MANHATTAN (CN) — Anticipating a $9 billion shortfall from lost revenue evaporated by the coronavirus shutdown, New York City lawmakers announced Tuesday that they had negotiated an austerity deal that shifts $1 billion away from the police department's budget for the upcoming fiscal year.
Since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, a nationwide movement of organized protests against systemic racism have demanded that cities restructure police department funding, with thousands of activists in New York City calling daily to reform the NYPD's discriminatory policing by stripping $1 billion away from the department's $6 billion budget.
According to the City Council on Tuesday, the agreed-upon Fiscal Year 2021 Adopted Budget includes $837 million in cuts and transfers to the New York Police Department expense budget and cancels two NYPD academy classes of more than 1,100 new cadets this summer.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said separately on Tuesday that the cuts and transfers, combined with associated costs, remove $1 billion from the NYPD’s spending but advocates of police department “defunding” claim the budget cuts amount to meaningless shell games instead of a substantive divestment from policing to preserve the social safety net.
The reduction of the NYPD’s spending budget is comprised of nearly $484 million in cuts and $354 million in reassignments of duties previously assigned to the NYPD — school safety, homelessness and mental health — to other agencies, including the Department of Education New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Department of Homeland Security.
The budget also eliminates two of the four NYPD academy classes this year, purportedly reducing the headcount of the city’s 38,000 officers by 1,163 uniform officers.
De Blasio said Tuesday that the budget transfers $450 million from the NYPD capital spending to the New York City Housing Authority and Parks Department youth recreation centers.
The mayor also announced the budget will reinvest $430 million of those NYPD cuts into community initiatives: $115 million for summer youth programs, $116 million to education, and $134 million for family and social services.
Initially, de Blasio’s 2021 executive budget had proposed entirely cutting the city’s Summer Youth Programming, which serves 100,000 young people.
The adopted budget shifts funding for school policing from the NYPD’s School Safety Division to the Department of Education, ending a zero-tolerance plan implemented by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani that put the police department in charge of school safety.
“Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Johnson are using funny math and budget tricks to try to mislead New Yorkers into thinking that they plan to meet the movement's demands for at least $1B in direct cuts to the NYPD's almost $6B FY21 expense budget and reinvestments of over $1 billion to communities,” Anthonine Pierre, spokesperson for the grassroots organizing group Communities United for Police Reform, said in a statement Monday.
"This is a lie and the movement isn't falling for de Blasio and Johnson's budget tricks that are protecting and giving special treatment to the NYPD, refusing to even institute a full hiring freeze on NYPD uniformed officers — all while continuing to decimate the social safety net, threaten future layoffs that are not police, cutting non-police hate violence prevention initiatives, and refusing to take care of elders, youth, Black and other communities of color most devastated by the pandemic and ongoing police violence,” Pierre added.
Members of Communities United for Police Reform have called for deep NYPD budget cuts, and a redirection of resources toward underfunded city agencies that will need to play a large role in driving an equitable recovery for New Yorkers hit hardest by Covid-19 global pandemic.
According to the City Council, the new agreement includes "a commitment to working with stakeholders, school administrators, advocates and school safety officers to move toward a community model and away from a punitive, enforcement-focused model."