NYPD set to blow past budget cap

Gotham’s top budget watchdog projected Tuesday that the NYPD will exceed its new overtime cap by $400 million, effectively undoing the biggest proposed cut the department faces in the city’s spending plan.

“The budget adopted last month assumes that overtime spending by the NYPD will fall to $268 million in 2021,” the Independent Budget Office wrote in its analysis of the deal struck by Mayor de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson in June, which was largely triggered by the protest-fueled movement to reduce police funding.

“IBO estimates that police spending on overtime will be $400 million more than budgeted,” the report reveals.

That would mean that overall NYPD overtime spending would still reach at least $668 million in the 2021 fiscal-year budget.

That’s down from the tentative $825 million tally for the 2020 budget, which ended on June 30, but roughly flat with the $736 million paid out during 2019.

De Blasio batted the watchdog’s conclusions away during his morning press conference.

“We don’t have a lot of the things that NYPD used to put money into for overtime, we don’t have big parades and events,” he said.

“There’s a lot of things that are not happening in New York City for the foreseeable future.

“So the hope here is that because we’re dealing with that changing dynamic, we can deeply reduce the amount of overtime.”

The IBO report will likely reignite the contentious dispute over the budget, which ended with a hard-fought deal that purportedly cut or transferred $835 million in direct spending from the NYPD’s budget in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota and the nationwide protests that it sparked.

The IBO disclosed the overtime findings in its review of the overall $88.2 billion spending pact.