The New York City Police Department will see the worst budget cuts in decades, threatening the city’s public safety after Mayor Eric Adams proposed cuts to every department to offset millions of dollars drained from the migrant crisis.
Adams said the next five police academy classes will be canceled, reducing the number of officers from 33,000 to 29,000 in the next two years. The city’s police department will be below 30,000 for the first time since the 1980s. According to the Adams administration, the NYPD’s $5.6 billion budget will be cut by about $132 million next year.
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A second round of budget cuts was sent to the City Council last week, but Adams will spare the NYPD, FDNY, and Department of Sanitation. Leaving out major departments from the cuts will force the administration to make major cuts to migrant services. The City Council has yet to approve the first round of cuts, which will slash every city department’s budget by 5% and will have to decide on the second round as well.
Adams has already received blowback from the city’s law enforcement over the budget cuts, which will result in a major hiring freeze, sounding the alarm over a potential decline in public safety.
“In essence, NYPD is being defunded,” retired Lt. Randy Sutton, founder of The Wounded Blue, told the Washington Examiner. “That’s the reality of the decision that Mayor Adams has taken. As a result of that, the public safety is going to be more and more jeopardized.”
Sutton founded The Wounded Blue, an organization that helps injured or disabled police officers through healing services. Sutton, a retired lieutenant who served for 10 years as a police officer in the state of New Jersey and 24 years with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, said the cuts are cause for concern as the city experiences a high rate of violent crimes.
Overall, New York City’s total major crimes spiked by 22.4% last year, up from 103,388 incidents in 2021 to 126,537 in 2022. End-of-the-year statistics from the NYPD showed murders were down 11.1%, but other crime is up in categories of rapes, robberies, felony assaults, burglaries, grand larcenies, and grand larceny autos.
“When you have so few cops to police so many people in an area the size of New York that has seen some incredible rises of violent crime. Well, that means more cops are going to get hurt, and we’re seeing it right now,” Sutton said.
However, five of the seven most serious crime categories declined in the first six months of 2023. The latest data collected from the NYPD shows murders, rapes, and burglaries are each down 10% compared to last year.
The NYC Democratic Socialists of America have called on leaders to defund the police, pushing their calls amid the Black Lives Matter movement and through police violence against minorities, but said they don’t support a 5% cut to every city department’s budget.
“NYC-DSA has long supported public safety as an important priority and goal for the working people of New York City,” NYC-DSA said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “We do not support a budget that cuts 5% across all city agencies and disproportionally hurts our most vulnerable communities.”
“Public safety includes fully funded social services, fire, sanitation, parks, public education, public libraries, CUNY and MTA. We condemn budget cuts that pit working-class New Yorkers against each other whether they’re seeking asylum or already live here — we have to fund the city that meets the needs of everyone,” NYC-DSA added.
A Jewish organization for racial and economic justice, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), said despite the NYPD budget reductions, the department will still be receiving billions of dollars while other agencies have a much lower budget and are still undergoing cuts, such as housing, workforce development, harm reduction, combating poverty, education, and healthcare.
“The Mayor’s mismanagement of our city has been so disastrous that he’s no longer able to spare the NYPD from budget reductions as he sought to do in the past. But to be clear, the NYPD is still receiving billions while other critical services are egregiously underfunded,” JFREJ said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “In recent days, the NYPD has decided to spend $390 million (which amounts to almost the entirety of the public library budget) on an encrypted radio system to replace their public radios, which provided key evidence about Officer Daniel Pantaleo’s killing of Eric Garner.”
Sutton emphasized that not enough people respect officers these days, citing a specific example last week when two NYPD officers were assaulted after asking a group to stop smoking their cigarettes at the Freeman train station in the Bronx. Sutton said with fewer police officers on duty, the streets will become “even bloodier places.”
“This shows a diminishment in the respect and also a diminishment in the fearful consequences that is now permeating the city of New York’s criminal justice system,” Sutton said.
“You add the no bail, low bail insanity that has been put into place by the governor and the state legislature, and you have the results that are coming,” Sutton added. “As less and less police officers are available to police that city, it is going to become even more and more exacerbated, and the streets are going to become even bloodier places.”
Four years ago, New York state implemented a law that essentially eliminates cash bail in most cases involving misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.
Sutton also called out a “failure to retain people on a level that we’ve never seen in policing history.” Police departments nationwide are experiencing declining forces, which Sutton said is due to counties and cities making it “unattractive to become a cop” to the point that they “can’t even hire anyone.”
Across the nation, The Los Angeles Police Department has only 8,995 police officers as of August, making it the smallest the force has been since the 1990s. Over two decades ago, the LAPD saw a record high of 9,895 officers, and then-Chief Bill Bratton called those numbers too low for policing the size and population of the city.
For months, New York City leaders have blamed the Biden administration and the federal government for not providing enough support as the city faces an increasingly expensive migrant crisis.
“I tell people all the time when they stop me on the subway system ‘don’t yell at me, yell at D.C. Yell at D.C.’ We deserve better as a city,” Adams said at a town hall Monday. “D.C. has abandoned us, and they need to be paying their cost to this national problem.”
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The city was accommodating at least 130,000 migrants as of mid-October, according to the Adams administration, which has led to a drainage of resources leading to major budget cuts.
“Law enforcement is facing a crisis like we’ve never seen before. This is the perfect storm of a public safety crisis,” Sutton said. “You have the lack of a commitment by the federal state, county, and city governments to take law enforcement seriously. And instead of putting policies and laws into place that create an environment for safety, they have done just the opposite. They have passed laws that don’t allow the police to police.”
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