As the new school year begins, the New York City Police Department will deploy hundreds of uniformed officers this week to key locations, Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Wednesday.
In a series of TV hits, she and Mayor Adams promoted a plan to assign the cops on foot along passageways where children frequently commute to and from school, as the NYPD tries to bolster its ranks of school safety agents.
“We have lots of officers,” Tisch told PIX11 Morning News, “over 500 officers that are going to work corridors that kids travel to and from school, at the times they’re traveling to and from school, just to make sure that their pre-school and post-school commutes are nice and safe.”
Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)
The deployment comes as a recent spate of high-profile shootings in the Bronx involving young people has left families in the borough on edge, on top of fears stemming from last week’s Catholic school shooting in Minneapolis.
“This city has been extremely fortunate: No mass shootings in our schools,” Adams said on ABC7 Eyewitness News. “There’s a real plan that the commissioner is rolling out when it comes down to keeping our children safe.”
“When you look at some of these crimes that hit young people, I spoke to the mother of the young girl who was shot in the Bronx, and it rips you apart,” the mayor added. “We’re going to keep them safe in our school system.”
The NYPD has hired nearly 3,000 new recruits this year, including school safety officers, the police commissioner said on PIX11.
“We’ve done a huge push around hiring school safety officers, and we will continue to do that,” Tisch continued. “For as long as I’ve been in the Police Department, there’s always been drama around the number of school safety officers we have. And so we’ve put in place a hiring plan, hopefully to end that drama.”
Last spring, just over 3,600 school safety agent jobs were filled out of an authorized head count closer to 4,000, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union — a 28% decrease in officers over the last half decade.
In response, the NYPD launched an “assistant” agent program for recent high school graduates to boost staffing in elementary schools and build a future talent pipeline. The Police Department has also moved the broader school safety agents division from a community bureau to under the control of police personnel — a move the NYPD insists was structural but sparked concern among advocates.
“Keeping our kids safe is our real priority this school year,” Tisch said on Fox5 Good Day New York.
