NYPD to receive stimulus money -- after Justice funds were denied

Published 30 July 2009

New York City officials were livid earlier this week after the Justice Department excluded NYC from law enforcement grants it gave cities that “needed it most” (among these cities: Caribou, Maine; Greybull, Wyoming; and Bayou La Batre, Alabama); DHS will now give NYPD $35 million in federal stimulus money

Just hours after New York City officials announced that they had been left out of one program to funnel federal money to police departments around the country, it was revealed that the city would receive even more money than they had already been counting on — but from a different source. New York Times’s Patrick McGeehan writes that on Wednesday, Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that the city will receive about $35 million in federal stimulus money that it can use to hire police officers. The money would come through DHS’s transit security grant program, which is distributing about $150 million in stimulus funds. The New York Police Department, though, would use it to hire about 120 recruits.

This will put more than 120 new cops on our trains and buses and will be a shot in the arm for New York’s successful fight against crime,” said Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York), who worked with homeland security officials to ensure that the money could be used to hire police officers.

Word of the grant began to spread Tuesday evening, a few hours after the city’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and Governor David Paterson spoke at a news conference about their disappointment with the Justice Department’s decision to exclude the city from a separate stream of stimulus money. That program is doling out $1 billion to more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies across the country.

The Justice Department allocation was announced on Tuesday in Philadelphia by Vice President Joseph Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder. Philadelphia, like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and others, is receiving enough money to hire fifty officers and pay them for three years. “These officers will go directly to the places they are needed most,” Holder said.

McGeehan writes that those places did not include the Bronx or Brooklyn or cities in New Jersey like Newark, Camden, or Jersey City. They did include Caribou, Maine; Greybull, Wyoming; and Bayou La Batre, Alabama, each of which will receive enough to hire one officer.

Half of the Justice Department money went to communities with fewer than 150,000 residents, and each state received at least $5 million. Police departments in New York State received almost $20 million, while those in New Jersey got $26.8 million, according to figures released by the Justice Department.

McGeehan notes that one of the police jobs to be created is in Paulsboro, New Jersey, a borough of about 6,000 residents sandwiched between two oil refineries along the Delaware River below Camden. The Paulsboro Police Department has two openings on its 20-member staff but did not have the money to fill them, said John Burzichelli, the mayor, who also is the deputy speaker of the New Jersey State Assembly. Violent crimes are “few and far between” in Paulsboro, said Burzichelli, who said he could not recall the last murder there.

The allocation from the Justice Department spurred immediate complaints from New York officials, who cited the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 as reasons why the city should have been among the recipients, even though its crime rate has been falling. Kelly said his department has 5,000 fewer officers than it did in 2001 and is expected to lose 1,000 more during a hiring drought lasting through June. He said the department had asked for enough stimulus money to hire 2,000 officers and hoped to receive at least enough to start 200 to 300 recruits in its training academy by the start of next year.

The Justice Department program never could have provided for that kind of increase, according to federal officials, because the most any city or county is to receive is enough for 50 officers. Among those receiving the maximum amounts available were Milwaukee, Nashville, Washington, Baltimore, and Prince George’s County, Maryland.

Holder said more than 7,000 cities and towns applied for the money. The decisions were based on the communities’ crime rates, financial need and the level of community policing they engaged in. Community policing involves working with local residents and business owners to identify problems and try to find solutions. In New York State, twelve departments, including small ones like in Hudson and larger forces like in Syracuse, received some of the stimulus money. Several of them ranked below New York City on the Justice Department’s assessment of “fiscal need,” but all ranked much higher on the measure of “crime and community policing.”