JEFFERSON SIEGEL/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS. Protesters gather outside City Hall on Thursday to call on the City Council to invest in communities rather than to hire 1,000 police officers.
Police reform activists slammed on Thursday a push by the City Council and Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito to add 1,000 new cops to the NYPD.
Mark-Viverito has made a headcount hike a top priority and plans to include it in the Council’s budget proposal, though it was left out of Mayor de Blasio’s latest plan.
“We don’t think that the largest police force in the country needs another thousand cops,” said Monica Novoa of the Coalition to End Broken Windows, among groups that rallied outside City Hall Thursday. “We don’t need more officers implementing broken windows policing.”
She said she was puzzled to see Mark-Viverito, a leading progressive, pushing the $90 million a year plan.
Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project, said there would be no need for more cops “if the NYPD deployed police officers to fight real crime, to fight serious felonies like rape, like homicide, like manslaughter, and took the police off the deployment to focus on [minor] infractions.”
Mark-Viverito strongly defended the proposal.
“Many of us continue to believe very strongly that this Police Department needs more police officers. And if we put in place effective community policing the way it is supposed to be, you need more officers on the ground interacting with communities,” she said.