NYPD head count doesn't correlate to crime rates, data suggests, despite candidate rhetoric

Whether or not to hire more police officers has been one of the more contentious policy arguments among New York City’s mayoral hopefuls — but a new report by a former NYPD executive shows that more cops don’t necessarily equal better public safety.

The report, published Thursday by the group Vital City, shows crime declined consistently across multiple years where the number of uniformed officers also waned.

“ It's been a campaign issue — what the police head count is and what it could be. And it seems to serve as some sort of proxy for what one thinks of the police,” said John Hall, a former NYPD official who wrote the report.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent, has hinged his campaign on the idea that crime in the city is out of control, despite significant drops in many major index crimes under Mayor Eric Adams. Cuomo said he plans to hire 5,000 additional officers as a solution.

Meanwhile, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has said he will keep the numbers as they are, and create a new Department of Community Safety to coordinate gun violence prevention and homeless services as well as mental health outreach and crisis response. Adams has expanded eligibility requirements to get the force back to 35,000 officers by fall 2026, up from just over 33,000 now.

The report highlighted data showing that the number of police officers has not neatly correlated with crime drops over the last three decades.

In 1990, more than 500,000 index felonies were reported in New York City, with 32,451 sworn officers on the force. The crime surge fueled a hiring spree in the middle of that decade, with the police head count at an all‑time high of 40,280 officers in fiscal year 2001.

Crime plummeted during this time period, Hall writes, but it stayed even as the NYPD head count dropped after 9/11.

More than 3,800 officers left the force in 2002 alone, the same year there were 154,809 felony crimes reported, NYPD data shows. The numbers dropped consistently every year until 2011, when the number of police officers hovered around 34,000.

In 2024, the city recorded 123,890 index felonies, while having about 6,700 fewer officers than in 2001, when 162,908 such crimes were logged. That’s a 24% decline, even as the city’s population also grew by almost 500,000.

“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,” Hall wrote.

He said the candidates’ overwhelming focus on policing numbers is misplaced, especially since the department is struggling to hire enough officers to make up for the higher attrition rate — which he said is caused by more intense demands, bigger classes hitting retirement age and smaller recruitment classes.

Besides those factors, hiring officers is expensive: 5,000 more names on the roster would add about $500 million a year to the NYPD’s $6 billion operating budget now — translating into almost $1 billion once the new hires reach top pay, according to the report.

While more officers in the force could eventually help crack down on ballooning overtime costs, potentially improving department morale and slowing attrition, Hall warns that getting those people in the door could be hard.

“ If it was possible, I would imagine [Commissioner Jessica Tisch] would do it,” Hall said. “If you want to increase the head count by 5,000 cops, that's a pretty tall task.”

Before the mayoral primary in June, Cuomo told Gothamist in an interview that the ‘defund the police’ slogan “was a mistake.”

Hall said Mamdani’s plan to keep the head count at current levels is “a realistic assessment of the challenges as they are.” As far as his plans to create a new department tasked with managing certain kinds of public safety issues, Hall said “the devil's always in the details.”

The Mamdani, Cuomo and Adams campaigns did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.