Hey, I'm a 'busy' guy
Top cop: Why I used spy plane
Police Commissioner James O’Neill on Wednesday admitted that he has been shuttled around “three or four times” on the NYPD’s $4 million, federally funded spy plane and defended the use because he’s “busy.”
The top cop also said he was never once aboard the Cessna 208 Caravan for the counterterror business it is intended for.
“Me on a counterterror mission? No, that’s not my job,” he said at an unrelated press conference.
“The police commissioner has a very busy schedule, as you might appreciate. Sometimes to get to different places, we need to do it quickly.”
O’Neill last flew aboard the plane to attend the funeral of 29-year-old state trooper Nicholas Clark in western New York on July 8. “I went to the state trooper’s funeral to pay my respects,” he said.
Last year, O’Neill and other brass including Chief of Department Terence Monahan took the FEMA-funded plane to Pennsylvania for the wake of Dolores Boyce — the mother of then-Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce, The Post revealed Tuesday.
Monahan was chief of patrol at the time, and sources said Boyce was not aboard the flight.
The souped-up Cessna also shuttled Mayor de Blasio to and from his vacation in Canada when he returned to the city for several hours on July 5 to attend a street co-naming honoring slain NYPD Detec- tive Miosotis Familia.
The plane has not lifted off since, flight records show.
The city bought the plane using grant money from a FEMA Urban Areas Security Initiative. Its mission is patrolling the coast hunting for terrorists smuggling radioactive weapons into the United States.
O’Neill has said that the department never sought guidance from the feds about using the plane for transport, but that doing so was aboveboard.
“As far as using the plane, we did not see any obstacles. I don’t think there’s going to be pushback from Washington,” he said last week.
“We didn’t ask for clearance, and I haven’t heard from them.”
The department has claimed it followed FEMA grant guidelines while using the plane for transport but refused to provide The Post with a copy of the guidelines.
“The NYPD remains 100 percent confident that all department use has been fully appropriate,” NYPD spokesman Phil Walzak said in an email Wednesday when asked for a copy of the guidelines.
He later wrote, “Two percent of use has been for official travel. The other 98 percent of use has been for operations and training.”
FEMA confirmed it “is looking into the matter” after US Rep. Dan Donovan (R–Staten Island) sent a letter to FEMA grant-program administrator Thomas DiNanno asking for a probe.