New York City Mayor Eric Adams, himself a former Police Captain, swept into office on a promise to refund the police, support the thin blue line, and get the violent crime numbers under control. He appointed new, experienced leadership at the top fo the NYPD and immediately worked to get the police budget increased. And he has repeatedly called out the prosecutors and judges who let the work of the police go to waste with soft-on-crime sentencing guidelines. In an atmosphere like that, you could probably expect to see morale rising and more officers joining the force. But a shocking new report this week shows that the opposite has been happening for the first five months of this year. The NYPD was already losing officers at an alarming rate in 2020 and 2021, but the resignation and retirement rates have actually continued to increase at an alarming pace in 2022. (NY Post)
More than 1,500 NYPD officers have either resigned or retired so far this year – on pace to be the biggest exodus of officers since the statistics have been available, The Post has learned.
Some 524 cops have resigned and 1,072 have retired as of May 31, NYPD pension stats obtained by The Post show.
The 1,596 total is a 38% spike from the same period in 2021, when 1,159 cops called it a career, and a staggering 46% climb from 2020, when 1,092 left the force by the same date.
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Exit interviews with the departing officers continue to indicate three common factors cited for these departures. Anti-cop hostility, bail reform, and rising crime rates are the common themes. And while progress has certainly been made, it clearly hasn’t been enough for some of the men and women on the force. For others, their plans had been set in motion before Adams took office and their departure was already set in stone.
One cop who left Queens for a new gig out on Long Island spoke to the Post on background. He too cited the new bail reform laws as one of the primary reasons he left, saying that even when he was able to arrest someone, they were “back in the precinct picking up their property the same day.” He said that the mantra among his fellow officers has been “get out while you can.”
There are still almost 2,500 fewer NYPD officers today than there were in 2019. More than a few of them made the same decision as the officer quoted above and moved to Long Island. They speak of being treated “more like a human being” and having a better quality of life. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Long Island is where voters in the 2021 elections tossed out Democrats who supported bail reform in favor of Republicans who vowed to fight to repeal it.
Many of the departing officers spoke of the “constant abuse from the City Council.” We’ve discussed this here before and it’s a reminder that Mayor Adams can’t do this on his own. If the Council continues to undermine his efforts and push an anti-cop agenda and if the prosecutors and the courts won’t lock up criminals, there is only so much he can do. Replacing only the Mayor was never going to fix this situation. If the voters really want change, they’re going to need to clean house on the Council and flush out some of the District Attorneys like Alvin Bragg who model themselves after Chesa Boudin. This November might present an opportunity to do that and the public needs to see some primary challengers on the ballot who actually want to make things better and not just pay lip service while adopting the BLM agenda.
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