Hundreds Of New York Cops Are Doing Work That Could Be Done By Civilians
As New York City debates whether the police department needs more officers, some current and former rank-and-file cops say too many of their colleagues are sitting indoors doing work that could be done by civilians.
snip*New York Police Department officers told BuzzFeed News they have a rich and varied slang to refer to colleagues who don’t do “real police work.” There’s “brooms”: sworn police officers who get paid to do janitorial work. There’s “house mice”: desk-bound cops who stay indoors all day, performing administrative duties like keeping track of the payroll. There’s “car guys,” in charge of maintaining a precinct’s vehicles.
And then there are the “zips,” also known as “zeroes”: cops who don’t really do anything, at least as far as anyone can tell.
“Some of these people have been inside so long that they can’t go outside,” Graham Campbell, a former NYPD officer who now works as a risk consultant, told BuzzFeed News. “They’re literally terrified.”
snip*The current discussion has become a strange political operetta, in which a progressive mayor has found himself at odds with his chosen police commissioner, and where a liberal Council speaker has sided with firebrand police unions.
People in city government have a more polite term to refer to the so-called house mice and the brooms — or rather, to their jobs. They call them “civilianizable” positions, because they could be filled by non-uniformed employees. Whenever the headcount question comes up, the issue of civilianization also arises. After all, why go through the trouble of recruiting and training 1,000 more officers when you could just redeploy the cops you already have?
snip*Mayor de Blasio’s office and the NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.
There is no guarantee that any newly hired officers would actually do community policing. Where any cop is deployed depends entirely on Commissioner Bratton, who can unilaterally decide what to do with his force. Bratton has made a point of not specifying what he would do with any new officers, but on at least one occasion he has indicated he would like to have 500 more cops doing counter-terrorism — a very different task from walking a beat, which is the backbone of community policing.
It’s unclear how many NYPD officers spend their work hours in tasks that could be done by civilians — in part because the NYPD does not detail how it deploys its officers on any given day. But several current and former police officers and sources at City Council told BuzzFeed News that at least several hundred officers are currently doing work that could be done by civilians.
in full: http://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolasmedinamora/does-new-york-need-more-cops-ask-the-brooms-and-the-zeroes#.lkBGVaM7V
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