The number of prospective cops willing to join the New York Police Department has decreased by more than half since 2017. The drop comes as the state struggles with an influx of illegal immigrants, rising crime, and local corruption.
The NYPD had 18,000 candidates take the test to join the department’s ranks in 2017. Only 8,000 prospective members applied this year, a 55 percent decrease in eight years, according to Police Benevolent Association data, which was reported by the New York Post.
Current and former cops told the Post that the decreased size of the NYPD’s application pool is due to the comparatively low starting salary of $53,790 and state bail reform efforts that allow criminals, some of them illegal immigrants, to commit crimes and quickly be released back into the city. Retired NYPD sergeant and professor of criminal justice Joseph Giacalone said that City Council’s recently-passed “stupid laws” hamstring police officers and deter prospective force members.
“A lot of my students don’t want to be cops anymore,” Giacalone told the Post. “The whole class used to want to be cops.”
Facing a low applicant pool and a shrinking number of NYPD cops altogether, Mayor Eric Adams said late last year that he would recruit 1,600 new officers in 2025. However, since only one out of every eight potential members pass the test to become an officer, to recruit 1,600 cops would require 13,000 to apply in 2025 — a number the department hasn’t seen in years.
The report comes after a couple of heinous crimes committed in New York City went viral. Sebastian Zapeta, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who was staying in a taxpayer-funded shelter at the Days Inn in Brooklyn, lit on fire and killed a woman who was sleeping in a subway car. Days later, a man shoved a 45-year-old man, who survived with serious injuries, off a subway platform in Manhattan.
NYPD officers are subject to harassment and grunt work, cops also told the Post. Earlier last year, as many as 14 illegal immigrants attacked two police officers in Times Square, in what Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg called a “heinous” crime.
Also last year, New York Police Department commissioner Edward Caban resigned, after federal authorities seized his phone in connection to a federal investigation into corruption. Dozens of NYPD officials were let go in December by now-commissioner Jessica Tisch, in relation to multiple scandals.