New York City has approved a new, pandemic-squeezed budget that’s making headlines because it includes a $1 billion cut to the NYPD amid calls, in the wake of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, to defund police. The reality is less dramatic, with about half of that $1 billion coming from shifting money and workers from the NYPD to other departments.
While the mayor pushes back against the “defund” bandwagon, his sleight of hand misses an opportunity in a time of crisis.
The police budget has grown enormously because of lavish benefits that the city has awarded to NYPD employees and because New York state laws make it difficult to slow the increase in those costs once the perks have been awarded. The de Blasio administration is doing little to address those problems. Resisting calls to defund the department shouldn’t mean carrying on with a cost structure growing increasingly unwieldy.
Police in New York have a hard job, but the extraordinary increase in the department’s benefit costs makes the budget a target.
In the past ten years, the police budget has increased by $2.8 billion — to $10.9 billion — a compound growth rate of 3 percent annually. That’s slower than the rate of increase of the city’s overall budget, but more than half of the increase in the NYPD’s total budget has been for pensions and fringe benefits, mostly health-care premiums for workers and retirees.
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Steven Malanga is the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor at City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post