Police union, advocates critical of decision to add 1,300 cops to NYPD

New York Daily News – by Thomas Tracy

Not everyone’s happy with Mayor de Blasio’s surprise decision to add close to 1,300 officers to the NYPD’s ranks.

The head of the police union said Tuesday that the paltry number is just a “drop in the bucket.”

“We have lost nearly 7,000 (cops) since 2001,” Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch said in a statement. “Understaffing not only empowers criminals, but it leads management to make bad policy decisions.”  

Those bad decisions include “quotas for police activities in an effort to compensate for the shortage” said Lynch — tactics that led to an increase in stop and frisks a few years ago.

“The city should fill the new Police Academy now and keep filing it until we reach Safe Streets, Safe City levels of staffing before crime gets out of control,” said Lynch, referring to a program in 1994 where the city was flooded with cops.

Other critics of the decision reached in negotiations Monday night between the mayor and the City Council  think the city doesn’t need any more cops.

Robert Gangi, the director of the Police Reform Organizing Project, said de Blasio made a “truly terrible decision” by knuckling under to pressure to increase police headcount.

To Gangi, more cops will mean more Broken Windows policing where cops focus on minor violations such as bicycling on the sidewalk and drinking in public — a policy he sees as “radically discriminatory” against New Yorkers of color.

“Rather than solve problems (the new cops) will aggravate existing difficulties, deepening the racial, social and economic inequities that plague our city and adding to the antagonism and distrust that communities of color already feel toward the police and the criminal justice system,” Gangi said.

Both NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and the Council had been pushing for at least 1,000 more officers to be added to the ranks in 2016 budget negotiations.

“We think this is a plan that really works for New York City,” the mayor said Monday, claiming that continued talks with Bratton and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito helped him change his mind.

Three hundred of the 1,297 new cops will work in counterterrorism, and the rest will take part in a new community policing program, de Blasio said in announcing the $78.5 billion budget.

Some observers say de Blasio had no choice but to agree to the additional cops after the spike in shootings and an 11.6% jump in homicides seen this year.

“The crime stats are going up,” Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeant’s Benevolent Association, said Tuesday. “If he refuses to add more cops and crime continues to go up, it was going to land on his hands.”

Mullins said de Blasio’s sea change shows that the mayor can be swayed.

“A lot of politics was being played, but at least we were able to change his mind — and that’s a good sign,” Mullins said. “You can have your opinion and stick to it, but you can’t do without public safety.”

Longtime north Brooklyn community advocate Tony Herbert agreed that the mayor had no other choice but to bring in more cops.

“The mayor is under a lot of pressure to do something given his failed attempts to rein in this violence,” Herbert said. “We need these troops to get in the battle so we can win this war against the gangs and gun violence.”

With Rocco Parascandola

ttracy@nydailynews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/critics-not-happy-1-300-cops-article-1.2267941?cid=bitly