NYC to vote on 1 billion in spending cuts to NYPD while protesters occupy City Hall

New York City is set to defund the NYPD to the tune of 1 billion dollars, trying to make protesters happy who are currently occupying City Hall:

NY POST – Mayor de Blasio and Council Speaker Corey Johnson are finalizing an $87 billion budget deal that would avoid municipal layoffs while slicing $1 billion from the Police Department’s budget through transfers and spending cuts, The Post has learned.

The agreement — which the City Council was being briefed on late Monday night — largely restores cuts Hizzoner made to summer youth employment programs, counselors for high needs schools and tuition aid for low-income City University students.

Hizzoner’s April budget — when the deficit was estimated to be just $7 billion — continued the city’s tradition of sparing the NYPD from the budget ax even during tough times.

Just weeks later, the brutal in-custody police death of George Floyd in Minneapolis rocketed across social media, sending tens-of-thousands New Yorkers to the street in protest — the first in a series of dominoes that would fall — leaving Hizzoner politically besieged and completely remaking the budget debate.

“Tricks”

This latest spending plan hopes to answer calls from protestors to ‘defund’ the NYPD by slashing and transferring $1 billion from its budget, six sources confirmed. However, City Hall hit the mark using accounting measures that critics have labeled as ‘tricks’.

It transfers the school safety officers back to the Department of Education, moving $307 million off of the NYPD’s budget in the first year. It also calls for school safety agents to be moved to another still-unspecified agency, accounting for another $42 million.

Controversially, sources told The Post, City Hall also tallied the $134 million in fringe benefits — like health, dental and eye care — associated with those employees and counted those savings toward the $1 billion goal.

The NYPD is also supposed to slash its overtime spending by $352 million in 2021 — roughly half of its annual outlay, which exceeded $700 million in each of the last three completed budget.

Much of the rest of the savings come from reducing the department’s uniformed headcount by 1,163 through attrition, the sources added. Once more, City Hall counted the costs of providing benefits to those employees towards the $1 billion mark.

As the Daily Caller points out protesters are occupying City Hall, demanding this $1 billion in cuts to the NYPD:

That was early yesterday. Last night the protesters expanded their ‘zone’:

From the way it sounds in the NY Post article, the ‘tricks’ these city councilmen and the mayor are using probably won’t sit well with these protesters, assuming the budget deal passes.


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