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New York City crime has nosedived since stay-at-home measures went into place 10 days ago, a silver lining as the number of police officers sick with the coronavirus soars, New York Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said in a briefing to officers on Tuesday morning.
Roughly 1,200 employees of the NYPD, both uniformed officers and staff, have tested positive for COVID-19 and five had died as of Tuesday, Shea said via live webcast. But the total number of infected officers could be far higher, as some 5,600 department employees called out sick on Tuesday, five times the usual daily volume. Sick police officers accounted for roughly 15% of the uniformed force, he said.
There were “thousands and thousands and thousands of calls into our sick desk yesterday,” Shea said. “People couldn’t even get through, the lines couldn’t hold.”
The commissioner said they’ve since added 10 to 15 more phone lines to handle the staggering volume of sick calls, he said.
New York City has steadily become the epicenter of the disease in the U.S. Around 41,000 people across the five boroughs had tested positive as of Tuesday morning, nearly as many known cases as reported in all of hard-hit Iran. Deaths in the city as of early Tuesday totaled 932, including a detective from a Harlem precinct, a school safety agent in Queens, two NYPD administrative aides and a custodial assistant working at police headquarters.
“We’re assuming everyone coming into work was exposed in some way, shape or form,” Shea said, adding that at this stage in the outbreak there’s no use trying to pinpoint where officers are contracting it. He said the force is trying to boost testing availability, but added that the NYPD’s medical staff may not recommend tests for some officers with mild symptoms.
Meanwhile, a process is in place to get older employees and those with vulnerable underlying medical conditions out of the workplace, Shea said. A large cohort of administrative staff, including many from the NYPD’s lower Manhattan headquarters, are already working remotely, an unprecedented move, Shea said. New York City police officers, who are heavily unionized, get unlimited sick days.
Social distancing measures have helped the NYPD cope with the illness ripping through its ranks, and especially as crime has plummeted since Gov. Andrew Cuomo mandated all non-essential workers stay at home, an order enacted 10 days ago.
“Crime has dropped off the face of the map really since the social distancing went into effect,” Shea said. Far fewer members of the public are walking into precincts and emergency calls directed to the NYPD have declined sharply, he said.
“As hard as EMS is working on a lot of fronts, our radio calls are actually down, the ones that get funneled to the NYPD,” he said.
Crime started to decline even in the week before Cuomo’s executive order, as foot traffic across the city dried up, employers told their staff to work from home and tourism dropped off, public NYPD data shows.
In the week ending Sunday, 1,041 major crimes, which includes felonies such as murder, rape, grand larceny, assault and burglary, were reported across all five boroughs, a decrease of about 24% from the previous week and down 43% from the week before that, public data shows.
Nevertheless, Shea said he couldn’t imagine a more stressful time for New York City cops.
“It’s a stressful job at the best of times. Right now I don’t think you could imagine a worse point in time,” he said, but “we’re carrying on.”
