Mayor Adams calls for ‘immediate redeployment’ of desk-duty cops to the streets
Mayor Eric Adams called for an “immediate redeployment” department-wide of cops on desk duty Thursday as the NYPD tries to stem the Big Apple’s soaring gun violence.
The mayor vowed swift action when asked for a timeframe, saying the summer months — when shootings have historically peaked — would be waiting too long, while acknowledging the redeployment effort is on the shoulders of the city’s top cop, who was in the process of evaluating how to replace those officers with non-uniformed employees.
“I am not going to accept June, as you know, traditionally, when crime is the highest and we are not going to accept that long period of time,” Adams said at a press conference announcing a new head of the Big Apple’s emergency management division .
“The crime we’re facing, we need immediate deployment.”
Adams added, “you will see in the next few weeks the necessary appropriate transferring of those who are going to do actual public safety on the streets.”
The call comes almost a week after Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell ordered just over 650 cops to be moved off desk duty on a daily basis as part of its “enhanced deployment strategy” to “combat violent crime.”
As of Sunday, Gotham has recorded 141 acts of gunplay with 160 injured or dead this year, compared to 103 and 113, respectively, last year, according to NYPD data.
Adams has long voiced his plans to civilianize the NYPD, which a recent audit found has previously taken years to convert just a few hundred police posts.
The mayor said Thursday Sewell was working on a “complete analysis” of how to replace officers with non-uniformed employees in the department.
The scope of how many more officers would be moved out from behind desks and replaced by civilian employees was not immediately known. Neither the NYPD nor the mayor’s office immediately responded to questions.
Currently, the department consists of 17,500 civilian workers and nearly 35,000 cops, NYPD data shows.
A recently released audit by city Comptroller Brad Lander on the department’s attempt to civilianize its workforce found that there are about 500 officers handling full-time clerical duties.
None of the 368 positions identified by the NYPD three years ago as roles able to be handled by a non-uniformed employee have been civilianized as of last month, the audit found.
The department said it previously took them nearly two years to civilianize 415 similar roles in the department. However, the audit, which was initiated by Lander’s predecessor, revealed the NYPD data provided to the City Council didn’t line up.
“Rather, the evidence the NYPD provided was not internally consistent, nor was it consistent with the corresponding data it submitted to the City Council,” the audit reads. “Consequently, the audit cannot assess the degree to which the figures the NYPD reported to the City Council accurately represent actual civilianized positions.”
