A $225 million plan by Mayor Eric Adams to erect a 16-agency public safety training facility on the NYPD academy’s campus is being panned by nearly all of his Democratic primary challengers.
Not only is newfound “defund the police” enemy Andrew Cuomo against the so-called “Cop City,” so are many actual NYPD officers.
The mayoral hopefuls, including democratic socialist firebrand Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, agree that shelling out a quarter billion dollars on a training facility does nothing to help the NYPD’s ongoing crisis with hiring and keeping cops on the force.
“From an NYPD perspective, it’s dumb,” one law-enforcement source said Friday.
“The NYPD does everything anyway — we do everyone’s job, and now we’re going to train other agencies to continue to not do our job. It’s just another waste of our resources.”
Another mayoral candidate, State Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens), argued the money would be better spent on increasing base pay, among other bread-and-butter public safety items.
“It’s another Eric Adams boondoggle of taxpayer dollars,” she said.
Adams last year announced plans to build the facility by repurposing money his predecessor Bill de Blasio had set aside for a Department of Correction training center.
He argued putting all the city’s public safety training in one facility — with construction slated to begin in early 2026 — would be more efficient and save taxpayers money.
City Hall, however, did not provide The Post an estimate for savings.
Leftist police reform advocates quickly lambasted the facility as the Big Apple’s own version of Atlanta’s controversial “Cop City,” but the furor largely faded until Politico first reported that eight of Adams’ mayoral challengers opposed it.
“Quite frankly, the Adams administration doesn’t care what a bunch of ‘defund the police’ career bureaucrats – who have only made it more difficult for us to protect New Yorkers’ public safety – have to say about our fiscally-responsible public safety academy which will streamline services and more effectively utilize taxpayer dollars,” a City Hall spokesperson said.
Besides Adams, most Democratic mayoral candidates expressed at least some support amid the George Floyd protests in 2020 for the “defund the police” movement, ranging from Cuomo calling it a “legitimate school of thought” to then-city Councilman Brad Lander actively pushing to cut $1 billion from the NYPD’s budget.
But they’ve all — besides Mamdani — since changed their defunding tunes as Big Apple crime rose and the NYPD’s headcount fell to roughly 33,500 from its pre-pandemic 36,000.
Lander, who is now city comptroller, recently unveiled a public safety plan that adds more cops — as have all the contenders except Mamdani.
“The top issues facing the New York Police Department right now are recruitment and retention, neither of which will be solved by Mayor Adams’ unnecessary $225 million vanity project in Queens,” Lander said.
“As Mayor, I’ll redirect capital funding to enhance the workplace experience for our officers, upgrading our precincts into environments where they feel valued and respected. This approach will not only boost morale and make the job more appealing — but also strengthen our NYPD officers’ commitment to fair and equal policing.”
Former city Comptroller Scott Stringer likewise lambasted the “Cop City” as financially wasteful and besides the point.
“The issue we really have isn’t one of physical infrastructure—its human infrastructure and effective management,” he said. “Right now, hundreds of millions of our taxpayer dollars are wasted because the people we are training—3,000 people last year — are leaving for law enforcement jobs outside of New York City.”
Former state Assemblyman and Obama White House aide Michael Blake piled on, saying, “We oppose Cop City.”
“As we are seeing in Atlanta, the people don’t want their limited dollars to expand the prison industrial complex.”
Another law-enforcement source said the training facility is a distraction from the NYPD’s staffing crisis.
“If you make a ‘cop city’ and pack it with all these minor law enforcement agencies it gives the appearance that we’re not short staffed of police officers,” the source said.
“Meanwhile, the reality is the NYPD will continue to do the job of all the other agencies and now, with a new facility, train all of them too. The problem still remains – we don’t have enough police officers to do the ever-evolving and expanding duties of NYPD police officers.”
