Police staffing lows are back from the ’90s like baggy jeans and graphic tees. Earlier this month, city officials projected the NYPD force numbers will decline to below 30,000 by the fiscal year of 2025 due to the planned postponement of the next five incoming classes. That would mark the fewest officers since the mid-1990s.
The projection stems from budgets across city agencies announced on November 16, which officials attribute to costs incurred from the city’s migrant situation—the estimated price tag currently stands at $12 billion by the fiscal year of 2025.
There were 33,822 NYPD officers at the end of last year, according to the department’s census, of which 5,311 identified as Black. The cuts also coincide with increased rates of retiring veteran cops.
Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), the union representing most NYPD uniformed officers, warned the cuts would undermine public safety gains made in the past few decades.
“This is truly a disaster for every New Yorker who cares about safe streets,” he said in an email statement. “Cops are already stretched to our breaking point, and these cuts will return us to staffing levels we haven’t seen since the crime epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s. We cannot go back there. We need every level of government to work together to find a way to support police officers and protect New York City’s 30 years of public safety progress.”
Brooklyn College professor of sociology and author of “The End of Policing” Alex Vitale has suggested that the city should implement civilian alternatives to some police responses to mental health crises, low-level drug enforcement, and routine traffic safety stops—practices he deems as “ineffective and potentially harmful.”
Vitale also contends that there is no clear connection between the number of police and public safety, pointing to the Bloomberg administration years. In 2000, there were 40,435 sworn NYPD officers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. After Mike Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, the numbers steadily declined. By the time he left office at the end of 2013, the department sat at just 34,584 officers, according to the NYPD. All the while, crime numbers waned as well.
“One thing to keep in mind is that part of what turns out to really be of concern to a lot of people is not what we would consider serious crime—it’s actually a low-level disorder or so-called quality of life issues,” said Vitale. “What’s happened is that in the absence of appropriate city-delivered or community-delivered services for high-needs populations, people have defaulted to expecting the police to manage things like homelessness, people having a mental health crisis, people with substance use issues, [and] low-level street disputes.
“And so they imagine that if we dial back the availability of police to manage these quality-of-life issues, that we’ll have chaos in the streets.”
Both Black and white unformed force numbers declined since the Bloomberg administration while the NYPD census tallied a marked increase in the number of officers identifying as Hispanic and Asian.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice adjunct professor Keith Taylor said the delayed class elevates an existing crisis to a catastrophe, with the NYPD already struggling to replace outgoing cops. The ex-NYPD officer said that while the department can stem gradual force number declines with burgeoning technological innovation and reconfiguration of units, there are bigger challenges to handling such an abrupt reduction. Ultimately, he contended, crime numbers will reflect the decrease of cops in a negative fashion.
“The last time we had a loss of officers of this significance was in the 1970s, during the city’s fiscal crisis, and the consequence of that—regarding lawlessness, crime, the abandonment of the city by businesses and individuals—took many years to recover from,” said Taylor. “It’s really a major threat to New York City’s way of life.
“For the department itself, it also means that officers will not have as much career flexibility, they won’t be able to get promoted as much, and so everything will slow down: Transfers will slow down [and cops will leave] for better opportunities, better pay, or [because of] frustration with the job.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.