As for pulling police officers from their jobs, let us go to the source: Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said police officers will not be taken off storm-recovery duty to work the marathon. He said the estimated 2,000 officers on the marathon route come in on their days off, on overtime, while those on storm duty work extended shifts on their regular work days. – http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ny-mayor-criticized-not-canceling-marathon

Running the marathon also required pulling police officers from their jobs protecting the people who lost their homes, and the rescue effort to do crowd control.

As a Staten Island resident, the only bad decision was waiting until the 11th hour to cancel the race. The NYRR (which i am a member of) thoroughly embarrassed themselves and the NY Metro Area with their incipid comments in the aftermath of canceling the race.

despite there being no good reason on the planet to run the marathon and a million good ones not to, the New York Road Runners and the city insisted that the thing still go on, only to finally bow to common sense on Friday afternoon

Not true. There were actually 340 million reasons to run the race. The race brings an average of $340 million to NYC’s economy, a big help towards the recovery, and would have taken little to nothing away from the recovery effort. The big generators that were sitting in Central Park for the media that everyone was making a big deal about have now, predictably, gone back into storage and are not being used where they would be most useful in the recovery effort. All in all, by canceling the Marathon NY successfully kept itself from $340 million and gained nothing.