The Latest Online Campaign for Police Reform Is Literally A ‘Seinfeld’ Joke
When police officers say that they want to “clean up the streets,” are they really willing to put their money where their badges are?
Despite how the series masterfully satirized the mundane insanity of daily life in New York during the 1990s, the beloved sitcom Seinfeld was never the show where viewers would go for overt political commentary — at least, not in regards to the issues that made national headlines. No, the hot-button topics that Seinfeld tackled were of the profoundly local variety, such as the fascistic rule of a New York soup restaurant or the demands of strikers at a specific bagel shop. The characters of Seinfeld never debated the decisions they would make in the ballot box, but if the personal is truly political, then, in its own subtle way, Seinfeld was one of the most opinionated and politically active shows of all time, just so long as the colored icing on a cookie can encapsulate your entire ethos.
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However, every now and then, Seinfeld would playfully put forth an actual, actionable policy objective that still resonates to this day among the politically motivated, as was the case in the all-time classic episode “The Chinese Restaurant” when George, Jerry and Elaine debated the relative importance of garbage men and police officers. Today, nearly 34 years later, Jerry’s idea to combine the duties of New York’s finest and New York's filthiest is finally picking up some steam. Is it time for him to revisit his mayoral aspirations?
According to New York City's Independent Budget Office, the city devotes 10 percent of its annual budget to public safety while only a measly 2 percent of the $100 billion in yearly spending goes to sanitation. Now, George Costanza obviously doesn’t speak for all New Yorkers, but, really, does anyone in the Big Apple actually believe that cleaning the streets of crime is an effort that’s five times more valuable than literally cleaning the streets when so much of the money devoted to the former is just overtime pay for cops playing Candy Crush on subway platforms?
And, honestly, George’s point that we’ll never put an end to crime is one worth interrogating when the goals of the New York City Department of Sanitation are much more achievable, so long as a couple extra public employees are willing to pull up their sleeves and start sweeping. I mean, everyone in New York has seen a pair of cops sitting in their patrol car staring at their phones, but you never really see garbagemen take a break at the curb to check Instagram, now do you?
Plus, in an age when the public’s trust in law enforcement is tenuous at best, cops could clean up their image as well as their city if they simply took Jerry’s advice and used the down time in between crime-fighting to tidy up a bit. The overdue library books will still be there when Lieutenant Bookman is done with the broom.
