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Pension tension & the crime spike
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| Contributor | Scott³ |
| Last Edited | Scott³ Jul 17, 2012 01:30pm |
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| Category | News |
| Author | Nicole Gelinas |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Post |
| News Date | Sunday, July 15, 2012 07:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | "Crime is up — and cops are down. City taxpayers are paying so much for yesterday’s crime-fighting that they can barely afford today’s.
A bloody start to July reminded New Yorkers about the bad old days: 21 people killed over the holiday week, including three gunned down after leaving a Queens club. Though murders are down, shootings are up 11 percent for the year, helping push crime up 4 percent.
It gets harder to keep New York safe as the number of cops falls. Little more than a decade ago, in 2000, the city had 40,451 police officers. Today, it’s 34,413 cops — an 18 percent drop.
Even four years ago, we had 35,561 officers — 1,148 more than today.
This a big switch from the protection New York thought it would have. Four years ago, the NYPD expected to have 36,284 people in the ranks by mid-2012 — 1,871 above today’s real numbers.
And City Hall expects a drop of another 104 cops over the next two years. The number of officers won’t rise until at least 2016.
What happened? Yes, Wall Street collapsed, and tax revenues plummeted. The city thought things would be better by now — and they aren’t.
But the other huge factor is cops’ pensions.
Last year, New York City taxpayers put nearly $2.1 billion into the cops’ $24.7 billion pension fund to pay for future benefits — up from more than four-fold from the 1999-2000 average. (Cops’ own contributions are $207 million, but they pay only 9 percent of the total.)
If pension costs for cops had “only” doubled in a decade, we’d have an extra $1 billion a year — enough to hire at least 5,000 cops." |
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