 So last week NYPD News tweeted out something and then they quickly deleted it after realizing it was a bad idea after people told them tweeting this was a pretty bad look. Thankfully somebody had screenshotted what they put out there into the universe that they deliberately thought people should know about and this is what they tweeted. After receiving numerous larceny complaints in the Bronx, officers from NYPD's 44th precinct recently arrested 12 individuals following an enforcement initiative targeting shoplifters. The arrests may lead to the closure of 23 warrants and the recovery of $1,800 worth of merchandise. And of course the merchandise in question is essential items like cold medicine, diapers, laundry detergent, baby formula, soap, diaper wipes and other essential things. Now let's pause for a moment and ask ourselves why in particular would anyone steal these items? These are essential items so perhaps there's some underlying issue that is leading to people being desperate enough to shoplift diapers and baby wipes and soap. It's poverty obviously. So they confiscated these stolen items and they're bragging about it as if they cracked some massive criminal case. These are people who would not steal likely if they weren't so desperate. When you get to the point where you're stealing basic items, essential items like soap and diapers or bread, something of that nature, groceries that says more about society itself than the people who are doing the shoplifting. And AOC pointed this out saying when I talk about violent conditions this is what I mean. But hey it's much easier to frame people who steal baby formula and medicine as monsters to be jailed than acknowledge our politics and economic priorities, create conditions where people steal baby formula to survive. Child tax credit expired December 31 and it was many people's lifeline to feed and clothe their kids. Politicians let it expire overnight with a shrug but now want to feed into the sensationalism around crime acting like shoplifting has nothing to do with their actions. Wild. Yeah, now she's exactly correct about this. Now I don't know what the response was to this tweet from Republicans if they even acknowledged it but you know it's nice to have a politician who's willing to say this because we know exactly what the inevitable response will be from right-wingers and even some neoliberal Democrats. How could you say this? You're basically condoning theft. People don't steal essential items if they don't have to. They know that there is an inherent risk and there's a reporter from The Hill who says that two of the people arrested for this, they're both living in a homeless shelter. One of them is a woman in her 60s so she's likely stealing for somebody else so that way they don't get into trouble because she knows how much they need it. This is sad to let people get to this point where they have to steal. That is a failure of our society that shows how ruthless our late-stage capitalist dystopia is. Now there's a couple of tweets that really show exactly why our priorities as a culture are so messed up. Joshua Potash writes, seeing the NYPD tweet about getting stolen diapers, formula, and baby food off our streets, then seeing that Eric Adams wants to cut every department budget except the NYPD is a good summary of how we fund police instead of basic human needs. And Alec Corract Sanis writes, the two images that best describe the budget priorities of the US police bureaucracy. Alabama cops celebrating a fun quilt they made from the signs of unhoused people begging for money and NYPD bragging about executing 23 warrants to seize shop-lifted diapers. And just stop for a moment and look at this so-called quilt. This is how cops view poverty. This is what they think of the unhoused. They think it's funny. This is what they focus on. Rather than going after violent criminals or people in power who are committing financial crimes, this is who they're focusing on. You know, they say that the police are there to protect and serve, and that's correct, but just not you. They're there to protect and serve capital, protect and serve property of elites. Now, one thing that Congress could have done as AOC alluded to is extend the child tax credit, and they did not do that. And as a result, well, we've seen a rise in poverty and that's leading to this. So as Common Dreams explains, as Common Dreams reported earlier February, child poverty spiked by 41% in the US in January. The first month since July 2021 that eligible families didn't receive the expanded child tax credit. Since all 50 Senate Republicans and corporate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin allowed the popular $300 monthly benefit to lapse. At least 3.7 million children have been plunged into poverty. Now this doesn't even take into account the expiration of the moratorium on evictions, the limited number of survival checks that Americans got compared to other developed countries. You know, the hazard pay that workers were required to get at the beginning of the pandemic when we actually claimed that we valued the lives of essential workers. I mean, if the Senate just expanded the child tax credit for another year or at least at the very minimum throughout the duration of the pandemic until COVID reached endemic status, that would have made a difference. It wouldn't have been the end all be all, but it would have made a meaningful difference, but they didn't do that. We're choosing instead to prioritize the criminalization of poverty. So when people talk about defunding the police, you know, you can argue about the efficacy of that slogan and whether or not it's politically toxic. The substance of that slogan is really important. The need to actually reallocate resources and cities into fighting poverty itself rather than fighting the impoverished is very important. Because rather than, you know, criminalizing homelessness, if we provided housing to the unhoused, rather than criminalizing people who commit theft and shoplift, if we provided food and resources to these people, you understand the difference that that would make. But in our ruthless late-stage capitalist society, we don't prioritize that. We don't care about people. It's every person for themselves. And if you, you know, get left behind, if you become desperate, then that's your own fault. It's just, it's really, it's sickening, it's gross, but it's entirely what you can expect when your government just refuses to do the bare minimum to protect its citizens.