Mayor De Blasio hired 900 police officers

By Yehudit Garmaise

   Although the NYPD remains “substantially smaller than it was a year ago,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said this morning at a press conference, the mayor announced this morning that he added 900 police officers.

    The 900 new police officers will compensate for the unusually high number of NYPD retirements, which has been reported as being 86% higher from January to September than it was throughout all of 2019.

   Another cause of NYPD attrition is the lack of police academy classes in April and July due to what the mayor called “the coronavirus, and so many other factors, and policy decisions.”

   The NY Police Academy was supposed to have an October class, which on Oct. 8, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said he hopes to still enroll, despite budget and other constraints, although only four days remain in October and violent crime in the city continues to increase.

    Another NYPD spokesperson, citing conversations with superiors, said at the time that the October class of the New York Police Academy had been canceled. 

  “We have not had a normal situation,” said Mayor De Blasio said, who cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget after a summer of sometimes violent protests against police brutality after a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.