#NYPD overtime for uniformed cops rose 24 percent in fiscal year

Uniformed NYPD officers saw a near 25 percent surge last fiscal year in overtime pay from three years ago — a protest-fueled windfall that has plummeted over the past four months, city data obtained by The Post reveal.

Fiscal year 2020, which began July 1, 2019 and ended June 30 this year, saw $721,394,734 spent on overtime, a jump boosted by rioting and protests in the wake of George Floyd’s police-custody death in Minneapolis, according to the watchdog Independent Budget Office.

Overtime spending was roughly $54 million a month in FY 2020, but June is the outlier — when a staggering $179 million was spent, according to the data. In all of FY 2018 the city spent $589,293,350 on uniformed NYPD OT, roughly 24 percent less than FY2020, according to the IBO.

But in the first four months of the current fiscal year, overtime is at about $112 million, which projects to a 34 percent decrease compared to FY 2020, the numbers show.

“A good deal of the drop is attributable to cancellation of major events (such as parades) that normally take place every year,” the IBO’s senior budget analyst Bernard O’Brien told The Post.

“The drop from last year’s heightened overtime spending is also tied to a good deal of subsiding of major protest activities that occurred in May and June of 2020 (the final two months of FY 2020),” he added.

Police overtime was reduced as part of the City Council budget in July in response to the financial load from the coronavirus and the push to defund police departments nationwide in the wake of Floyd’s May 25 death.

In crafting the budget, Mayor de Blasio and Council Speaker Corey Johnson struck a deal that claimed to either cut or reallocate roughly $800 million from the NYPD’s budget by slashing overtime spending and transferring the school safety division back to the Department of Education.

Budget watchdogs believe the overtime savings will not bear out.

In July, the IBO projected the NYPD would blow its new overtime cap by $400 million, essentially undoing the biggest proposed spending cut the department faced in the city’s new budget.

“When we decided on the $400 million re-estimate figure back in June 2020, there were many uncertainties,” O’Brien said, adding that the current fiscal year still has a ways to go.  “There are of course still uncertainties.”