Ten Facts about the New York City Police Department: Background information when reading Proving Ground

Ten Facts about the New York City Police Department

This article relates to Proving Ground

In Proving Ground, Blauner's modern noir mystery, the colossus that is the New York City Police Department, one of the largest civil law enforcement entities in the world, is a supporting character in its own right.

Here are ten fascinating facts about the NYPD:

1. NYPD has over 49,000 employees of which 34,000 are uniformed police officers serving a city of 8.4 million (about 42 officers for every 10,000 people). On a per capita basis this is slightly higher than Japan's capital city Tokyo which has a population of 12.3 million and 43,000 police officers. Compared to other US cities, Baltimore, Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. have proportionally more officers than the NYPD.
2. With its motto Fidelis ad mortem (Faithful unto death), the NYPD serves Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island via 123 precincts. The department also incorporates a Traffic Bureau and a Housing Bureau.
3. Training at the New York City Police Academy takes 6 months to complete. Base pay for a new officer is $42,500.
4. The New York Police Department has a troop of 55 horses, 22 stationed in Manhattan and the remainder in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. They are used in community policing.
5. 150 officers serve in the New York Police Department Harbor Unit. Founded in 1858, the unit first employed rowboats.
6. The NYPD deploys about 90 dogs in K9 units serving the Transit, Emergency Services Unit, bomb, and narcotic divisions.
7. The NYPD operates almost 9,000 patrol cars.
8. The annual budget for the NYPD is $5.5 billion dollars, which is similar to the state budgets of New Hampshire and Vermont and more than the state budgets of Delaware and South Dakota.
9. The NYPD has its own museum, covering 400 years of history ranging from the Dutch colonial era through 1898 consolidation of the burroughs into what is now termed New York City.
10. Future president Theodore Roosevelt was police commissioner for New York City from 1895-1897. He was appointed by Republican reformers in an attempt to clean up Manhattan, the "Island of Sin."

And one more:

During the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, 23 New York City police officers were killed; since that date, about 100 more have succumbed to illnesses caused by exposure to toxins on that day.

Filed under Society and Politics

This "beyond the book article" relates to Proving Ground. It originally ran in May 2017 and has been updated for the March 2018 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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