NYPD Overtime Payments to Reach Record $740M Amid Staffing Shortage

By: Hellen Zaboulani

The New York Police Department has raked up a record size bill for overtime cops.

As reported by the NY Post, NYPD officials said on Monday that police overtime payments are slated to reach $740 million fiscal year 2023.  This is close to double its budget for extra hours, and the highest such tab seen in the last ten years.  As of February, the NYPD already used the $374 million allocated to it by the City Council for overtime and already exceeded that allowance by nearly $100 million– and there are still four months left in the fiscal year which ends June, as per a new report by City Comptroller Brad Lander.  The only other time that NYPD overtime payments had exceeded $700 million was in 2020, when the total came to $721 million, and that was mostly due to the extensive protests and unrest following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.

On Monday, at a lengthy committee budget hearing, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell and other top NYPD officials defended this year’s spending, explaining to  council members that there are just less officers on the department’s payroll.  As per the Post, Sewell admitted that this kind of overtime use “is not sustainable in the long term,” but said there were not many other options, and they needed to fill the shifts left open due to the mass departures from the force.

The size of the NYPD force has dwindled substantially— losing some 900 officers since last year, reaching a total of 34,017 agents, as of February, based on the comptroller’s recent report.  The number of officers is down roughly 2,500 since 2019, when the force employed a high of 36,717 uniformed officers.  “The persistent gap between budgeted overtime and actual overtime spending is neither helpful for agency planning nor cost effective for the City of New York,” the comptroller’s report says, adding, “Simply budgeting less for overtime has not proven to be an effective tool for controlling overtime costs, without any accountability for agencies that exceed their budgets.”

Sewell said the department has tried to limit overtime costs where possible, specifically noting that the NYPD has reevaluated its “cookie cutter” police response to events, rather evaluating the need on a case-by-case basis. That helped lower OT costs some 14% during planned events, as per police officials.  “It comes down to, as we move forward, putting our officers where the need is evaluating where the successes have been and being able to shift our resources accordingly to be able to account for the fact that the money the funds will not be in perpetuity,” she told council members.  Chief of Department Jeff Maddrey said the main driver of overtime was for sending out officers to stem crime patterns across NYC.

As per the Post, the high overtime costs come amid an already oversized budget deficit at the city council.  In January, Mayor Eric Adams had announced a $102.7 billion budget proposal, which would cut funding to all city agencies– including cutting the NYPD budget down to $5.44 billion from $5.59 billion.