NYPD Halts Disclosure of Data on Spending

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The New York Police Department is the only city agency to stop producing a set of data for the Office of Management and Budget detailing how the department deploys resources, officials said.

The OMB annually publishes the “District Resource Statement,” a document in which every service agency breaks down its resources and operations by borough and areas of the city. In the case of the NYPD, the data would include each precinct’s priorities, programs, and projected activities for the year, including things such as the number of officers and vehicles deployed and response time to 911 calls.

The city’s charter requires service agencies to provide the information. The NYPD hasn’t sent the data since the 2001-02 report was published, an OMB spokesman, Raymond Orlando, said.

A spokesman for the police department, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said the department stopped supplying the information when the OMB stopped sending it information requests.

“We have no record of any data request from OMB about the district resource reports until a couple of months ago, at which time we began collecting the data for the current report,” he said. “We will provide whatever data OMB needs for this and subsequent reports, whenever they ask for it.”

Over the years, the OMB has taken on the role of putting the data into a comprehensive document and reminding agencies to stay in compliance with section 2707 of Chapter 69 of the charter.

Community boards and other city officials have traditionally used the statements to craft their budgetary needs statements and in City Council hearings, but the data has also been used to elucidate trends not apparent in the police department’s sections of the executive budget, weekly Compstat reports, and the Mayor’s Management Reports.

The district manager of Community Board 6 in Brooklyn, Craig Hammerman, said that because the department doesn’t put out the report, the board has to go directly to the precinct for data, which can be problematic.

“You get one number when you ask one person. If you ask a different person you get a different number,” he said. “Without the data in writing, it’s harder to keep them accountable.”

The president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, said the data might show worrying indications of staffing problems at the precincts.

“We can understand why the NYPD does not want to advertise the fact that local communities’ resources have been depleted to dangerous levels,” he said.

Critics of the police department’s openness said not putting out the data is part of a wider pattern of closing out the public from unmediated access to police data.

After numerous requests from the City Council for up-to-date stop-and-frisk data, the police department only last month supplied the 2006 reports they were mandated to turn over quarterly. A Freedom of Information Law request to the department takes between four and five months, according to the NYPD’s record access officers. The law requires agencies to respond within 20 days to a request. The officers said the department doesn’t have enough staff to handle the volume of requests, which number 900 already this year.


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