Mayor de Blasio Increases NYPD Budget by $200 Million to Upgrade the Department’s Technology Needs

By Yehudit Garmaise

     Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council have increased the budget of the NYPD by $200 million for the fiscal year of 2022, after infamously shifting $1 billion away from the department last summer amidst many anti-police protests that took place after the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, who, two days ago, was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.

     In addition to anti-gun violence initiatives, the NYPD’s budget increase “includes expenditures for civilian activities,” the mayor said, citing enhancing the department’s information technology (IT) resources.

     “A big piece of the increase [in the NYPD’s budget] is IT needs,” the mayor explained. “We want to have the department be effective. We needed better technology to do it.”

     Reducing the payment of overtime for cops is a place in the budget where excessive expenditures were cut.

      “We reduced overtime a lot,” the mayor said. “We were not able to reduce it quite as much as we wanted.

      “So, we've put in a number that we now believe is the realistic overtime number for what we're going into for next year, but it's substantially less than what it was in previous years.”

     When questioned about the tension that surrounded the NYPD’s budget last year, when some Council members were so against the changes to the NYPD’s budget that they refused to vote on it, Mayor de Blasio explained that his shifting $1 billion away from the police department was “the result [of] listening to the concerns of communities,” he said. We paid attention to what was going on in the moment, we tried to make the right adjustments.”

      The mayor, who usually displays apprehension with increased efforts toward traditional notions of law and order, instead emphasizes “grassroots solutions to gun violence,” such as his $44 million Cure Violence Movement and Crisis Management System, which the mayor called, “an unprecedented set of reforms for the NYPD."

     In other efforts to increase the safety of the streets of New York, the NYPD has re-deployed 200 officers, who had been wasting their training by performing administrative tasks, to active-duty patrols of high violence commands.

     City Council speaker Corey Johnson explained that Mayor de Blasio’s administration wants to break the cycle of incarceration and gun violence partly by investing in program that are “alternatives to incarceration,” Speaker Johnson said. 

     “We want to keep people out of jail, and instead, fund programs to help them rebuild their lives,” Speaker Johnson explained. 

     “We are really investing in our youth with safe space and recreation and summer youth and after-school programs that will make a different in uplifting our youth and creating a real pathway to the middle class for so many New Yorkers,” said Council member Vanessa Gibson.

     “The way to recovery is public safety,” Mayor de Blasio said. “I keep saying it, and I believe it.