New York City police officers put their safety on the line today as they scrambled to preserve order and prevent rioting protesters from shutting down the New York Stock Exchange. This is what they got in exchange for doing their jobs:

A New York City police officer was slashed during Thursday’s “Occupy Wall Street” action—and a second cop was taken to a local hospital with an eye injury—after clashes between protesters and activists across Lower Manhattan, sources told FoxNews.com.

Disgraceful. Activists will claim that this was self-defense, but the truth is the police are the ones defending their fellow citizens and neighbors from the rioting mobs of extremists. Those weren’t the only injuries police sustained today, either:

Police said four officers went to a hospital after a demonstrator threw some kind of liquid in their faces. Many demonstrators were carrying vinegar as an antidote for pepper spray.

The liquid appeared to be vinegar, according to the New York Daily News, but with protesters claiming to have mixed up Molotov cocktails, there’s obviously a concern about what else they may have been concocting.

The attacks on police aren’t the only problem here. Creating mass public disturbances means that law enforcement has to devote valuable police resources from other areas of the city. Time and manpower that police could be spending on patrol and other crime prevention efforts is now shifted to monitoring and restraining OWS protesters—and many of the agitators probably aren’t even local residents.