NYPD brass addresses bloated overtime spending at budget hearing
/By Ryan Schwach
Police Department brass took to the hot seat on Monday as part of the New York City Council preliminary budget hearings, and Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell and her executive staff took questions and addressed overtime spending above their allotted budget.
The NYPD’s preliminary budget totals $5.44 billion for the Fiscal Year 2024, about $88.9 million less than last year, and makes up around 5 percent of the city’s total fiscal budget for next year.
Staten Island City Councilmember Kamillah Hanks, the chair of the Public Safety Committee, presided over the hearings along with Speaker Adrienne Adams, who questioned the department on their controversial use of their overtime budget.
According to Adams, the NYPD spent $552.5 million on overtime for its officers, around 22 percent more than the $453 million budgeted for overtime, last year.
“This continues to be a historical trend,” she said. “The NYPD has not implemented any new processes to better manage its overtime spending, which has been a longtime concern of mine.”
Prior to the hearing on Monday, City Comptroller Brad Lander released a report detailing the city’s, and the NYPD’s tendency to go over allotted budgets for overtime, and projected that it will continue into the FY 24 budget.
Lander’s report says that New York City overspent its overtime budget by 93 percent in Fiscal Year 2022 and that the NYPD has the “largest share of overtime over-spending.”
Lander said through Feb. 2023, the NYPD has spent $472 million on uniformed overtime, which already exceeds the $374 million allotted in the budget for this fiscal year by $98 million.
His office projects that the NYPD will spend around $740 million in total this coming year on overtime.
“Over the past decade, NYPD overtime has grown without any regard for what’s in the budget agreed upon by the Mayor and the City Council – and with no accountability for overspending each year by hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Lander.
“If New York City had unlimited cash, it would be lovely to allow teachers unlimited overtime to stay after school to help every kid learn to read or pay social workers unlimited overtime to help counsel New Yorkers struggling with mental illness,” he added. “But other agencies aren’t allowed to show total disregard for their overtime budget, and we can’t afford for the NYPD to do so year after year.”
The report shows that the NYPD routinely spends more on overtime than the FDNY, DOC and DSNY, a trend that has only increased in the last few years.
According to the report, in 2018 and 2019 the NYPD only overspent by 10 percent in overtime, a number that went up to 35 in 2020, then 89 and 90 percent in 2021 and 2022.
However, the NYPD’s overtime budget was cut by around $300 million going into 2021, and the NYPD spent around $300 million less on overtime.
The comptroller also noted that during that time frame the NYPD headcount increased, but overtime did not necessarily decrease.
“We recognize that overtime has been an issue with his body and we have worked to curtail that,” said Sewell in response to questions about overtime during the hearing on Monday. “Overtime is a critical tool to maintain public safety.”
Lander’s report specifically highlighted that major events are when the NYPD tends to spend more on overtime – specifically. $220 million last year.
“Last year, we took a hard look at those deployments and made sure that we did not do cookie cutter responses that we have done in the past,” Sewell said. “We looked at the need, the threat level, the conditions as we knew them for those events, and we were able to contain a significant amount of overtime in those areas.”
Sewell says that they specifically reduced overtime hours for the Halloween parade by 40 percent, and the New York City Marathon by 20 percent.
More recently, overtime hours were used to put a larger number of officers in the subway system to respond to a rise in crime underground.
According to the Comptroller’s report, almost $43 million was spent in overtime as part of that program.
Though Governor Kathy Hochul has said that the state will reimburse the city for the overtime costs incurred through January related to subway patrols, the funding was not included in her executive budget, the report says.
“So there is an overtime that is added to officers' tours and their officers that are called in, but this is part of our effort to secure the subway systems,” said Sewell. “We recognize that that is not sustainable in the long term.”
At the hearing on Monday, the NYPD also answered some questions on the controversial Strategic Response Group which is taking heat for its handling of the 2020 George Floyd protests.
NYPD brass was called out earlier this month for choosing not to attend a hearing regarding SRG and instead sent a written statement which a number of councilmembers took issue with.
“I want to start off by saying that it is never the intention of this police department to disrespect this body,” Sewell said.
Although the NYPD did answer some questions on the SRG as far as the number of officers and the unit’s role in the department, it declined to comment on any questions regarding the 2020 protests due to ongoing litigation.
