In June, under the "leadership" of City Council President Chuck Lesnick, the Yonkers City Council passed a city budget eliminating 2.2 million dollars from the police overtime budget. Many of our elected officials, including Lesnick, have misunderstood the importance and need for this overtime and have overlooked the obvious. In fact, The Journal News has written a number of articles criticizing Yonkers Police Officer’s above average pensions, which are driven higher as a result of overtime.
For more than a decade Yonkers politicians have ignored the pleas of the Yonkers PBA to bolster the ranks of the police force, which would reduce the need for overtime. Police departments in cities of our size, such as Rochester, NY and Richmond, Va. have well more than 800 employees, while Yonkers barely has 600. This has been pointed out countless times yet it has fallen on deaf ears. In fact, on numerous occasions, elected officials in Yonkers have said that it is "cheaper" to fill posts on overtime than it is to hire more cops. This myopic view of how to staff our police department has proven to be a huge mistake. Ironically, the same people who are responsible for this mistake have chosen to vilify the police officers dedicated to protecting the citizens of Yonkers.
The overwhelming majority of Yonkers police overtime is created by filling posts and sector cars which patrol the city. If the police department were properly staffed there would be no need to utilize overtime to fill these posts. Many of these posts were created due to necessity as crime levels rose, demographics changed and gang activity skyrocketed. In January, the Yonkers PBA paid for an ad in The Journal News appealing to the citizens of Yonkers and pleading with city government to adequately staff the department. In the spring at City Council budget hearings members of the PBA and CLSA once again warned the Council that not properly staffing the police department would result in unnecessary bloodshed. The City Council's response to these pleas was to dangerously cut the police budget and unfortunately, our warnings came to fruition.
As a result of these cuts there are no longer cops in the schools, there are no plainclothes cops assigned to the entire east side of the city, all of the foot posts were cut from minimum manning, and several other essential units were completely cut from the YPD. Just as warned, there has been a direct result of these cuts. Crimes in our schools abound and the city's southeast section is suffering from a 50% increase in robberies and a 35% increase in larcenies from autos. The most telling statistic comes in the 47 people that have been shot so far this year. In the 3rd Precinct, the hardest hit by the cuts, there is a 76% increase in shootings, many of which occurred in broad daylight! Keep in mind these statistics do not reflect the dozens of shootouts where we were lucky enough that nobody was hit. Only days ago in Yonkers, steps from YPD headquarters and City Hall, a gang fight erupted into gunfire, an all too common occurrence these days. In suppressing this incident nearly every police unit in the city was called upon, leaving the rest of the city unpatrolled and unprotected, a situation so serious that Mount Vernon, Dobbs Ferry and Greenburgh Police Department's were called and put on standby to respond to our city.
This past June City Council President Lesnick and Council members issued a statement saying they had "concluded that the budget we have outlined strikes the appropriate balance between what our citizens need and should expect for city government and what they can afford in these difficult times." More recently, on the heels of the latest gang related high noon shooting, Mr. Lesnick exclaimed "Yonkers IS safe." Simply stated, Mr. Lesnick is out of touch with what is going on in our city. He and too many of our elected politicians have failed us by not adequately staffing and funding our police force, thus making Yonkers a dangerous and unattractive city.
The men and women of the Yonkers Police are proud to have the honor of protecting the citizens of Yonkers. All we ask is that we are given the proper amount of police officers needed to get the job done. Once this is accomplished, the city will be safer, overtime will go down and pensions will be lowered. Until then let us direct our anger and frustrations to where it belongs, towards our elected officials who all too often choose to point fingers at each other rather than working together to come up with solutions.
Det. Keith Olson is 1st Vice President of the Yonkers (PBA) Police Benevolent Association.
