Diana Robinson/Mayoral Photography Office
The New York City Council is expected Tuesday in its response to the mayor’s preliminary fiscal year 2016 budget to call for increasing the New York City Police Department’s headcount by 1,000 officers.
It’s unclear what the de Blasio administration’s response to that response will be. Last year, the mayor resisted Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s call for additional officers, but that was before the Eric Garner killing. Now Police Commissioner Bratton is arguing that more cops are needed to permit the training and intensified police-community interaction he says will prevent tragedies like Garner’s death.
Many critics of the NYPD’s broken-windows policing strategy oppose expanding the department’s headcount. “We don’t want more cops,” said a coalition of advocacy groups in a press release this morning. “The City Council needs to stop selling out our communities for its own political reasons. 1,000 more cops is not ‘progressive’ and is a step away from the accountability.” For her part, Mark-Viverito has argued that “to demand reform and to demand more resources, [are] not mutually exclusive.”
The debate is over whether the NYPD is big enough. What there’s no debating is that the NYPD is very, very big. Here are some numbers to put it into perspective:
Current NYPD uniformed strength 34,440
NYPD uniformed strength in 2000, the all-time high 40, 285
NYPD uniformed strength in 1990, when murders peaked 25,909
Pedagogical employees in the NYC school system 109,901
Uniformed FDNY personnel 10,318
Total police personnel in the state of Pennsylvania (5th largest law-enforcement headcount) 25,278
Headcount of the Federal Bureau of Investigation 34,456
Headcount of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives 4,768
Headcount of the U.S. Marshals Service 5,303
Headcount of the Secret Service 6,338
Headcount of the Transportation Security Administration 59,367
Headcount of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement 18826
Active military manpower of Belgium, ranked 77th out of 126 countries 33,000
7 thoughts on “The NYPD has More Police Officers Than 45 States”
On a daily basis in Tribeca, we have Harley Davidson motorcycles riding on the sidewalk weaving in between pedestrians. On a daily basis, we have 100’s of out of state Chartered Tour buses violating all moving and parking laws. They never pay the Muni-Meters and never get tickets. It’s hard to know the reason – police shortage, specific training or directive.
Blahhh haha.. Comparing NYPD.? When your involved in a traffic accident (approximately 500 per day), go into labor, have a domestic or neighbor dispute, the victim of a shooting /stabbing, unable to locate your missing toddler, you don’t call ICE, TSA, ATF, or the military. NYC dispatchers receive millions of 911 calls & your questioning the size of the Force? What solutions to public safety & emergencies have you discovered? Please enlighten us.
The number of crime-in-progress calls to the NYPD has dropped by 20,000 in the past two years. There just aren’t as many emergencies as you imagine. Cops do a tremendous job, but they’re expensive, and it has sometimes seemed like police leaders didn’t know how to productively use all that person-power (remember the black-bag sting of Ray Kelly days?). Plus, keep in mind that the debate that prompted this article was about augmenting the force, not reducing it.
God bless you
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