Despite “Costing Taxpayers” $366 Million, NYPD Overtime Overages Get Zero Critical Coverage in “Fare Evasion” Obsessed NY Media

Both are costing the public hundreds of millions of dollars, but only one generates outrage and cries for crackdowns.

A recent report in The City shows that the NYPD overtime budget is expected to go a whopping $366 million over what the city allotted in its 2022 budget. Only halfway through the fiscal year, the NYPD has almost surpassed its city council-approved overtime budget of $454 million for FY2022, with $410 million spent thus far. As The City notes, the NYPD is expected to blow past the money the ostensibly democratic leaders of the city approved for overtime by $366 million, for a total of $820 million in overtime pay.  

For a New York City media obsessed with “lost revenue” caused by fare evasion, which the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) estimates will cost $500 million in 2022, this is a glaring inconsistency. There is no way to independently verify the $500 million figure, but the last year we do have a semi-official estimate for, 2019, put the figure at $300 million. Splitting the difference, we can safely put NYPD overtime overages in the same general ballpark as fare evasion estimates. Thus, comparing the media’s reaction to these two instances of “lost revenue” is a useful object lesson in how some forms of government waste are a five-alarm outrage accompanied by calls for police crackdowns and blue ribbon commissions, while some are met with a collective yawn.

A survey of coverage in major New York media—New York Post, New York Daily News, and New York 1—over the past year, shows no negative coverage of the NYPD blowing past its allotted overtime budget. To the extent overtime is mentioned it is dry budget process language or is said to be the inevitable result of “crime” putting “strains” on the department. P.R.-wise, the NYPD can’t lose: Every time it racks up overtime far beyond what it was budgeted for it becomes a story about out of control crime compelling it to do so. The issue is never framed as something that “costs taxpayers” money or is “stealing” from the public. Contrast this with the consistent, “crime”-indexed coverage over fare evasion stories. In the past year, the New York Post ran 32 stories mentioning fare evasion, the Daily News ran 23, and NY1 ran 30.

Headlines mindlessly repeat MTA claims of “$500 million in lost revenue.” We get vox pop with “frustrated” “commuters” angry at those free loading off the system. “Rising fare evasion,” we are told, is effectively being taken from the pockets of “taxpayers.” The money lost from fare evasion is said to be an urgent crime problem in need of more policing and tougher sentencing. 

No such framing exists for the NYPD deciding to unilaterally double its overtime budget—effectively taking $366 million from “taxpayers” without any approval from their duly elected representatives. The funding streams are, of course, different: MTA is mostly state funded, while the NYPD is largely funded by the city. But the tax bases are not that different, and the principle of “taxpayer” funding remains the same. 

We know New York media is capable of framing public overtime overages as effectively stealing from “taxpayers.” Two days ago The New York Post did a tabloid hit piece on overtime costs of non-police labor, going after MTA and LIRR workers who are seeking more state funds to cover a $385 million budget shortfall. The number isn’t that much different than the $366 million New York police are just randomly taking from city coffers without any public debate or democratic input. But, alas, no such tabloid hit piece will be forthcoming.

This is consistent with a larger media ethos that police spending, even when it’s far beyond what was budgeted for, is simply a law of nature, like gravity or a cosmological constant. Something immutable and incontestable. The NYPD routinely blows past the democratically approved overtime budget. Last year it surpassed it by $300 million. In 2021 it was $121 million over budget. Which raises the question: Why even have the New York city council pre-approve the overtime budget at all? If police leadership is going to simply ignore it and run up the tab as it sees fit, why even have it as a budget item?  Why not just put an infinity loop symbol in the budget and let electeds rubber stamp that? Similar to how our media frames military spending as “essential” and “must-pass” without any debate as to how “we will pay for it,” while demanding every cent of Single Payer healthcare or free college be “accounted for,” police budgets never need justifying. As cities increasingly consider—backed by mounds of evidence gained during the early stages of the pandemic—free fares for all public transit, the rush to criminalize “evasion” is a solution in search of a problem. It should, like dozens of other public services, simply be free and covered by taxes on the wealthy. As I noted last year, it’s a fake outrage, based on false austerity; a backdoor for criminalizing poverty and keeping homeless people off subways. But the outrage of “fare evasion” will remain a consistent story in New York media, while the NYPD racks up overtime overages—not overtime budgets, mind you, which already total almost half a billion dollars, but the $366 million over this amount—greater than the military budget of Albania. All with zero public debate, much less media outrage.