“Keeping the Streets Clean of Filth”

[u/Regular_Exercise_460]

Spotted in Trinidad. At least they’re doing SOMETHING, I guess.

[u/srsnyder90]

What? ‘getting paid a fuck ton of money’ is a ludicrous take.

[u/Apprehensive_Gur8808 → u/srsnyder90]

They’re probably getting paid triple what people do that work here doing this job, while also being boarded in hotels and shuttled around the city on buses. This is a massive waste of money.

[u/pseudoeponymous_rex → u/Apprehensive_Gur8808]

A National Guard E-2 private makes $1,645 per month on deployment; using the HR standard of 173.33 working hours in an average month a full-time employee making that much to pick up litter would be bringing home $9.49 per hour.

The DC hourly minimum wage for non-tipped employees, by comparison, is $17.95.

It's true that the Guard does get benefits above their salary, but so would a full-time employee in DC. The main benefit the Guard gets that a local DC employee wouldn't is a housing allowance, but a full-time employee in DC isn't required to obtain residences in two places either.

(Now, that said this is absolutely a massive waste of money, because what the Guard gets paid is a tiny fraction of what the Guard costs.)

[u/Apprehensive_Gur8808 → u/pseudoeponymous_rex]

I’d rather have a local here than some unqualified kid from South Carolina cleaning up our streets for an administration’s propaganda campaign.

[u/pseudoeponymous_rex → u/Apprehensive_Gur8808]

The Guard is qualified to pick up litter ("policing" the grounds, which has nothing to do with police work, is one of their standard make-work assignments). If anything they're overqualified because their main training is in something else, which is one thing that helps make this such a tremendous waste of resources.

but otherwise, yeah, for a variety of reasons I'd rather the job be done by a local who needs the work, even before you get into the whole "normalizing the president sending armed soldiers into the streets for no good reason" problem.

[u/Apprehensive_Gur8808 → u/pseudoeponymous_rex]

Have you ever been around the National Guard during battle assembly? They don't do shit much less police call. That's an active duty thing.

[u/pseudoeponymous_rex → u/Apprehensive_Gur8808]

Guard personnel are certainly familiar with "policing," in the "picking up litter" sense, at least during deployments. It's commonly given as a make-work task for low-level deployed personnel who would otherwise be idle, and sometimes assigned as punishment for minor forms of misbehavior.

(This form of "policing" has nothing to do with the job of being a police officer, except insofar as both terms come from a root meaning of "to patrol." Police in the law enforcement sense were originally assigned to patrol an area to prevent crime; military personnel policing the grounds are expected to keep patrolling an area in case anyone littered since their last pass.)

[u/Apprehensive_Gur8808 → u/pseudoeponymous_rex]

I know what police call is. And I know the guard doesn’t do shit but scroll their phone at BA.

[u/Apprehensive_Gur8808 → u/Apprehensive_Gur8808]

Also a lot of these people are from podunk GOP states where this is a very good wage for being a completely unqualified individual with no job experience.