Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams announced plans Friday to hire 5,000 additional police officers by 2028, but the NYPD is already struggling to hire and retain officers at its current head count.
The new funding came in Adams’ latest budget plan, but doesn’t address the department’s documented struggles to meet its current staffing levels. On top of nearly 1,300 current vacancies, police unions complained that recruiting can no longer keep up with attrition because people no longer want to be police officers.
Earlier this year, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the city was “begging” people to become officers, but after reducing hiring standards, she said recruitment was “back in a big way.”
Experts worry that if the only way to keep recruitment up is to reduce standards, policing quality will drop. But with the election days away, this is a staffing issue the next mayor will inherit.
“Saying numbers is one thing, keeping police officers on the job is another thing,” said Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association.
Hendry said the quality of life for police officers is low, citing better pay in jurisdictions without aggressive civilian complaint review boards, and complaining that officers don’t have enough days off or time for meal breaks.
“They’re looking for different opportunities because there are police officers who get paid more, who work the same streets as us like state troopers and Port Authority and MTA,” he said.
The NYPD is currently authorized for 34,975 officers and only has 33,692, according to the city comptroller’s office.
Despite this, Tisch struck an optimistic tone about the department’s recruitment efforts.
“This investment will put an additional 5,000 police officers on the streets as the NYPD continues to deliver record-low shooting incidents and victims, and the safest third quarter ever on our subways,” she said. “Every new officer means safer streets, stronger communities, and a thriving city.”
Earlier this year, Tisch said there was a staffing crisis prompting her to drop recruitment standards, allowing recruits with two semesters of college instead of four and dropping the age requirements from 25 to 20.5 years old. The city also waived testing fees and increased the number of entrance exams for a given year.
Kenneth Quick, a policing professor at DeSales University and former NYPD inspector in charge of personnel, said he worries the only way the NYPD addressed the staffing crisis this year was by officially dropping standards. He also expressed concern about unofficial ways to lower the bar.
“There’s always ways to try to get people through the training to get them out in the street,” Quick said. “Not necessarily eliminating standards, but manipulating the process so that you can have more people out and hired.”
Adams’ ambitious hiring plan would bring the NYPD authorized head count to 40,000 officers for the first time in 20 years. It calls for a phased approach: 300 officers in July 2026, which would grow to 2,500 in July 2027, and reach 5,000 annually by July 2028. The cost would grow from $17.8 million in the first year to $315.8 million by fiscal year 2029.
Adams announced the plan five days before the city chooses its next mayor.
The timing means his successor will inherit the challenge of finding thousands of qualified recruits. Spokespeople for mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
All three candidates have called for boosting recruitment, though with different approaches. Mamdani has suggested that shifting mental health calls from police will make the job more attractive, while Cuomo — who received Adams’ endorsement after the current mayor dropped out of the race — has promised to hire 5,000 cops, as Adams declared Friday.
Justin Brannan, who chairs the City Council’s finance committee, said it’s unrealistic to reverse the trend of losing more police than the city can hire without addressing core workplace issues such as forced overtime.
He added that the timing of Friday’s announcement was political.
“This announcement is best understood as a politically motivated and improper use of the city budget in support of Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign,” he said.
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