Monday’s unprovoked knife attack in Times Square was “a tragedy that will not soon be forgotten,” says Tom Harris, head of the Times Square Alliance. Sadly, he’s probably mistaken.
Page A4From§Eachthe midnight edition — 2 September 2026
NYPD officer charged with killing student at wrong door; department asks for more funding.
As it ran on the front
Here's how it works: a cop kills a college student who knocked on the wrong door, gets charged with manslaughter, and in the same week the op-ed page runs a piece arguing the department needs more money because 'mentally ill attacks' are the real problem. Not the door. Not the charge. Not the training. More money, same department, same budget line that just failed on camera.
Nobody in that op-ed asks what the last funding increase bought. Nobody asks what the one before that bought. The pitch is always the same pitch — give us more, and this time it'll be different — and the receipts on the last however-many increases just sit in a drawer somewhere that never gets opened before the next ask goes out. You don't get a manslaughter charge and a funding pitch in the same week from an institution that's fixing itself. You get that combination from an institution that's found a permanent revenue argument in its own failures.…
…(cont) This isn't a mystery, it's a business model. You don't fix the thing, you fund the thing, because the thing existing is the whole revenue stream. A department that solved its own problem would have a much harder time asking for a bigger check next year. So the problem gets to keep living, rent-free, in the budget request, right next to the memorial plaques and the heroism stories, because both of those run in the same news cycle too, and neither one requires anybody to explain the charge sheet sitting underneath it.
And notice what never shows up next to the funding ask: the number. Not how much the last increase was, not what it bought, not whether the training that was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of call ever got funded, delivered, or used. Just the ask, clean, every time, dressed as public safety.
You want to know who pays for this. Not the department. The kid who's dead. The family that gets a manslaughter case instead of an answer. And you, eventually, on whatever line item shows up next to your rent or your co-op fee, funding the same unexamined machine that just failed one more time, with a bow on it, because 'more funding' polls better than 'what happened to the last check.'
“A cop kills a kid at the wrong door, gets charged, and the very same week the ask is for more department funding — not answers, not reform, more money for the same unexamined machine. That's not a coincidence, that's the business model: fund the problem, don't fix it.”
“Every department needs adequate resourcing to handle mental health crises safely, and treating an isolated tragic incident as an indictment of the funding request itself conflates two separate issues. Separate. Mostly separate. Look, they're related, but the ask still stands.”
The receipts
A 22-year-old college baseball player was gunned down in Pennsylvania last week after knocking on the wrong door. On Tuesday, a 58-year-old police corporal was charged with manslaughter. Tom Hanson reports.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.