11 ms·

The NYPD is a profoundly overfunded police agency[1], as these kinds of technical hijinks indicate. If there are noise complaints, why aren't they knocking on d

The NYPD is a profoundly overfunded police agency[1], as these kinds of technical hijinks indicate. If there are noise complaints, why aren't they knocking on doors? (It's a rhetorical question: the answer is that the NYPD has abject contempt for the communities it ostensibly serves, and increasingly is made of people who don't even live in the city they police[2].) [1]: https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2021/03/056-NYPD.pdf https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2... [2]: https://nypost.com/2023/06/03/more-nypd-officers-are-opting-to-live-outside-nyc/ https://nypost.com/2023/06/03/more-nypd-officers-are-opting-...

timcederman 3y ago
It's always fun to ask people how much they think the annual budget for the NYPD might be, and learn they're off by several orders of magnitude.
- khuey 3y ago
  It's not really a fair comparison because much of the budget is the cost of labor, but the NYPD's budget is roughly equal to the budget of Ukraine's military (pre-February 2022).
- koonsolo 3y ago
  Well, NYC has about 8.5 million people. I'm from Flanders and we have about 6.5 million people. 8.5 is about the population of Austria or Switzerland. I think people underestimate how big NYC really is. It is basically a small country. So yeah, how much funds do the police of Austria or Switzerland get?
  - Hello71 3y ago
    according to https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20170816-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D..., in 2015, Austria spent €545 per inhabitant on "public order and safety", which includes "Police services; fire-protection services; law courts; prisons; R&D related to public order and safety; public order and safety n.e.c. ". about 9 million people live in Austria, so they spent about €5 million in total. according to https://cbcny.org/research/six-fast-facts-about-nypds-preliminary-fy2023-budget https://cbcny.org/research/six-fast-facts-about-nypds-prelim..., the NYPD budget in 2023 was $10.8 billion. so, NYC spent about twice as much on police as Austria spent on police plus fire protection, law courts, prisons, etc. even if they have the same population, it should cost more to police Austria than NYC because Austria has a larger area, so they need to have more police stations and cars.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Drones are cheap, people are expensive. The current labor shortage isn’t going away, and everyone is going to have to make more use of automation to get by. Lots of police departments are flush in cash and yet still can’t hire enough new police officers (and when/if they compete on salaries, which they can’t because of union rules, it would just be a bidding war for a limited number of people who want to do that kind of job).
- heliodor 3y ago
  Most people have a price. How can you say there's a limited number of people willing to do that job?
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    All industries are suffering labor shortages. Sure, let’s just raise wages for everyone, but there are still a limited number of people overall. Across the board, in every industry, the only real solution is to raise productivity (from grocery stores using automated checkouts to police using drones), there simply isn’t any other reasonable solution (and nicely, with increased productivity should come higher salaries without causing bidding wars on a limited supply of labor).
    - heliodor 3y ago
      > "All industries are suffering labor shortages" That's basically saying that all companies are daydreaming about what they'd like to do if only they had more people. They're not willing to pay higher wages though, while inflation has gone up quite a bit in the last few years. So yeah, "labor shortage," in quotes.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Unless you think there is lots of induced supply to be had, paying more won’t do much in increasing supply, you’ll just be taking workers from somewhere else, and if everyone pays more, it will just come out as inflation. Increased productivity gets around that, since fewer workers are needed, they can be paid more, and since they produce more, inflation is less of a concern. Incidentally, NYPD is pretty well paid, if you think they need to be making tech salaries…well, I’m not sure where to start with that. Someday this might be more of a tech career (think riggers from shadow run).
mackaway 3y ago
[flagged]
squirrel6 3y ago
Where is the money going? Anyone got a copy of the budget? Haha. I am always so interested in how NYC’s bureaucracy comes out with these crazy decisions.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  The city's budget documents for the current fiscal year are here[1]. The NYPD doesn't appear to publish their own "internal" budget, but many details can be gleaned from their finance committee reports[2]. A large part of the NYPD's budget goes to wages, in parts because of (1) bloated wages for senior officers, and (2) rampant overtime abuse[3]. Some of that money would be recaptured in the form of income taxes, except that the NYPD has successfully lobbied to exclude itself from NYC's civil servant residency requirements[4]. [1]: https://council.nyc.gov/budget/fy2023/ https://council.nyc.gov/budget/fy2023/ [2]: https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2023/05/NYPD.pdf https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2... [3]: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypd-overspending-on-overtime-grew-dramatically-in-recent-years/ https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypd-overspending-on-ov... [4]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-hiring.page https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-hir...
pseudo0 3y ago
Right out of the article you linked: > The starting salary for an NYPD officer is $55,910 without overtime. Meanwhile, the required annual income for a person living alone in New York City with no children is $53,342, according to an MIT living wage calculator. So a police officer starts out barely makes a living wage. No wonder they end up living outside NYC to save money. And then if they manage to save up a down payment, good luck qualifying for a NYC mortgage on that salary.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Emphasis on "without overtime." Their actual take-home pay includes overtime. And note: the NYPD has very handsome perks: it's a 22-years-to-half-salary-pension job that rises to 121k after 5.5 years in the service[1]. The other benefits are worth looking at as well. Working as a cop doesn't entitle someone to be able to afford a mortgage; millions of New Yorkers can't afford mortgages. Millions of New Yorkers also live in this city while making less than the NYPD does; on a basic civic level, it would behoove the NYPD to live a bit more like the people they're meant to protect. [1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-benefits.page https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-ben...
  - pseudo0 3y ago
    If cops can't qualify for a NYC mortgage and are forced to live in NYC, many will quit. They have very transferable skills and there are loads of police departments with staff shortages in places where housing is affordable on a police officer's salary. Including overtime seems questionable. It's arguably a "perk" but it damages work/life balance and contributes to burnout. Most people do a ~40 hour work week, comparing that to a police officer doing 50-60 does not seem fair. I understand the issues with policing as an institution, but average police officers are basically societal janitors, doing a nasty, unpleasant job for very mediocre pay. You aren't going to improve the quality of people hired by making the job even more unattractive.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      > If cops can't qualify for a NYC mortgage and are forced to live in NYC, many will quit. They have very transferable skills and there are loads of police departments with staff shortages in places where housing is affordable on a police officer's salary. This is true for every other civil servant in NYC; they haven't quit. People want to live here. Overtime does indeed contribute to burnout. But overtime use by the NYPD is culturally endemic and rampant[1]; individual anecdotes don't make a trend, but you can look up "NYPD overtime abuse" for widely shared "tricks" among NY's finest for getting paid extra money for indefinitely detaining suspects, conducting calls where they know an arrest won't be made, &c. Finally: I agree that policing is a nasty, unpleasant job. To a certain degree, it's fundamentally nasty and unpleasant. But the current degree to which it's that way is a problem of our own making: police departments have been happy to absorb the budget that was slashed from mental health and community building programs, all while complaining about the overflowed social ills that come with doing that. I'd rather make the job more attractive by funding those things than dumping more money into the black hole that is the NYPD's labor budget. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blows-overtime-budget-by-nearly-100-million-on-pace-for-record https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blow...
polski-g 3y ago
> If there are noise complaints, why aren't they knocking on doors? Because the noise complaints have been decriminalized: https://nypost.com/2017/05/10/nypd-cops-forbidden-from-breaking-up-noisy-parties/ https://nypost.com/2017/05/10/nypd-cops-forbidden-from-break...
- hazmazlaz 3y ago
  A policy that was enacted because of the widespread citizen outcry against police knocking on doors, by the way!
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Controversial, but I don't think it's a bad use of resources. Noise from parties is horrible and it's too easy to get away with it by just not answering the door.
hazmazlaz 3y ago
How much do you think it costs to send an armed officer in a squad car to knock on a door in response to a noise complaint? How much do you think it costs to send a drone to observe a place in response to a noise complaint? A place which legally has no expectation of privacy by the way. Consider also the fact that armed officers sometimes shoot and kill people. A camera drone completely avoids this potential outcome.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  These are excellent reasons to disarm ordinary police, not to give our overarmed police drones. As noted in another thread: the drone can’t give out a ticket; it isn’t as if this eliminates the shoe-leather work that cops are still doing here (and the corresponding risk due to them being overarmed.) NY has a privacy law that enshrines a reasonable expectation of privacy in one’s backyard. But I haven’t made any argument around this: I don’t think we should be paying cops to fly drones around, regardless of whether or not it’s a civil liberties issue.

timcederman 3y ago

It's always fun to ask people how much they think the annual budget for the NYPD might be, and learn they're off by several orders of magnitude.

khuey 3y ago
It's not really a fair comparison because much of the budget is the cost of labor, but the NYPD's budget is roughly equal to the budget of Ukraine's military (pre-February 2022).
koonsolo 3y ago
Well, NYC has about 8.5 million people. I'm from Flanders and we have about 6.5 million people. 8.5 is about the population of Austria or Switzerland. I think people underestimate how big NYC really is. It is basically a small country. So yeah, how much funds do the police of Austria or Switzerland get?
- Hello71 3y ago
  according to https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20170816-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D..., in 2015, Austria spent €545 per inhabitant on "public order and safety", which includes "Police services; fire-protection services; law courts; prisons; R&D related to public order and safety; public order and safety n.e.c. ". about 9 million people live in Austria, so they spent about €5 million in total. according to https://cbcny.org/research/six-fast-facts-about-nypds-preliminary-fy2023-budget https://cbcny.org/research/six-fast-facts-about-nypds-prelim..., the NYPD budget in 2023 was $10.8 billion. so, NYC spent about twice as much on police as Austria spent on police plus fire protection, law courts, prisons, etc. even if they have the same population, it should cost more to police Austria than NYC because Austria has a larger area, so they need to have more police stations and cars.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

Drones are cheap, people are expensive. The current labor shortage isn’t going away, and everyone is going to have to make more use of automation to get by. Lots of police departments are flush in cash and yet still can’t hire enough new police officers (and when/if they compete on salaries, which they can’t because of union rules, it would just be a bidding war for a limited number of people who want to do that kind of job).

heliodor 3y ago
Most people have a price. How can you say there's a limited number of people willing to do that job?
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  All industries are suffering labor shortages. Sure, let’s just raise wages for everyone, but there are still a limited number of people overall. Across the board, in every industry, the only real solution is to raise productivity (from grocery stores using automated checkouts to police using drones), there simply isn’t any other reasonable solution (and nicely, with increased productivity should come higher salaries without causing bidding wars on a limited supply of labor).
  - heliodor 3y ago
    > "All industries are suffering labor shortages" That's basically saying that all companies are daydreaming about what they'd like to do if only they had more people. They're not willing to pay higher wages though, while inflation has gone up quite a bit in the last few years. So yeah, "labor shortage," in quotes.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Unless you think there is lots of induced supply to be had, paying more won’t do much in increasing supply, you’ll just be taking workers from somewhere else, and if everyone pays more, it will just come out as inflation. Increased productivity gets around that, since fewer workers are needed, they can be paid more, and since they produce more, inflation is less of a concern. Incidentally, NYPD is pretty well paid, if you think they need to be making tech salaries…well, I’m not sure where to start with that. Someday this might be more of a tech career (think riggers from shadow run).

mackaway 3y ago

[flagged]

squirrel6 3y ago

Where is the money going? Anyone got a copy of the budget? Haha. I am always so interested in how NYC’s bureaucracy comes out with these crazy decisions.

woodruffw 3y ago
The city's budget documents for the current fiscal year are here[1]. The NYPD doesn't appear to publish their own "internal" budget, but many details can be gleaned from their finance committee reports[2]. A large part of the NYPD's budget goes to wages, in parts because of (1) bloated wages for senior officers, and (2) rampant overtime abuse[3]. Some of that money would be recaptured in the form of income taxes, except that the NYPD has successfully lobbied to exclude itself from NYC's civil servant residency requirements[4]. [1]: https://council.nyc.gov/budget/fy2023/ https://council.nyc.gov/budget/fy2023/ [2]: https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2023/05/NYPD.pdf https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2... [3]: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypd-overspending-on-overtime-grew-dramatically-in-recent-years/ https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypd-overspending-on-ov... [4]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-hiring.page https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-hir...

pseudo0 3y ago

Right out of the article you linked: > The starting salary for an NYPD officer is $55,910 without overtime. Meanwhile, the required annual income for a person living alone in New York City with no children is $53,342, according to an MIT living wage calculator. So a police officer starts out barely makes a living wage. No wonder they end up living outside NYC to save money. And then if they manage to save up a down payment, good luck qualifying for a NYC mortgage on that salary.

woodruffw 3y ago
Emphasis on "without overtime." Their actual take-home pay includes overtime. And note: the NYPD has very handsome perks: it's a 22-years-to-half-salary-pension job that rises to 121k after 5.5 years in the service[1]. The other benefits are worth looking at as well. Working as a cop doesn't entitle someone to be able to afford a mortgage; millions of New Yorkers can't afford mortgages. Millions of New Yorkers also live in this city while making less than the NYPD does; on a basic civic level, it would behoove the NYPD to live a bit more like the people they're meant to protect. [1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-benefits.page https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-ben...
- pseudo0 3y ago
  If cops can't qualify for a NYC mortgage and are forced to live in NYC, many will quit. They have very transferable skills and there are loads of police departments with staff shortages in places where housing is affordable on a police officer's salary. Including overtime seems questionable. It's arguably a "perk" but it damages work/life balance and contributes to burnout. Most people do a ~40 hour work week, comparing that to a police officer doing 50-60 does not seem fair. I understand the issues with policing as an institution, but average police officers are basically societal janitors, doing a nasty, unpleasant job for very mediocre pay. You aren't going to improve the quality of people hired by making the job even more unattractive.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    > If cops can't qualify for a NYC mortgage and are forced to live in NYC, many will quit. They have very transferable skills and there are loads of police departments with staff shortages in places where housing is affordable on a police officer's salary. This is true for every other civil servant in NYC; they haven't quit. People want to live here. Overtime does indeed contribute to burnout. But overtime use by the NYPD is culturally endemic and rampant[1]; individual anecdotes don't make a trend, but you can look up "NYPD overtime abuse" for widely shared "tricks" among NY's finest for getting paid extra money for indefinitely detaining suspects, conducting calls where they know an arrest won't be made, &c. Finally: I agree that policing is a nasty, unpleasant job. To a certain degree, it's fundamentally nasty and unpleasant. But the current degree to which it's that way is a problem of our own making: police departments have been happy to absorb the budget that was slashed from mental health and community building programs, all while complaining about the overflowed social ills that come with doing that. I'd rather make the job more attractive by funding those things than dumping more money into the black hole that is the NYPD's labor budget. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blows-overtime-budget-by-nearly-100-million-on-pace-for-record https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blow...

polski-g 3y ago

> If there are noise complaints, why aren't they knocking on doors? Because the noise complaints have been decriminalized: https://nypost.com/2017/05/10/nypd-cops-forbidden-from-breaking-up-noisy-parties/ https://nypost.com/2017/05/10/nypd-cops-forbidden-from-break...

hazmazlaz 3y ago
A policy that was enacted because of the widespread citizen outcry against police knocking on doors, by the way!

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

Controversial, but I don't think it's a bad use of resources. Noise from parties is horrible and it's too easy to get away with it by just not answering the door.

hazmazlaz 3y ago

How much do you think it costs to send an armed officer in a squad car to knock on a door in response to a noise complaint? How much do you think it costs to send a drone to observe a place in response to a noise complaint? A place which legally has no expectation of privacy by the way. Consider also the fact that armed officers sometimes shoot and kill people. A camera drone completely avoids this potential outcome.

woodruffw 3y ago
These are excellent reasons to disarm ordinary police, not to give our overarmed police drones. As noted in another thread: the drone can’t give out a ticket; it isn’t as if this eliminates the shoe-leather work that cops are still doing here (and the corresponding risk due to them being overarmed.) NY has a privacy law that enshrines a reasonable expectation of privacy in one’s backyard. But I haven’t made any argument around this: I don’t think we should be paying cops to fly drones around, regardless of whether or not it’s a civil liberties issue.