![]() ![]() The subway initiatives add to an already massive overtime haul for the Transit Bureau, one of several recipients of the subway patrol-driven overtime boom. And last month, he and Governor Kathy Hochul announced an initiative that would approve 1,200 additional overtime hours per day for subway patrols. In April, after a mass shooting at a Sunset Park subway station, Adams vowed to double the underground police presence. Just days after becoming mayor, Adams announced the largest deployment in the NYPD Transit Bureau’s history, sending more than 1,000 extra officers into the subway system. “When working people say they want safer streets,” Adams wrote in a post-mortem of the elections, when Democrats in New York underperformed badly enough to, in all likelihood, cost their party a US House majority, “we put more officers on them.”Īs lurid crime stories drive public fear of the subway system, both Adams and his predecessor, Bill de Blasio - whose tenures bisected last fiscal year - have flooded it with more and more police. As the Republican party seized on crime narratives nationwide, the Democratic mayor pushed more police patrols as a way to remedy his party’s electoral woes - though the argument gave an underwhelming performance in the recent midterms. In the year since Adams made his campaign promise to crack down on overtime abuse, the priority has fallen by the wayside. In response to specific questions, an NYPD spokesperson sent a general statement, asserting that overtime “is instrumental in addressing crime trends, conducting investigations, and deploying enhanced resources to critical areas, including transit.” ![]() The mayor’s office did not respond to New York Focus’s emails. “It’s a prime example of NYPD budget bloat.” “The amount of leeway that the NYPD is given to go over their overtime budget is pretty extraordinary,” said Ileana Méndez-Peñate, program director for Communities United for Police Reform. But instead of taking care of the overtime problem, the mayor’s attempts to address subway safety concerns, homelessness, and gun violence with more policing are almost certainly contributing to it. Before becoming mayor in January, Adams committed to halving NYPD overtime by the end of his first year in office. The data also offer insight into the financial burden Mayor Eric Adams’s many policing initiatives are taking on city coffers. The numbers reveal the NYPD’s most frequent overtimers: subway cops, a notorious “goon squad,” surveillance units, and drug police, among others. The resulting data set - which doesn’t include cops who left the force between June 2021 and late October - offers a near-complete breakdown of uniformed overtime spending by unit and individual officer. Using an open-source program published by citizen watchdog Eric Spishak-Thomas, New York Focus merged city Office of Payroll Administration numbers with a snapshot of the NYPD’s officer profiles. ![]() But a New York Focus analysis sheds new light. Despite this rampant overspending, the public often doesn’t know where the money goes.Ĭity budget reports break the numbers down by which office appropriates overtime spending, rather than which units actually spend it. Between June 2021 and June 2022, the department hit its second-highest recorded level of overtime by uniformed officers - $762 million - overshooting its budget by more than $100 million. The canine cops are among the top earners in a recent NYPD overtime boon. Altogether, Transit’s 45 active dog wranglers cost the city about $2.3 million in overtime. Rigel and eight peers pulled in an average of 1,700 bonus hours in fiscal year 2022 - up 67 percent from 2021 and 35 percent from 2020. Rigel was the leader of a high-earning pack: The NYPD Transit Bureau’s canine unit, which patrols the subways with bomb-sniffing dogs, contained the police force’s top nine active over-workers. OFFICER ANDREW RIGEL worked more overtime than anyone else in the New York City Police Department last fiscal year: 2,002 extra hours, akin to nearly 79-hour work weeks. ![]()
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