WHAT CUTS?

NYPD Slashed Budget, Is on Track to Overshoot It Anyway

The NYPD was supposed to cut its overtime budget by 60 percent. It’s already spending wildly.

The New York City Police Department was supposed to slash its overtime budget by $335 million—nearly 60 percent this fiscal year. Instead, just three months into the fiscal year, the department is on track to overshoot its budget by about $116 million by year’s end, the Indypendent reports. “For the first three months of the current fiscal year, which began in July, NYPD has recorded overtime costs for uniformed officers of nearly $86 million,” a budget official told the publication. When the cuts were announced earlier this year, even New York City’s Independent Budget Office predicted police would blow through their overtime funds, estimating that their year-end overtime spending would be $628 million.

The cuts—and the predictions that police would continue over-spending—come amid protests against police excesses, during which activists demanded massive reductions in the NYPD budget. Although city officials claimed to cut $1 billion from the budget, critics argued that many of the cuts were deceptive, reallocating the money to programs that funded police under other names.