Give residency rules for cops no quarter here
Manhattan: Memo to Mayor Adams: Police officers in the NYPD are not assigned to precincts where they reside for good reason. This regulation is a good check on potential corruption and off-duty involvement in matters they should not be exposed to. The policy also provides a shield of safety for officers and their families. I don’t know how many people Eric Adams has arrested, but I can tell you that one of the last things officers want is for their children to be in school or in the same neighborhood as the people they have arrested or have constant enforcement issues with. They don’t want their families harassed, assaulted or put in harm’s way. They don’t want to have to constantly worry about who is behind them on line at the supermarket or sitting in the movie theater.
Residence requirements also severely limit your talent pool for recruitment and retention. When I was teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, I interviewed many minority single mom students who couldn’t wait to take the test and become members of the NYPD so they could pursue that nice home of their own in suburbia and raise their children in better school districts and environments than they themselves grew up in. Residency requirements fracture that dream. The way to recruit top talent in the NYPD is to break the silly parity formulas that exist in the city’s labor structure. It is no wonder that cops are leaving in droves for higher-salaried law enforcement jobs elsewhere. Considering the scope of their responsibilities, NYPD officers should be the highest-paid in the country!