Police Commissioner Dermot Shea on Monday backed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vow to shift funding from the NYPD to youth groups — but his cops proved a harder sell, with police sources panning the plan.
“To help the kids of our city, I’m 1,000% behind shifting some funding from the police to youth programs,” the top cop tweeted early Monday. “It’s incumbent upon all of us to dig down and do what’s needed.”
Shea lent the vote of confidence one day after de Blasio promised in a press briefing to reallocate an unspecified amount of funding from the department’s $6 billion budget to also-unspecified youth groups and social services amid scrutiny of policing since the fatal May 25 arrest of George Floyd.
The commissioner doubled down later in the day on Fox News, contending that reinvesting the funds into keeping kids out of trouble still helps the NYPD in the long run.
“I think it’s crime-fighting, it’s just crime-fighting in a better way,” he told anchor Neil Cavuto.
“The devil is always in the details, but when you’re talking about giving kids something to do, when you’re talking about mentoring kids … I think that we would be foolish not to spend the money on that,” he continued. “We will find the money.”
Hizzoner — who as recently as Friday came out against reducing the NYPD’s budget — stressed that whatever cuts the department had to make would not sacrifice public safety.
But he has remained mum on exactly how the department might tighten its purse strings, insisting that the details would be hammered out in the coming weeks before the fiscal year ended on June 30.
NYPD insiders fear that overtime hours — suggested last week by some City Council members as a possible source of savings as the city faces a $9 billion budget gap — will be on the chopping block, to the detriment of their wallets and good police work.
“Guys are all on edge in the department because they rely on overtime,” one source said.
“This isn’t a job where you work banking hours. You can’t work eight-hour days when you are trying to solve a case.”
One Brooklyn cop said minority communities with high crime rates could be the areas most impacted by the cuts — and called it ironic given that the cuts were being demanded by advocates of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“You can’t care about black lives and cut the police budget, because that would be a disaster to the black community,” the cop said.
“It would affect the black store owners and make certain neighborhoods — Bed-Stuy, Harlem, Bushwick — ripe to be taken over again by drug dealers and violent gangs.”
Shea did push back in the Fox interview on calls to defund police departments wholesale.
“Lord help us if that ever came to pass,” he said. “If you’re having a talk about defunding the police, again, I think we need saner, calmer people to sit around the table and really talk about what’s going on.”
Additional reporting by Julia Marsh and Nolan Hicks