AP NewsBreak: Official: NYC to hire almost 1300 new cops

De Blasio laid out a $78.3 billion executive budget for the next fiscal year in May, a $600 million increase over his blueprint in early February.

The City Council said the new police officers are needed to help the NYPD do so-called community policing, fix relationships with minority communities and control overtime costs.

Three hundred of the new officers will be assigned to counterterrorism duties, specifically, according to the Times, “to patrol areas of the city perceived as high risk, like Times Square”.

The new hires will join a force of about 35,000 uniformed officers, the nation’s largest.

De Blasio wanted it to be permanent.

“I was there when the animal rights community and the gay community said “Anybody but Quinn” and they worked, and we worked, hard because [de Blasio] was a progressive”, he said. The official had direct knowledge of the budget process but was not authorized to speak publicly until the deal is officially announced.

The increase in officers has already faced pushback from police reform groups, one decrying that the budget item “seems like politics at its worst”.

The deal marks a major victory to the Council Speaker, who fought for the hiring of 1,000 additional cops, despite countless rejections by the mayor. Murders have risen from 138 to 154, 11 percent, through Sunday, while shootings have gone up from 488 to 515.

“We’re strengthening the NYPD’s ranks, devoting new officers to counterterror work and neighborhood policing, while securing vital fiscal reforms in overtime and civilianization”, de Blasio said in a statement after the budget was finalized late Monday. The mayor particularly pegged it to Bratton’s ongoing efforts to revamp police department strategies; the commissioner is expected to announce several new initiatives later this week.

A deal has to come soon because the mayor and council face a deadline of June 30, the end of the fiscal year. The vote is expected to largely be a formality.

Hinton defended the beleaguered mayor: “At Mayor de Blasio’s direction, Commissioner Bratton has retrained officers and stopped excessive stop and frisk, which the mayor believes led to unconstitutional searches of innocent people of color but did nothing to reduce crime overall”.

“Our budget makes New York City a better place to call home”, remarked speaker Mark-Viverito.

$17.9 million to phase-in breakfast in the classroom at 530 elementary schools, serving 339,000 students by FY18.

Advocates of police reform are obviously unhappy with this outcome, with one activist telling the New York Daily News that it would only exacerbate the NYPD’s problems with racial profiling and overzealous policing of minor violations. “We have a bunch of community centers that are being closed, we have after school programs that are being shut down, we have mental health facilities that are being shut down, and we have homeless people everywhere”.