messing with their budget. You’ll also get a lens into how the city really operates and can do that salting work that is probably far more impactful. It is a more strategic path to hurt police budgets by having a powerful union to advocate against cuts to any other department. And to do things like kick cop unions out of union coalitions.
