NEWARK
BLUES
HUFFINGTON
08.05.12
Local children play in the midst of a police operation on summer day in Newark.
the city’s police union. DeMaio says
the arrangement also ruffled feathers in a department long resistant to
change. Either way, it is a policy that
is here to stay.
“We’re going to have to keep on
doing that, because the department
is going to keep on shrinking down,
until we start to do some more hiring,
and that’s not anywhere in the fore-
seeable future,” he says.
During the previous three major
recessions, under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George
W. Bush, the public sector grew, as
municipalities, states and the federal government boosted spending to
stimulate the economy and offset the
decline in private employment. But
not this time around. At every level of
government, payrolls are shrinking,
often dramatically. Federal economic
data show that at least 600,000 pub-