Why De-Civilianize NYPD?

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly presented a paradox during his testimony to a City Council budget hearing last week: he said he was unhappy about a reduction in the uniformed force because "we can do a better job the more officers we have," but he also said an increasing number of cops would be performing civilian duties.

Each officer assigned full time to work that could be done by civilians is a cop taken away from the patrol force. And since the cost of those in uniform, once benefits as well as salary are considered, is roughly twice that for a civilian employee, the NYPD is losing money on that shift in duties.

Yet the Police Commissioner told the Council that roughly 650 civilian positions will be eliminated by mid-2010. On the one hand, this means fewer police jobs will have to be lost via attrition, but with cops taking over civilian work, there will be a net loss of patrol strength.

This is not only dubious from a fiscal standpoint, it runs counter to a 2004 court ruling requiring the NYPD to further civilianize its operations.

The following spring, Mr. Kelly said that the department had identified 700 positions that might be converted. That was considerably less than the 3,500 estimated by District Council 37, which brought the lawsuit that produced the court victory.

Since then, however, the NYPD has actually gone backward in the number of jobs handled by civilians. Mayor Bloomberg, later in 2005 when he was seeking DC 37's endorsement of his re-election bid, joked that getting the department to civilianize was "like pulling teeth."

This bit of humor had an element of self-deprecation to it, since it implied that while in theory he outranked Mr. Kelly, the Mayor could only make suggestions on civilianizing and hope they were complied with.

DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts, who has the option of going back to court to demand that the city make a greater effort, has chosen not to do so. A union consultant who had suggested pressing the issue later noted in a memo that Ms. Roberts's chief lobbyist, Wanda Williams, "told me to back off." So the political dynamic involves a strong Police Commissioner and a weak union leader, and a Mayor opting to bend with the wind. From a budgetary standpoint, however, this makes little sense. Nor does it seem to be a sound move operationally.

Police Commissioners have always been resistant to civilianization. Mayor Ed Koch's first NYPD head, Robert McGuire, stated more than 25 years ago that he believed civilian employees were at least a cut below the average cop when it came to capability and an understanding of the department's needs.

The obvious rejoinder was that even if this was accurate, didn't it suggest the NYPD should be raising salaries and standards for its civilian jobs in order to attract better-qualified candidates? Since civilian-employee pension provisions are significantly less generous than those for police officers, their pay could be raised more than a bit and the NYPD would still save money over a uniformed hire to do desk work.

DC 37 has disputed the claim that there was a marked difference in the skills that members it represented brought to jobs that were also being performed by cops. It contended in the past that the real reason Police Commissioners limited civilianization was that they doled out desk jobs like patronage plums to some officers who preferred to be away from patrol duty.

The Council's Public Safety Committee Chair, Peter Vallone Jr., decried the planned reduction in officers through attrition, saying it could have a severe impact on the NYPD's crime-fighting efforts.

What he and other Council Members ought to be doing, however, is asking tough questions about why the department is reducing its civilian headcount when that forces a reduction in patrol strength as uniformed officers are taken from the streets to do desk work. Mr. Kelly may have a plausible response; if so, make him provide it.