DiBlasio just slashed a billion dollars from the NYPD budget. Hopefully, it's just the start. AOC has come out criticizing it.
https://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/de-blasio-nypd-budget-cuts-1.46252704The NYPD is losing more than $1 billion in funding — including canceling the July recruit class and overtime cuts — with the money transferred to social-welfare programs, in the fallout from the George Floyd protests, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday.
The head count of officers will go down by the end of the year to 34,837 from about 36,000, with the patrol force supplemented by reassigning cops now doing desk jobs, de Blasio said, promising the budget cuts wouldn’t jeopardize public safety.
Among the “NYPD reinvestments”: from the police operating budget,
$115 million for summer youth programs;
$116 million for education;
$134 million for family and social services; from the capital budget,
$450 million for public housing and parks facilities; and
$67 million for broadband internet in the city’s housing projects, according to a slide presentation at de Blasio’s daily news conference.
“Our young people need to be reached. Not policed, reached,” de Blasio said.
The curbing of overtime won’t affect emergencies, he said.
“Look, we’re gonna have some exceptional moments, and we’re gonna have to deal with those unto themselves,” he said. “What we’re talking about is the kind of overtime that is normally relied upon.”
In the first two weeks alone of the Floyd protests, the city spent $115 million on police overtime, which is more than four times the amount spent in the same period in 2019.
The total municipal budget de Blasio is proposing for the upcoming fiscal year — which starts Wednesday — is $88.1 billion. It is to be voted on later Tuesday by the City Council, with just hours until the budget is due under 1970s-era fiscal crisis rules.
The budget is billions less than the $95 billion he proposed earlier this year, before the coronavirus pandemic devastated city tax coffers. Already, the city has lost $9 billion in revenue, he’s said.
For more than a week, there’s been an encampment of hundreds outside New York City Hall — where de Blasio works — demanding at least $1 billion in NYPD cuts.
Like more than 140 places in the United States, the city has been the site of protests demanding changes to policing, since May 25’s bystander-recorded death of Floyd while a cop in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes.
On Tuesday at his news conference, de Blasio shrugged off criticism from some left-leaning groups who have accused the mayor of playing budgetary shell games — reaching $1 billion in NYPD cuts by moving crossing guards and school security guards to other municipal agencies, for instance.
“Some people are never happy,” he said.
