Call for NYPD green
Boost budget: city poll
It’s the “re-fund the police” movement.
More than half of New Yorkers want to see the NYPD’s budget boosted amid mounting safety concerns over violent crime in the city, a new poll has found.
According to the Spectrum News NY1/Siena College survey, 52% of respondents said the Police Department’s budget should be increased, 27% want it to remain unchanged and just 17% said it should be decreased.
The NYPD’s fiscal year 2023 budget, including pensions and benefits, is projected to be $10.8 billion — $83 million lower than fiscal year 2022, records show.
The survey comes on the heels of another poll that found 7 in 10 New Yorkers fear they will become the victim of a violent crime — and as NYPD statistics show shootings are still nearly double pre-pandemic levels.
Most major crimes — including grand larceny, robberies and burglaries — rose 27.8% last month compared to the same time last year.
The NYPD is the nation’s oldest and largest police force, with about 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees on its payroll.
The agency’s city-funded operating expenses in fiscal year 2023 are budgeted at $5.3 billion, although the actual cost of running the vast department is double that, topping $10 billion every year when pensions, fringe benefits, settlements and debt payments are factored in.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin in May 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters in New York City called for the police agency’s 2021 budget to be slashed by $1 billion as part of the “defund the police” movement, but only about $420 million was cut in the end.
Mayor Adams, who has made public safety one of the cornerstones of his administration, did
not add new funding to the NYPD’s budget to carry out his “Blueprint to End Gun Violence” plan, instead opting to reallocate the agency’s existing resources and shift personnel from civilian to patrol duties.
The NYPD’s crime statistics from last week showed that murders and shootings had decreased compared to the same time last year, but nearly all other types of crime have gone up, including rape, robbery, assault, larceny and subway attacks, which jumped more than 53% since May 2021.
One of the latest transit attacks took place Sunday when a 52-yearold woman was shoved onto the tracks at a Bronx station, seemingly without any provocation, leaving her injured.
Addressing New Yorkers’ growing safety concerns Monday, Adams blasted lenient prosecutors
and judges for releasing suspected shooters back into the community and turning the city’s criminal justice system into “a laughingstock of our entire country.”
Progressive Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has been widely criticized — including by the mayor — for being soft on crime and allowing perpetrators of nonviolent offenses to walk free, sometimes after repeated arrests.