Mayor Adams slammed critics of the NYPD’s overtime spending Wednesday during his executive budget rollout, suggesting that those who fixate so much on the fiscal outlay are either “anti-overtime” or “anti-police.”
Adams, who had just unveiled his updated $106.7 billion spending plan, was taking questions from reporters when he veered off on an apparently unscripted tangent about police overtime spending, which has come under fire for years for being excessive.
The mayor prefaced his remarks by saying he’d been discussing the issue with “some City Council members the other day.”
“I said, ‘Is it that you dislike overtime, or you dislike the NYPD?’ Because I never hear them talking about overtime in any of the other agencies. In all the agencies, I have overtime,” said Adams, who retired from the NYPD as a captain.
“But no one gets riled up with overtime in parks, in HRA. Nobody gets riled up in overtime anywhere else but the New York City police department,” he said referring to the Parks Department and the city’s Human Resources Administration. “That’s all we focus on — NYPD. So is it anti-overtime? Or is it anti-police? And if it’s anti-police, shame on us.”
Adams spokesman Fabien Levy declined to say which Council members the mayor recently spoke with regarding police overtime.
Cutting the cost has long been an issue in city government, and Adams himself called for it to be cut early on in his run for mayor.
Andrew Rein, head of the Citizens Budget Commission, said part of the reason police overtime has received so much scrutiny over the years is because overtime costs for the city’s uniformed agencies in general have consistently run over budget over the years.
“Year in and year out, uniformed overtime is a budget buster. It exceeds the budget by sometimes a couple of hundred million dollars, and in this budget they’re even pretending that they’re going to reduce overtime in the future, which isn’t realistic,” Rein said. “We need to dig deeper, but so far I haven’t seen a structural plan to reduce overtime.”