This is the first in an occasional Vital City series putting public policy debates in context.
Background: The status quo and proposals for change
How many police officers should the New York Police Department employ? In this mayoral campaign season, headcount has become a proxy for wider crime-fighting strategy. Before debating numbers, the city must first pin down the department’s mission. What exactly do we expect police to accomplish? Only once that purpose is clear can we weigh how added officers might influence crime, what they would cost, whether hiring constraints make a ramp-up feasible and how rapid growth could affect force quality.
The NYPD’s headcount has risen and fallen over the past three decades, but its relationship to crime has never been linear. In 1990, New York City’s three police departments — the NYPD, Transit Police and Housing Police (all since consolidated into one NYPD) — fielded 32,451 sworn officers. That year, the city registered an unprecedented 527,257 index felonies. A mid‑1990s hiring binge, fueled by Mayor David Dinkins’ Safe Streets, Safe City initiative and the federal COPS hiring grants, pushed the roster to an all‑time high of 40,280 officers in FY 2000. Crime plummeted in the mid‑ to late‑1990s.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, budget pressures and rising pension costs reversed the rising personnel tide. Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly let the force shrink through attrition; 3,846 officers departed in 2002 alone, and headcount settled near 34,000 by 2011. Today’s payroll lists 33,198 officers — about 1,800 shy of the budgeted ceiling of 35,001 because recruitment lags retirements — leaving the department only marginally above its post‑1990 low and well below its turn‑of‑the‑century peak.
Yet over the period between 2001 and today, when force strength fell from an all‑time high to a 30‑year low, crime plummeted even as the city’s population increased. In 2024, the city recorded 123,890 index felonies while operating with about 6,700 fewer officers than in 2001, when 162,908 such crimes were logged — a 24% decline.
Staffing expansions clearly coincided with the early, steep phase of New York’s crime decline and may have helped drive those reductions, but the sustained fall that followed — even as headcount ebbed — signals that deployment strategies, technological and managerial innovations, demographic shifts and broader social and economic forces have been at least as consequential as sheer numbers in driving public safety gains.
What does this evidence say about whether today’s NYPD is too large, too small or just right? Consistent with campaign themes that call crime and disorder unacceptably high, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been pushing a 5,000-officer increase in headcount, framing it as necessary to return to the early-2000s “tipping-point” strength that, in his telling, helped drive record crime drops. The Democratic nominee for mayor, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, says New York should keep the force size as it is — essentially the same result that Mayor Adams is chasing. Adams has pledged to “add” roughly 1,600 recruits by restoring two canceled academy classes and filling vacancies so that the NYPD can get to its authorized headcount.
The ledger lines hide tougher questions. Even if more police might, all else being equal, help crime decline, given the multi-million-dollar cost of staffing up the NYPD, what is the relative utility of this strategy compared to others? How many of the 35,001 already-funded positions can the NYPD be expected to fill when recruitment has stalled and attrition is topping 200 veteran officers a month, outpacing hiring? Are there better ways to increase effective headcount than simply hiring more cops? Given the loss of veteran supervision and investigative know-how, how might the department recalibrate so that it replaces lost judgment and skill rather than merely adding bodies?
Broad-brush evidence: Adding cops can reduce crime — with caveats
Decades of empirical work across economics, criminology and public policy converge on a finding: Increasing force size can reduce crime. Research published in 2017 by Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary looked at 242 U.S. cities between 1960 and 2010 and concluded that a 10% rise in staffing on average translates into roughly a 3% to 4% drop in violent crime. Their results align with a study by economist Steven Levitt showing that each additional officer added prevents both violent and property crime such that a 10% increase in officers causes a 4-5 % drop in violent crime and a 5% drop in property crime.
Broader evidence from American public policy history seems to support this finding. During the 1990s, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) initiative pumped federal grant money into police hiring. Using that natural experiment, Evans and Owens (2007) found that a 10% increase in staffing led to a 10% reduction in violent crime and 3% reduction in property crime.
New York’s recent history tells a more complicated story
But the COPS program was based on the premise that force strength had dipped to dangerously low levels at a time when crime was historically high. Can similar logic be applied today to a city like New York, which is much safer than it was then, and to a police department that is much better resourced than in the 1990s and is currently driving down crime?
Recent New York City history challenges the premise that the department’s total headcount is a decisive factor in crime trendlines. From 2001 to 2011, the city allowed its uniformed rolls to shrink by about 15%, more than 6,000 officers. Over the same period, felony index crimes fell by 16%, even as the population of the city grew from 7.8 million to 8.2 million. Scholars have pointed to CompStat’s data-driven accountability and “Operation Impact” hot-spot flooding as proof that smart resource allocation and deployment play a more important role than leaner headcounts.
Even if more police might, all else being equal, help crime decline, given the multi-million-dollar cost of staffing up the NYPD, what is the relative utility of this strategy compared to others?
Indeed, of the 14 years since 1998 in which NYPD staffing fell, crime still declined in 11 of them. All of this suggests that raw headcount is half or less than the story; more important is where those officers are deployed and what they are asked to do.
Calibrating police strength to crime levels matters because hiring 5,000 more officers is costly. The NYPD’s $6 billion operating budget is only the visible half of its price tag. Add the pension contributions, health-care premiums, Social Security, workers’ comp, and retiree health insurance that the City books in central accounts, and the department’s recurring costs rise to roughly $12 billion a year. Bringing on 5,000 new officers would lift spending by about $500 million in their first year and close to $1 billion once they hit top pay. Some of this investment could be recouped because, theoretically, with more cops there will be less overtime, which has exceeded $600 million in four of the last five years. But given that resources are limited, the bang for the buck of a hiring spree must be smartly compared to other investments, not in isolation. Any payoff must be weighed against other uses of the same funds — such as upgrading technology and dispatch systems or funding community and mental‑health programs — to identify the greatest public‑safety return.
So, what about overtime?
The Cuomo plan is not simply premised on the notion that more cops equal less crime. It’s rooted in the idea that morale is low and police are now fleeing the force in large numbers in part because forced overtime is high. This deserves some scrutiny.
Overtime is indeed rising. Between FY 2019 and FY 2024, total NYPD uniformed overtime costs ballooned 59.2%, reaching a high of $955 million in a $6 billion department operating budget. The average annual overtime for those who earned any overtime rose from 204 to 251 hours, and the share logging 500-plus hours in a given year jumped from 1% to 15.5%.
While some share of officers unquestionably appreciated the sizable pay boost that overtime provides, the increase has nonetheless become a drag on morale and retention, arguably aggravating the problem that it’s intended to solve.
Attrition also now outpaces new hiring. The uniformed attrition rate rose to 8.7% in 2024, up from 4.8% in 2018. The NYPD managed to hire only 2,600 recruits last year, fewer than the 2,951 officers who retired or resigned, leaving the department with a growing personnel gap and prompting the agency to relax its hiring standards.
Is hiring the only way to get more cops on the beat?
Increasing topline force strength isn’t the only way to add more police to the streets. Commissioner Jessica Tisch has already shown how much capacity hides in plain sight. In the first few months of her tenure, she pulled roughly 500 officers out of “unofficial assignments” and trimmed oversized executive entourages. The manpower was immediately reassigned to precincts and detective squads.
Roster data confirm more opportunities. The Court Section, which handles pre-arraignment processing and shares detention-cell supervision with the City’s Correction Department, now has 510 sworn members, roughly 130 more than at the start of 2024. Pruning these peripheral posts could send hundreds back to the front line without hiring a single recruit.
Wellness is another force multiplier. Since 2019, average sick leave has risen from 7.1 to 10.9 days per officer, a loss of 3.8 shifts each and about 1.6% of annual availability. Across the 33,000‑plus force, that equals 525 to 530 full‑time positions, the manpower of an entire mid‑size precinct. Mandatory overtime and low morale feed the problem as much as illness, so any staffing strategy must include policies that cut fatigue and improve health.
Last comes civilianization, or moving people from “desk duty” to patrol while keeping the desks sufficiently staffed. More than 250 officers on the roster still handle fleet fueling, property-clerk work, discovery compliance and other clerical chores that require no weapon or arrest powers. The chief bottleneck is the City’s two-for-one vacancy policy for “non-safety” titles: Under current policy, an agency may fill only one civilian position for every two vacant lines it carries, leaving the second slot permanently empty. Because half the clerical lines stay unfilled, police brass substitute higher-paid officers for missing civilians. Lifting, or at least exempting public-safety agencies from this cap would let the NYPD hire lower-cost civilians, return sworn personnel to the street and trim overtime, adding hundreds of patrol hours each day without increasing the authorized headcount.
Could more police drive down response times?
Beyond morale and overall crime rates, the question is what significantly upping the current number of cops might mean on the street for callers waiting for a patrol car. As head count shrank after 2019, critical call response times, i.e. to shootings, robberies and life-threatening assaults, slowed from 4 minutes 42 seconds in FY 2019 to 7 minutes in FY 2024, a 49% increase. The wait for police in response to serious crimes, such as burglaries or assaults, rose from seven minutes to over 11 minutes, a 61% jump. The wait in response to non-critical complaints such as disorderly groups and past crimes stretched even longer, expanding from 16 minutes 18 seconds to 26 minutes 53 seconds, up 65%.
Empirical studies of 911 queues predict exactly this pattern: Lower staffing leads to higher response times. But staffing isn’t the only lever. Smarter deployment, clearer priorities and allocation of personnel, including decisions about where officers are assigned and what tasks they focus on, can all improve response times.
Beyond headcount
Headline promises to substantially increase police headcount have surface appeal, but the evidence suggests there are other potent and cost-effective ways to reduce crime — not to mention other ways to get more police on duty. Because attrition is now outpacing recruitment and the force is losing officers each month, the next mayor cannot count on a bigger headcount anytime soon. Until the NYPD can retain current staff and fill its existing vacancies, the more reliable path to better public safety is to redeploy idle cops, civilianize clerical work and steer every patrol hour toward tactics with a proven track record. Voters should ask not just “How many officers?” but also “Doing what, where, and to what effect?”