Defund the Police? New York City Already Did Funding for Law Enforcement, as a Share of NYC’s Budget, Has Long Been Shrinking

By Nicole Gelinas

  Since mid-2020, government spending on American police departments has come under intense scrutiny nationwide. The New York Police Department (NYPD) is no exception. Leftwing critics supporting the “defund the police” movement charge that spending on police is crowding out necessary spending on civilian agencies that provide education, housing, health care, and social services. Even moderate Democrats and supposedly neutral news outlets accept the premise that police spending is either too high, relative to the rest of the city budget, or, at minimum, keeping up with the rest of the city budget. What’s missing from the “defund” argument and even from news sources is context. How large is the NYPD budget, relative to the overall city budget? How has spending on policing changed over the years and decades, relative to the entire budget? How large is uniformed-police staffing, relative to the overall city workforce? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes four decades of New York City police spending, from the recovery after the 1970s fiscal crisis through the pandemic years of the early 2020s. This paper puts spending and officer headcount in the context of the overall budget. The paper finds that operational spending on the uniformed NYPD, contrary to conventional wisdom, has shrunk substantially as a share of the city budget since the early 1980s, both in terms of spending and the size of the uniformed-officer workforce.

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2023. 13p.