NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea brushed off any accusations of a police “slowdown” Monday — saying the suggestion makes his “blood boil.”
The top cop confirmed that he was cutting officers’ time off on weekends to try to tackle the alarming spike in gun crime — as the NYPD deals with a “fuse lit at both ends” with police overtime cuts and droves of retirees driving down numbers.
But Shea defended the rank-and-file from accusations of a “deliberate slowdown” on Fox’s “Good Day New York” Monday morning after Public Advocate Jumaane Williams pressed the department for arrest numbers last week citing rumors over the decline in police activity.
“Right now there is a fuse lit at both ends. On one end, you have attrition, going through the roof, and on the other end, you have an overtime budget that was decimated,” Shea said, calling the “slowdown” claims “absolutely not true.”
“I try to keep a level height at times but when I hear that it does make my blood boil. They’re working they’re running towards danger.”
Arrests have been down since the coronavirus shut down New York in March, but the trend has continued over the last two months as the city has slowly reopened.
Over the last four weeks, overall collars were down nearly 50 percent compared to the same time last year, according to NYPD released Monday.
The dip comes as shootings have surged by more than 160 percent over the same time, with Gotham seeing its 12th consecutive week of surging gun violence.
Shea, though, pleaded with the legislators, the community and criminal justice system to band together to help combat the “perfect storm” created by the events of 2020.
“The COVID crisis, the protests, and now the budgetary crisis, we need to be together not apart,” Shea said.
“I firmly believe that everyone has common ground here — and the common ground is no one wants to see a mother shot on the streets of New York City, or a 1-year-old shot, as happened in Brooklyn,” he said of two of the “heartbreaking” recent homicides.
“We need to take a look at where we are right now because this, I think we would all agree, is not really working,” he said.
The city’s top cop confirmed that officers have lost time off on weekends, when gun crime typically spikes, so that “every single man and woman is able to be used.”
“It’s tough. I feel for the men and women that it affects — it affects personal lives — but it’s something that we had to do,” he said.
He said he was particularly frustrated to read a recent report of a store that no longer calls police after robberies because they know the offender will only get a ticket.
“And that’s true, they get a ticket,” he said of the “frustrating” legal change that “puts the individual right back on the street, and it just doesn’t make sense.”
“On a first-time offense … of course, we don’t want to put that person into jail for any extended period of time,” he said.
“But when you have people that do it over and over and over again … this is some of the things that really can be quite frustrating.
“None of us want to say going back to the bad old days, right,” he said.
“We will get through this, but it’s certainly a tough time right now,” Shea conceded.