Officer attrition at the NYPD, although still above pre-pandemic norms, eased somewhat in the first half of the year.
Through the end of June, 1,119 officers had retired and 395 had resigned, according to the Police Pension Fund. Although those numbers mean that just 2.5 percent fewer cops left the department in the first six months, resignations declined 25 percent compared to the same period last year, when 526 left.
And that’s good news for a department where departures of officers before they are fully vested in their pension plans — and in some cases when they are just a few years into the job — spiked after the pandemic.
Through the first half of 2022, for instance, 647 left the force before their 20-year thresholds while 443 quit in 2021. From 2018 through 2020, an average of 249 cops left the department through June.
According to Police Pension Fund figures, more than 14,000 officers have left the department since the start of 2020. But the NYPD has hired fewer than 11,000 since then, according to figures compiled by the PBA.
Cops have quit the department for any number of reasons. Among them, exhaustion following Covid’s first year, when the department was thrust into unfamiliar and sometimes unwelcome policing roles and as thousands of officers got sick and many died. The city’s Covid vaccination mandates were also a factor.
The officer corps was also rocked by the defund movement and the protests and violence that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020.
Comparatively poor starting pay and no raises for six years for officers was also certainly a reason, with many officers transferring to nearby jurisdictions.
Since then, though, the anti-police sentiment that manifested in street demonstrations and protests has ebbed. New contract terms for police officers and a pilot program that allows cops to work fewer days but the same number of hours are now among the reasons to stay on.
But some remain convinced the department is short officers, even as city officials, most prominently Mayor Eric Adams, tout year-over-year reductions in most categories of major crimes, including shootings and killings.
Joseph Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired NYPD sergeant, said the current number of officers is not sufficient for the department to respond to incidents and maintain public safety.
He said city officials appear to be lulled into a false sense of security since crime has gone down even as the number of officers has declined. He noted that the number of cops is roughly the same as it was decades ago, when the crime rate was significantly higher than it is today.
“So there are politicians in the City Council that believe, like, everything's fine, but the issue that comes down to is, as that number decreases or continues to decrease, is there will not be enough cops to do things in regards to surging in the subway and following these hot spots, because it's just not possible,” he said.
The president of the Police Benevolent Association, Patrick Hendry, said that retention is one just one aspect of staffing, the other being recruitment, and that the department is falling short on the latter.
“The NYPD’s staffing crisis hasn’t improved because we are still losing cops faster than the job can replace them. Hiring a class of 600 recruits doesn’t cut it when we lose more than double that amount in the 6 months it takes them to graduate from the Academy,” he said in a statement.
The NYPD graduated 626 police officers from its academy last week while another class of 600 was to start training this month.
Short even budgeted headcount
As of June 6, the department counted 33,943 officers, including the recruits who graduated last week. Another class of about 600 was to start training this month. The department’s budgeted uniformed headcount for the fiscal year that began July 1 and for the coming years is 35,001 officers.
The department did not respond to a request to speak with the NYPD’s head of personnel, Chief John Benoit, regarding recruitment efforts, which even Mayor Eric Adams has said present a challenge. An NYPD spokesperson instead forwarded the same statement the department has relied on for months when queried about officer attrition: “The NYPD regularly monitors attrition and plans accordingly to address the loss of officers who retire or leave the Department for a variety of reasons. While recent events outside of the department continue to present challenges to recruitment efforts, we continue to focus on the positive results that happen when someone joins this organization.”
The spokesperson said the department had hired 1,984 recruits so far this year and anticipates hiring another academy class in October, which would then graduate in April.
In announcing the July and October classes, initially canceled in November as part of citywide budget cuts, Adams in April said those recruits would put the department on a path toward its budgeted headcount, still fewer than the roughly 36,500 cops who were on the job in 2019, a year before the pandemic, the protests and the start of the officer exodus.
Giacolone noted — as did Council representatives and police officials admit earlier this year during a budget hearing — that the department was leaning on officer overtime to police events, notably demonstrations against the war in the Gaza Strip and also more rote city events such as parades.
“They're replacing the hiring and everything else with overtime and you end up a department that becomes exhausted and then they’re not as effective. So there are a lot of issues that we're going to see over the next couple of years,” the former officer said.
Police overtime has spiked in recent years, more than doubling the department’s budgeted amount during the last three fiscal years.
Hendry, the PBA president, warned that forced overtime would lead to more officer departures.
“Cops on the street are burned out on mandatory overtime, and it’s driving even more of them away,” he said. “The situation is not sustainable. We need immediate help to hire more cops and keep the ones we have on the job.”