NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- The NYPD will spend $400 million more on overtime next year than the amount for which the city has budgeted, the city's Independent Budget Office estimates.
The IBO on Tuesday released a report that includes "key findings" from a review of the 2021 budget New York City adopted at the beginning of the month. As part of the budget Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council agreed on, the city promised to reduce the NYPD's overtime spending by $335 million, the report said.
"The city has faced great difficulty in controlling the use of overtime and now estimates that police overtime totaled $820 million in 2020, the fiscal year that just ended," the report said. "While this figure is swelled by the response to the Black Lives Matter protests, overtime has averaged $723 million each year from 2017 through 2019."
"The budget assumes overtime can be reduced by roughly 60 percent from the 2017-2019 average to $268 million in 2021; no reductions in overtime are scheduled for 2022 through 2024," the report added. "IBO estimates that 2021 NYPD overtime will actually be $400 million higher than budgeted."
Asked about the report during his daily briefing on Tuesday, de Blasio noted that the city doesn't "have a lot of the things that NYPD used to put money into for overtime" as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We don't have big parades and events. There are a lot of things that are not happening in New York City for the foreseeable future," he said. "We don't have details that are having to be at the sports stadiums for different games. We don't have a lot of things."
"So the hope here is that because we're dealing with a changing dynamic, we can deeply reduce the amount of overtime, and we just have to find a way to tighten our belt with all agencies, because we're in the middle of a financial crisis," he added.
"So it's a goal that we believe with a lot of tough, tough decisions can be met. But it won't be easy. I'm the first to say that. But we just have to find ways to save the money."
