Take it from me kids, crime does not pay. No matter how many cars I ticket or unhoused people I harass, I’m stuck in this dead-end job, paid a paltry $100,000 salary.
How can they expect me to make ends meet? My pay hardly covers a spacious 3 bedroom apartment (one room for me and my unhappy wife, one for my kids who resent me, and one for framed photos of the Paw Patrol Dogs). My favorite delicacies – hot dogs, doughnuts, and lunchables – eat away at our already tight budget.
Without a raise, I’m afraid all I could do was lean into a life of crime. Not illegal crime, per se – but rather, extralegal crime. You know how much overtime I can clock as an officer of the “law?” To make ends meet, I’ve been pulling six-hour night shifts in “special combat training,” that is, poking those with nowhere to go until I have a very valid excuse to use the taser the department bought me. It’s even engraved: for Dante, you’re above the law. So sweet of them.
Those parking tickets you get so often in Berkeley? I actually get paid a commission on each one. It’s a lucrative game in a metropolis full of horrible drivers. I mean I’m one to talk, as a police officer “traffic laws” are what we call “chump suggestions.” Remarkably, even these traffic-citation-royalties generate what I’d call “chump change” compared to what I deserve.
I implore you, UC Regents, give me more money. Don’t you see all the good work I’ve been doing? Pestering students, imposing my impulses on campus, and breaking upholding the law? Can’t you cough up a couple more zeroes for a poor old 35-year-old with a buzzcut?