The cost of policing the ongoing demonstrations by Occupy Wall Street is mounting, according to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.
Nearly a month after protesters took up residence at a park near Wall Street, Mr. Kelly said that overtime costs to police their activities and marches had hit nearly $2 million.
On Wednesday, word came that those costs had increased to $3.2 million. Where the final figure will land is anybody’s guess.
“We use people who are working their regular tours of duty, but sometimes those tours are extended,” Mr. Kelly said in explaining the management issues after a news conference at 1 Police Plaza on Friday. “You know, we are down 6,000 officers from where we were 10 years ago, so it’s difficult to do any sort of protracted operation with people who are working in their regular tour of duty. So oftentimes, demonstrations of any type require overtime.”
Those added costs come at a difficult time.
The Bloomberg administration has asked for another round of spending cuts from city agencies in the face of lingering financial troubles, which are bleeding the city’s coffers. An open question is whether any savings plan devised by police numbers-crunchers — as their piece of the $2 million in cuts that City Hall wants — forestalls the hiring of a next round of police recruits. The next class is scheduled to enter the Police Academy in January.
But, as Mr. Kelly said, the protests must be policed.
“We always prefer to not spend overtime,” he said. “But again, this is a big, complex city; lots of things going on. And we have to spend overtime for unplanned operations.”
Solidarity With Officers
Speaking of the Occupy Wall Street protests, some of those involved in the campaign have spoken about finding solidarity with the working men and women of the New York Police Department. Of course, these sentiments have been muted in the face of what some critics have portrayed as aggressive policing tactics and violent flare-ups between certain officers and protesters.
So far, no buttons approaching a kind of “solidarnosc” message are emanating from the headquarters of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, trumpeting a a link between officers and the Occupy Wall Street troops. But it has not been for a lack of protesters’ efforts.
For instance, outside Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 30, one speaker who said he represented academics and union leaders told a crowd of demonstrators that “We are here to tell the N.Y.P.D. we are watching.”
But another speaker, who came later, struck a decidedly gentler tone with the more than 60 police officers, of differing ranks, looking on across a police barricade.
“We know that you have families,” said the veteran agitator who refers to himself as Reverend Billy, “We know that you think you have a job to do. We urge you to find the peace.”
That evening, in making their now-common chant, “We are the 99 percent” — which refers to the protesters’ claim to represent the vast majority of Americans victimized by Wall Street — some in the group of protesters pointed at nearby police officers and added the refrain: “So are you.”
A prominent protest sign echoed the sentiment.
“The Working Class Must Unite (Hey Cops, That Includes You),” it read.
Yet other speakers chose to use the stage to highlight cases of police brutality, some decades old.
“Across the nation and all over the world hundreds of people are killed by the police and the police are never held accountable” said a woman who identified herself as part of the National Organization Against Police Brutality.
Later, at a big, union-sponsored demonstration on Oct. 5, the theme rose again.
After a rally in Foley Square, a protester making his way back to Zuccotti Park, which the demonstrators have made into their base camp, walked up to a police officer manning a barricade on Broadway.
“Are you the 1 percent?” the male protester asked the male officer.
“No,” the officer said with a grin. “I’m the 99 percent.”
The response elicited a cheer from nearby protesters.
Watching the Protests
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have generated a “small number” of cases for the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, according the board’s executive director, Joan M. Thompson. But the monthlong action has prompted 474 “contacts from people complaining, online, or by telephone, either about specific events they watched on the Internet or television, or about policing of mass demonstrations in general,” Ms. Thompson said at the board’s monthly meeting on Wednesday morning.
The outreach has been something of a social media phenomenon, with those watching videos from New York on YouTube and, “just expressing their concern,” said Daniel D. Chu, the board’s chairman.
“And it’s something where we are keeping track of everyone who is making contact,” Mr. Chu said. “If the contact has anything to add to the investigation, we are certainly following up those investigative leads, and it really is the incidents that that are important to us, but we certainly don’t want to have any indication that we are not interested in hearing from people who do not have firsthand knowledge.”
Al Baker, police bureau chief for The New York Times — and the son of a police lieutenant — brings you inside the nation’s largest police force every Thursday. This week, Rob Harris contributed reporting. Mr. Baker can be reached at OnePolicePlaza@nytimes.com.