Despite a rise in crime, New York’s police officers will have their overtime hours reduced as the city continues to struggle financially as a result of the immigration crisis that has engulfed the Big Apple.
There are about 110,000 migrants scattered around the New York region, the majority of whom crossed the southern border in the last 18 months. Mayor of New York City Eric Adams has issued a warning that the problem could endanger the city and cost the taxpayers $12 million.
The city’s budget director, Jacques Jiha, has ordered the police, fire, sanitation, and prisons departments to significantly reduce overtime.
In a memo on Saturday, he stated, “The mayor will… issue a directive to implement an overtime reduction initiative for our city’s four uniformed agencies (NYPD, FDNY, DOC/DSNY).”
The decision is a result of citywide budget cuts made to find funding for the influx of refugees. Because to overcrowding, city shelters may even be forced to make migrant women and children live in tents.
According to the New York Post, the city has not proposed any layoffs as part of its efforts to control spending. However, there will be a hiring freeze, with the exception of public health and safety departments.
Additionally, there seems to be less overtime. He said, “These agencies must submit a plan to reduce year-to-year OT spending,” and stated that they were required to offer City Hall monthly updates on their progress in achieving the city’s overtime reduction objective.
The memo was released a few days after Mayor Adams went on a widely reported tirade, attacking the Big Apple’s catastrophic migrant situation, which he said will “destroy” the city unless immediate action is taken.
At a town hall meeting on Wednesday, he said he doesn’t see a solution to the issue and criticized Joe Biden’s lack of assistance when addressing irate citizens.
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Unprecedented Challenge Looms Over New York City’s Future: A Stark Warning
“New Yorkers, let me tell you something. Never in my life have I faced a challenge for which I could not see a solution. I don’t see this having a happy ending,’ he admitted. New York City will be destroyed by this problem. obliterate New York City.
He cited ‘grossly inadequate’ funding from the state and federal governments as the cause of the situation.
According to Jiha’s memo, services for migrants inside the city are also reportedly at jeopardy.
In order to ensure that services are being offered to asylum seekers in the most economical and effective way possible, he added, “We are also reducing the number of services provided to them and closely monitoring these services.”
Jiha wrote, “The city is going through a humanitarian crisis that we did not cause.”
Adams warned on Sunday that in-door shelters would soon run out of space for migrant women and children who had been given precedence at municipal shelters.
We’ll eventually need to relocate women and kids into congregational settings. According to the New York Daily News, he stated in an interview that was broadcast Sunday on PIX11 that some migrants could have to relocate into outdoor tents.
This is not a paradise and it is not an academic exercise. With no end in sight, 10,000 people each month are too many for New York City to handle. The mayor was quoted by PIX11 as saying, “That can’t happen, and that will undermine this entire city.”
There should be no reductions in overtime, according to Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association, the largest police union in the city.
Without resolving its staffing crisis, the NYPD won’t be able to drastically reduce overtime, according to Hendry. We still lack thousands of police officers, and without enough staff, it is difficult to reduce crime to its pre-2020 levels.
Mayor Adams has begged the state and federal governments for assistance, but neither has responded. As a result, the city’s budget would have to be used to pay the $4.7 billion.
That sum is equivalent to the combined budgets for the city’s parks, fire, and sanitation agencies.
Currently, the city is caring for up to 60,000 migrants, with 21,000 of those children beginning school this year. Numerous migrants are staying in hotels and shelters all across the city.
Due to this, migrants have been seen sleeping for days outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan as they attempt to enter the fully booked hotel. While migrants are being detained in schools and children are going back to class, there have been protests in other parts of the city.
On the first day of the new school year, some institutions had to turn away pupils due to overcrowding in the classrooms.
According to city officials, this fiscal year, there will be close to 33,980 households that are asylum seekers.
Currently, the city spends roughly $385 each night for each migrant family that requires housing and food. Asylum seekers, according to Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, cost the city over $10 million daily.
On Wednesday, an irate Adams indicated plainly that the existence of the city depends on outside assistance to handle the situation.
He referred to Texas governor Gregg Abbott’s busing of migrants to the metropolis and stated, “It started with a madman down in Texas deciding he wanted to bus people up to New York City.”
Adams went on to say, “We have 110,000 migrants we have to house, feed, clothe, educate, wash their laundry, give them everything they need.”
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Southern Conservative Governors and Migrant Influx: A Tug of Political Pressures
As conservative governors of southern states like Texas and Florida, like Abbott Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, seek to exert some pressure on progressive governments and President Joe Biden in Washington, many of the migrants have been bused in from these states.
Although they are not illegal immigrants, they lack work permits because they must wait months to get them after requesting asylum.
The inability of the migrants to work and become self-sufficient enough to obtain accommodation, according to experts, is one of the key problems. The city is required by a consent decree from decades ago to provide homes for all homeless people.
Abbott criticized Adams and New York last week, branding the mayor a “hypocrite” for his caution. The governor of Texas pointed out that the number of migrants in New York is much smaller than what Texas has experienced coming across the Mexican border.
‘Mayor Adams was pleased to promote his self-described sanctuary city status until Texas began busing migrants to New York City to bring relief to our overrun and overwhelmed border communities,’ Abbott’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
Mahaleris said in his statement, “With millions of residents, New York is only dealing with a fraction of what our small border communities deal with on a daily basis.”
‘Mayor Adams should criticize his party’s leader, President Biden, who has been transporting planeloads of migrants throughout the nation, frequently at night and taxing state and local resources nationwide, instead of whining about the 13,000 migrants flown from Texas.
“Texas will continue busing migrants to sanctuary cities until President Biden steps up and does his job to relieve our overburdened border towns,” the statement read.
Under Biden’s leadership, there have been a ton of migrants crossing the southern border, with a spike after Title 42 expired.
As Title 42 came to an end, the number of migrants crossing the Mexican border reached a record 10,000 per day. As a result, services were swamped and border towns were overrun, forcing several governments to bus refugees to liberal-led northern cities.
More than a year after launching “Operation Lone Star,” a program that permitted him to take broad action against asylum seekers swarming Texas cities, Abbott made the decision to start bussing migrants in August 2022.
In May 2021, he declared a disaster that affected more than 50 counties, the majority of which were border counties, giving him the right to send troops from the Texas National Guard on duty and expanding his detention authority.
The initiative costs taxpayers $2.5 million each week, according to research done by The Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and The Marshall initiative and published in March 2022.
This month, however, a judge’s ruling to demolish a floating barrier the governor had erected on a river separating the United States from Mexico to prevent border crossings severely damaged Abbott’s handling of the migrant problem in his own state.
Source: Daily Mail
