De Blasio the Critic Turns NYPD Defender to Fight Budget Cut
De Blasio the Critic Turns NYPD Defender to Fight $1 Billion Cut
(Bloomberg) -- For a self-styled police reformer running New York City amid the most sweeping civil-rights protests in half a century, Mayor Bill de Blasio finds himself in the odd position of defending the very department he pilloried to get himself elected.
De Blasio largely spared the NYPD from cuts in the $89.3 billion Covid-wracked budget he suggested in April, trimming the department’s spending by $16 million while slashing summer youth programs by $175 million. But that was before tens of thousands of people poured into the city’s streets to protest police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s killing on May 25.
Now, with two weeks to get City Council approval of a spending plan that plugs a $9 billion revenue gap in the next two years, de Blasio faces renewed calls to slash more than $1 billion from the NYPD. Floyd’s death, which happened while the black man was in Minneapolis police custody, has sparked protests and a push across the nation to redirect law enforcement funds to community programs and social services.
“Our budget must reflect the reality that policing needs fundamental reform,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said in a statement on Friday that was joined by seven of his most influential colleagues.
Shifting Funds
The group, emboldened by the outcry over police violence, said $1 billion of NYPD savings can be found by cutting the size of the force, curbing overtime, shifting responsibility for homeless outreach and domestic disturbances to civilian agencies, and finding efficiencies in non-personnel expenses.
The city spends about $11 billion a year on its police, when benefits, pensions and equipment are added to its $5.6 billion operating budget, according to the business-funded Citizens Budget Commission, a non-partisan fiscal watchdog group.
De Blasio, a former public advocate, campaigned for mayor in 2013 as a critic of controversial police stop-and-frisk tactics. Since the Floyd protests erupted, he has agreed to divert some money to youth programs and civilian-led efforts to fight crime, but has resisted the pressure for deeper cuts.
“We’re committed to re-prioritizing funding and looking for savings,” the mayor’s press secretary, Freddi Goldstein, said Friday. “He does not believe a $1 billion cut is the way to maintain safety.”
The arrest this month of 2,500 New Yorkers demanding police reform has made the debate even more rancorous. Former allies now describe de Blasio as a hindrance to change.
“The mayor who rode into office on promises of police reform and racial equality completely abandoned them once he got through the door,” said Donovan Richards, who heads the council’s public safety committee. He’s “the mayor who justifies every instance of inappropriate police conduct during these protests by shifting the focus to looters.”
De Blasio has stood firm. “I do not believe it is a good idea to reduce the budget of the agency that is here to keep us safe,” he said during a briefing June 5. “The bigger problem is we may not have a choice. We may be defunding all city agencies if things don’t go right.”
That bigger problem is a spending gap of at least $1.6 billion that’s opened since April, when de Blasio last presented an already pared down spending plan. If that’s not daunting enough, the city must adjust for an almost $7 billion deficit in fiscal 2022.
Aid Unknown
Two uncertainties complicate the task: How much Governor Andrew Cuomo will cut state aid to the city as he grapples with his own $8 billion deficit; and how much the federal government will reimburse the city for its lost revenue and costs incurred while at the pandemic’s epicenter. De Blasio won’t get the answers before his June 30 deadline. In the event he gets bad news from both, the mayor wants state approval to borrow $7 billion to pay operating expenses as necessary.
In resisting deep NYPD budget cuts, de Blasio isn’t just defying the Council’s progressive Democrats. City Comptroller Scott Stringer has said the department could sustain a $1.1 billion cut over the next four years without jeopardizing public safety.
“For too long the NYPD has been held harmless when time comes to make efficiencies and cuts,” said Stringer, a 2021 mayoral candidate.
At least $154 million could be saved just by postponing two cadet classes to allow the force to reduce by 1,200 officers through attrition, the Citizens Budget Commission said in a report last week.
Jobs Unfilled
The city could save more than $1 billion through 2022 if it reduced headcount through attrition beyond the police to other parts of the 326,000-worker bureaucracy -- by letting a third of the 22,000 positions that turn over each year go unfilled, said Andrew Rein, president of the budget commission.
In a separate report, Rein’s organization calculated that the city could save about $5.7 billion in the next two years with practices such as reducing headcount, centralizing procurement and union health fund management, vehicle fleet reduction, and redrawing sanitation routes more efficiently. If each agency reduced spending by just 1%, the city could save about $1.4 billion over the next two years, it said.
CBC recommendations also included workers and retirees paying a share for health insurance they now get for free. A temporary 2% property-tax increase could bring in $1.4 billion to help cover deficits in 2022 and 2023, while costing the average homeowner $143 a year, according to the CBC analysis.
Before the virus hit New York, de Blasio enjoyed six years of economic growth that allowed him to increase spending about 20%. De Blasio reserved $5 billion that will help ease the burden in this downturn, but he ignored warnings from the Council and the CBC to salt away more.
The mayor last week rejected the CBC’s latest recommendations, too, saying “I’m not someone who believes in an ideology of austerity.”
Rein counters that the CBC has suggested a course that can balance the budget without layoffs or cuts in services. It also wouldn’t require slashing the NYPD budget by $1 billion.
“These are not easy choices, but they are doable,” Rein said. “It takes leadership, management, cooperation with labor. But if we delay we will have to make more drastic decisions later.”
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