November 29, 2011 02:20 AM UTC

The "Cost" Of Occupation--Legit Beef Or Hypocrisy On Parade?

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• by: Colorado Pols

An update from FOX 31’s Eli Stokols:

Mayor Michael Hancock’s office has finally tabulated the latest estimate of what the city will have to pay as a result of the ongoing Occupy Denver protests.

Since mid-October, when the mayor’s office first reported that the first month of protests would cost the city roughly $350,000, the city has spent an additional $431,500 through mid-November.

That puts the overall cost to taxpayers as of Nov. 20 at $782,689.

As AP reports nationally–lest you think tabulating this was Michael Hancock’s idea:

During the first two months of the nationwide Occupy protests, the movement that is demanding more out of the wealthiest Americans cost local taxpayers at least $13 million in police overtime and other municipal services, according to a survey by The Associated Press…

Broken down city by city, the numbers are more or less in line with the cost of policing major public events and emergencies. In Los Angeles, for example, the Michael Jackson memorial concert cost the city $1.4 million. And Atlanta spent several million dollars after a major snow and ice storm this year.

But the price of the protests is rising by the day – along with taxpayer ire in some places.

On a certain level, you can understand why mayors around the country are hyping the cost of “dealing with” Occupy Wall Street protests and encampments–it’s a recession, after all, budgets are tight everywhere. Extra funds spent on police overtime, administrative costs of jailing protesters, or damages to public property have to be covered out of either contingency funds or cuts elsewhere. So there’s that side of the argument.

On the other side, there’s the fact that cities routinely pay much more in security costs for all kinds of public events in their jurisdiction, from presidential visits to sports events to rock concerts. Even while the AP totals up the cost of policing Occupy protests around the country, it’s noted that these costs are not really all that higher than having Lady Gaga at the Pepsi Center.

Bottom line: we understand where these complaints are coming from. Police look menacing to protesters, but to bureaucrats, they’re just a line-item–even if a large, variable line-item, a bureaucrat’s worst nightmare. From a viewpoint even partly sympathetic to the protesters, however, or just an objective look at the relative costs of Occupy Denver versus other public events, this can pretty easily be made to look like hypocritical blame-gaming from Mayor Hancock. Especially when we read things like this report from 9NEWS:

Some of the money will be made up by officers ticketing drivers who honk as they pass by the protestors downtown. Denver Police are enforcing an old law which prohibits drivers to honk unless it’s an emergency situation…

After which it’s considerably harder to sympathize with Mayor “Honk and Wave.”