This theoretically will allow more retailers and restaurants to deliver goods and food by drone. The problem with that is economics. Delivery drones can’t carry much weight and have big obstacles for getting the product on the ground with damaging the drone, the goods or the family pet.

Moreover, point-to-point deliveries are expensive. A delivery driver normally can make as many as 200 residential stops a day and drop off multiple packages at one place. Wind, rain and snow can impede drone deliveries. These drawbacks are the reason FedEx and United Parcel Service long ago cooled their enthusiasm on the drone-delivery promise.

On the other hand, apart from myriad military uses, small commercial drones excel at inspection, surveillance and videography. Companies and governments use drones to inspect bridges or home rooftops, to cover news and sporting events, to stage spectacular light shows and to contribute unbelievable aerial shots for movies and nature documentaries.

The ability to provide live, aerial views at the fraction of the cost of a helicopter also makes drones useful for law enforcement and firefighters. Police departments are employing them to track suspects and give officers more situational awareness at crime scenes. A drone can help firefighters search dangerous areas for trapped people. As the FAA relaxes restrictions, you can expect to see more first-responder drones buzzing around the sky. This raises all kinds of privacy concerns. But if the police can come up with acceptable rules and transparency to safeguard citizens’ rights, drones can become a powerful tool.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department just this fall received FAA authorization for remote pilots to fly drones beyond visual line of sight except near airports and military facilities. In an even bigger breakthrough for drone proponents, the department got the nod to have one remote pilot operate up to four autonomous drones at the same time, Dori Koren, assistant deputy sheriff at the department, said in September during a presentation by drone maker Skydio. This latter permission will make it much more cost effective for cities nationwide to operate a drone-response program.

Pushback on the use of police drones has already started, spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The ACLU joined community organizations to sue the Baltimore Police Department to stop an aerial surveillance program, which used light airplanes at the time. A U.S. appeals court ruling in 2021 struck down the program, which by that time had ceased to operate.

Law enforcement can get ahead of privacy concerns and gain public confidence by offering transparency about when drones are deployed and how the data collected during flights is used and stored. Police drones shouldn’t be used to patrol the streets and certainly shouldn’t be peeking into people’s backyards or windows. Drones should be launched in conjunction only with a 911 call.

This is the policy for the 75-drone fleet of the Las Vegas police, an early adopter of drone technology. Every drone flight is logged and audited to make sure it’s in response to an active police call, Koren said at a news conference in September. The cameras will point up when the drone is on the way to the scene and the department won’t retain any data it doesn’t need, he said.

The drones, made by Skydio, have flashing red and blue lights and contain a parachute that deploys in case of a midair emergency, he said.

Las Vegas began its “Blue Sky” drone program last year with designated officers carrying drones in the back of police cruisers and launching them when arriving at the scene. With the additional FAA permissions, the program is now switching gears to become much more autonomous.

The department is installing 13 all-weather skyports around the city, mostly at existing police and fire department facilities. These skyports, which double as charging stations, house three drones — one that is deployed and two that serve as backup if the first one runs low on battery power. The drones can launch and land autonomously from the skyports, whose placement around the city can cut response time to seconds.

While the drones are in the air, a remote operator monitoring the video feed can click on a suspect’s car, for example, and the drone automatically follows the vehicle. In one dramatic scene in San Francisco, a police drone tracked a car thief without his awareness and caught him on video stealing license plates to put on his stolen vehicle. Officers were able to follow the thief and then lay down spike strips to stop the vehicle and arrest the perpetrator without violence or a high-speed chase.

The Las Vegas drone program, even with the limits of launching from the back of police cruisers, flew 1,100 missions since October last year. The drones located suspects in 169 incidents and provided critical support for 386 arrests, Koren said. That performance will improve with the autonomous drones spread across the city.

There’s more drone technology to come. Skydio has a small indoor drone that adeptly flies around objects in tight spaces and can provide surveillance in a building or house, which could be useful for executing search warrants or during a fire. The company is working on a fixed-wing drone that flies farther and is launched with a robotic arm. Adam Bry, Skydio’s co-founder and chief executive officer, predicts this tracking drone will help reduce or even eliminate dangerous high-speed chases.

One of the main privacy concerns about law enforcement drones is that they could randomly collect, use and share data from video, audio or even sensors, such as heat sensors, while they are airborne. Commitments to only collect and use data during a specific police or fire emergency call should be backed up by independent data audits and by providing the public continuous full transparency about when, where and why drone flights were made.

This can all be done automatically and not burden officers with more paperwork. “What we see with police surveillance technology in general is that there’s a lot of lip service paid up front to the privacy concerns, but then there is mission creep that happens,” said Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher with Electronic Frontier Foundation. “With drones, we’re very concerned about the mission creep.”

As long as police departments take these privacy concerns seriously and use drones appropriately, the small flying machines will save lives, gain public confidence and pave the way for more long-distance commercial drone flights.

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African Americans and police brutality

Americans of all races, ethnicities, ages, classes, and genders have been subjected to police brutality.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, poor and working-class white people expressed frustration over discriminatory policing in northern cities. At about the same time, Jewish and other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe also complained of police brutality against their communities.

In the 1920s many urban police departments, especially in large cities such as New York and Chicago, used extralegal tactics against members of Italian-immigrant communities in efforts to crack down on organized crime.

In 1943 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were complicit in attacks on Mexican Americans by U.S. servicemen during the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, reflecting the department’s history of hostility toward Hispanics (Latinos).

Regular harassment of homosexuals and transgender persons by police in New York City culminated in 1969 in the Stonewall riots, which were triggered by a police raid on a gay bar; the protests marked the beginning of a new era of militancy in the international gay rights movement.

And in the aftermath of the 2001 September 11 attacks, Muslim Americans began to voice complaints about police brutality, including harassment and racial profiling. Many local law-enforcement agencies launched covert operations of questionable legality designed to surveil and infiltrate mosques and other Muslim American organizations in an effort to uncover presumed terrorists, a practice that went unchecked for at least a decade.

Notwithstanding the variety among groups that have been subjected to police brutality in the United States, the great majority of victims have been African American. In the estimation of most experts, a key factor explaining the predominance of African Americans among victims of police brutality is antiblack racism among members of mostly white police departments. Similar prejudices are thought to have played a role in police brutality committed against other historically oppressed or marginalized groups.
Whereas racism is thought to be a major cause of police brutality directed at African Americans and other ethnic groups, it is far from the only one.

Other factors concern the unique institutional culture of urban police departments, which stresses group solidarity, loyalty, and a “show of force” approach to any perceived challenge to an officer’s authority. For rookie officers, acceptance, success, and promotion within the department depend upon adopting the attitudes, values, and practices of the group, which historically have been infused with antiblack racism.

Because African Americans have been the primary — though certainly not the only — target of police brutality in the United States, the remainder of this article will deal mainly with their experiences, both historically and in the present day.

The Great Migration

Interactions between African Americans and urban police departments were initially shaped by the Great Migration (1916–1970) of African Americans from the rural South into urban areas of the North and West, especially following World War II.

Most white communities, including white police departments, were unaccustomed to the presence of African Americans and reacted to their increasing numbers with fear and hostility, attitudes that were exacerbated by deeply ingrained racist stereotypes. Reflecting the beliefs of many whites, northern police departments acted upon the presumption that African Americans, and especially African American men, possessed an inherent tendency toward criminal behavior, one that required constant surveillance of African Americans and restrictions on their movements (segregation) in the interests of white safety. Accordingly, by the mid-1950s many urban police departments had implicitly reconceived their missions as essentially that of policing African Americans — i.e., protecting whites against Blacks.

The forms of police brutality to which this situation gave rise were variable and generally not limited to physical assault (e.g., beatings) and excessive use of force. They also included unlawful arrests, verbal abuse (e.g., racial slurs) and threats, sexual assaults against African American women, and police homicides (murders of civilians by police). Police were also sometimes complicit in drug dealing, prostitution, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun-smuggling within African American neighborhoods.

Although police brutality against African Americans had become a serious problem in many urban areas by the mid-20th century, most whites remained unaware of it until about the mid-1960s, in large part because most large-city newspapers (whose readerships were primarily white) did not consider it newsworthy. In contrast, incidences of police brutality were regularly covered in the Black press from the early 20th century, frequently in front-page articles. Likewise, local and national civil rights organizations collected thousands of affidavits and letters from African Americans documenting their direct experiences of police brutality.

Police brutality after World War II

For a variety of reasons, incidences of police brutality against African Americans became more frequent and more intense throughout the country in the decades following World War II. First, the victory of the forces of democracy in the war overseas created among African Americans expectations of greater freedom and democracy at home, especially as many of them had served in combat in the U.S. armed forces (albeit in racially segregated units).

As Black Americans began to assert their formal rights and liberties, demanding that they be respected by local governments, judiciaries, and law-enforcement agencies, their demands had the effect of reinforcing the tendency of white police officers to view themselves as protectors of white communities.

Second, the migration of rural whites to nearby cities in search of better economic opportunities encouraged police to view their own violence against African Americans as a more acceptable means of control than the mob hysteria that rural whites had been accustomed to and that urban spaces simply did not allow. In effect, police brutality replaced lynchings as a means of oppressing Blacks.

During this period, white supremacist and terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council operated openly in Southern cities, where police brutality against African Americans was abetted by government and political leaders, district attorneys, and judges, among others.

Third, in other cities, especially in the North, the flight of whites to the suburbs and the natural growth of the African American population made African Americans more visible and allowed them to be more mobile within formerly white areas.

Such demographic changes made African Americans as a group appear more threatening to white police officers and allowed the latter to more easily justify extralegal tactics as a means of controlling African Americans’ mobility and limiting their use of public spaces.

Fourth, beginning in the 1970s, African Americans who had joined local police forces in large numbers as a result of aggressive recruitment and affirmative action programs themselves committed serious acts of brutality against African American civilians, in part because they wished to be seen as “good cops” and to be otherwise accepted within their departments.

Finally, the escalation of urban crime rates in the 1970s and ’80s, including in predominantly African American and other minority neighborhoods, strengthened the perception among white police officers and whites generally of African Americans as inherently criminal, a trend also reflected in a newly racially charged political and policy discourse, referred to by critics as the criminalization of the Black poor and working class.

Police brutality and race riots

From the 1960s, police brutality was a catalyst for many of the race riots (riots caused by racial dissensions or hatreds) that took place in urban America, including the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Detroit Riot of 1967. In 1980 the Liberty City section of Miami erupted over the police killing of an unarmed African American man.

During a period of three days, 18 people were killed and some 1,000 arrested, and more than $100 million in property damage was committed.

Twelve years later the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and their subsequent acquittal on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force triggered the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, still considered the worst race riots in American history.

During a period of four days, more than 50 people were killed and more than 2,300 were injured, and property damage was estimated at about $1 billion.

In 2014 the fatal shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and a grand jury’s subsequent decision not to indict the officer on criminal charges provoked rioting in that city.

Later race riots (along with peaceful demonstrations) followed the deaths in police custody of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland (2015), and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2020), both of whom were African American.

Antibrutality campaigns

Most victims of police brutality, including not only African Americans but also whites and other ethnic groups, have come from the ranks of the poor and low-income working classes. They have consequently lacked significant political influence or the financial resources that are sometimes necessary to effectively publicize complaints of police brutality.

Nevertheless, antibrutality campaigns have been mounted in nearly every major U.S. city with a sizable Black population. In sometimes large demonstrations, members of victimized communities have demanded, in addition to an end to police brutality and accountability for guilty officers, major reforms including the hiring of more African American police officers and the placement of more African American officers in supervisory positions, racially integrated patrols or Black-only patrols in African American neighborhoods, civilian review boards, and federal investigation (e.g., by the Justice Department) of egregious cases of police brutality. Their tactics have included sit-ins, boycotts, picketing, and close monitoring of police activity, including (from the late 20th century) by means of videos taken with handheld cameras and mobile telephones.

In 2013 the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, led to the founding of a powerful social movement, Black Lives Matter. The movement subsequently played a prominent role in nationwide protests following extreme acts of police brutality against African Americans. In retaliatory attacks in 2016, five white members of the Dallas, Texas, police department and three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were shot and killed.

Antibrutality campaigns tended to be led by activists at the grassroots level and by other members of the communities directly affected rather than by more-established civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, whose memberships were drawn primarily from the Black middle class.

Indeed, Black middle-class support for antibrutality protests was often limited, largely because, like their white counterparts, middle-class Blacks generally favored tough crime-fighting measures to protect themselves and their property from Black criminals. Because they were relatively inexperienced as leaders, however, antibrutality activists often used direct and confrontational methods, preferring street protests over negotiations.

And because they generally lacked an institutional base and a clear strategy, they were often reactionary, acting in an ad hoc fashion and creating organizations and developing constituencies as the need arose.

Despite such limitations, they were usually effective, because they articulated the anger of their constituencies, who were generally suspicious of electoral politics (“the system”) and who had no faith that Black politicians would adequately address their concerns.

California is among the first states to address the issue. The reporting was cited in the legislative analysis of the bill that ultimately became the law.

Senate Bill 524, signed into law Oct. 10, requires police officers to disclose when they use AI to write police reports. The tools include Draft One, an AI assistant that transcribes and summarizes body-camera footage to produce a draft report, which officers can then revise and edit.

Specifically, the law now requires a written disclosure to appear at the bottom of each page of a police report for which Draft One or other similar tools were used. The legislation also requires an “audit trail” that would preserve the original draft as well as identify the source bodycam footage or audio.

Police departments in East Palo Alto and Fresno were among the first in the state to adopt the technology.

For example, officers must fill in prompts within the generated report, then sign off on the report’s accuracy before it can be submitted. The tool also includes a disclaimer that Draft One was used, though police agencies have thus far been able to customize where in a report it’s placed.

Police departments have said the technology saves officers significant time, and even that some AI-generated reports are better than the ones written entirely by officers. Nevertheless, the bill arose out of concerns that bias or errors generated by AI software could make their way into final incident reports, which play a key role in charging, detaining and sentencing suspects.

Kate Chatfield, executive director of the California Public Defenders Association, which sponsored the bill, said she’s grateful the measure became law.

“Due process requires transparency,” Chatfield wrote in a public statement. “Everyone in the legal system — judges, juries, attorneys and the accused — deserve to know who wrote the police report.”

“With SB 524, California is sending a clear message: Innovation in policing must be tethered to accountability,” state Sen. Jesse Arreguín, who wrote the bill, said in the statement. “No more opaque reports, no more guessing whether AI shaped the narrative.”

Kevin Little, a defense attorney in Fresno, said the law is a step in the right direction, but not a true remedy.

“My own experience with AI in an unrelated context leads me to conclude that AI platforms have a significant amount of user bias and tend to support the agendas of the user,” he said.

Larry Bowlan, a spokesperson for the Fresno Police Department, said the agency had already implemented some of the safeguards now required by the law and does not expect the new rules to be especially burdensome.

“Our AI-powered narrative assistant … already generates a disclosure and requires our users to sign acknowledgements. Draft One also already produces the requisite audit trail,” he wrote in an email. “We are actively working with our vendor on the best solution for preserving and storing the first draft provided by the assistant, as well as a minor tweak to ensure the disclosure is present on each printed page, rather than just the first page as it is now.”

A spokesperson for the East Palo Alto Department said his agency has no official response to the law at this time.

Opponents of the bill included the California Police Chiefs Association and the Police Officers Research Association of California, a police union advocacy and lobbying group. The Chiefs Association did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, PORAC President Brian R. Marvel said the signed version of the law is an improvement over earlier drafts.

“In its original form, SB 524 would have put significant administrative burden on already short-staffed police forces and created broad liability by requiring agencies to retain every AI-generated draft, interim, and final version of a report, each labeled with AI disclosure language,” he wrote. “PORAC advocated to amend this bill … We were pleased to see several of these amendments taken, with the final version of the bill significantly narrowed.”

Axon representative Victoria Keough said the company is committed to complying with all state and federal laws, including SB 524.

“When developing AI for public safety, transparency and accountability are essential,” Keough wrote in a statement. “Responsible innovation remains at the core of how Axon designs and delivers new technology.”

The new requirements go into effect on Jan. 1, 2026.

By Kerry Klein, KVPR

Kerry Klein is a reporter and editor with KVPR in Fresno. Additional reporting was provided by KQED’s Sukey Lewis. The story was produced with support from The California Newsroom, a collaboration of public media outlets throughout the state. 

“This grant represents an important step forward in our commitment to compassionate, informed, and effective policing,” said Chief John D. Souza. “Through innovative training and collaboration, we can better serve our community and prepare for the complex challenges officers face today.”

The UMass Dartmouth Police Department recognizes the importance of equipping officers with the skills needed to effectively manage situations involving individuals in crisis or those posing active threats to the campus community. Through immersive, scenario-based VR simulations, officers will gain hands-on experience in responding to unpredictable, high-stress encounters with empathy, professionalism, and sound judgment.

By integrating this cutting-edge technology into its training program, the department aims to strengthen officer readiness further, ensure the safety of the campus community, and foster greater trust between law enforcement and those they serve.

The UMass Dartmouth Police Department also plans to collaborate with neighboring law enforcement agencies to extend the benefits of this training beyond campus. By sharing resources and expertise, local departments can collectively enhance public safety and improve crisis intervention practices throughout the region.

In addition to law enforcement training, Chief John Souza envisions opportunities for broader community engagement. The department plans to introduce this technology to Crime and Justice Studies students, members of the Student Government Association, and participants in a future Citizens’ Police Academy. These initiatives will provide valuable experiential learning opportunities and promote mutual understanding between the police department and the campus community.

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West Midlands Police has said it is the first force in the UK to partner with training provider Calico, to deliver the interactive sessions to 700 new recruits by April.

Officers wear virtual reality headsets, which places them in the shoes of a woman travelling through Birmingham after dark.

The force said the classes were part of a wider approach to address crimes such as stalking, harassment, rape and domestic abuse.

The simulation allows officers to make decisions throughout, following four different routes through the city via park, taxi, and bus.

In each scene, users hear the real voices and lived experiences of women, which helps them fully immerse themselves in the experience and understand the incident from the victim’s point of view.

West Midlands Police said its male officers were benefiting the most from the project.

PC Aaron Whittingslow said: “I’ve never experienced the world as a woman does.

“The session has thrown me into that world through the virtual reality goggles and we’ve had some good discussions with female colleagues.

“It’s really made me think about how I’d support victims, how my actions may be perceived and, as a new dad, the kind of world my daughter will grow up in.”

The force said while colleagues already completed a variety of training to ensure they were able to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG), this scheme would better equip officers to protect victims.

Assistant Chief Constable Jen Mattinson, force lead for VAWG said: “I’m proud to see West Midlands Police leading the way by providing training opportunities like this, in our committed approach to tackling violence against women and girls.

“This session is one of many tools that we are investing in as a force, to protect the communities we serve, and we will continually invest time, money and effort to combat VAWG.”

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Now a new solution powered by virtual reality is emerging: the Kauaʻi Police Department later this year plans to launch a small-footprint weapons training option right out the back door of KPD headquarters in Līhuʻe.

The goal is to quadruple officers’ annual training time, according to Lt. Aaron Lester, a firearms training supervisor. Most KPD officers currently participate in just a few hours of hands-on firearms drills once a year.

Kauai Police Department’s new four-lane shooting range provides an interactive format for training in various scenarios, including use-of-force, de-escalation, crisis management and firearms proficiency.
The new virtual reality and live-fire training complex has two components: a $2 million modular live-fire shooting range unveiled earlier this month and a compact, portable Taser and handgun training container powered by virtual reality that the department acquired in April.

Combined, these technologies introduce realistic, immersive exercises that go beyond traditional shooting practice. Built into a series of shipping containers, the training complex makes weapons drills more accessible, unlocking the potential for micro-learning sessions that last only 20 minutes.

Fifty-six officers participated in the program.

Training included a series of video-based scenarios that replicated real-life situations that officers may encounter during their shifts, according to the announcement. These included traffic stops, trespassing incidents and an active-shooter situation.

Yet, navigating these high-pressure moments is far from simple.

Stephen Ware, associate professor in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky, has been working to enhance officer training through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR).

“We’re trying to use technology to do something good — to create intelligent training for de-escalation with the purpose of calming everyone down and creating a safe environment for police officers and the community they serve,” he said.

In 2022, Ware received the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, “Structured High-Agency Interactive Narratives for Virtual Environments.”

The honor is one of the “most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate education and research within the context of their organization’s mission,” according to the NSF.

With the award, Ware received more than $530,000 over five years to conduct research and create the immersive police training for de-escalation.

“My team of graduate students and I have been working on this project for about five years,” he continued. When you’ve got an interactive story that could go thousands of different ways, we need to decide what the non-player characters should do. We often need to look five, 10, maybe even 20 steps ahead — to make sure we have the structure and content the story needs to contain.”

The unique training environment is designed to be not only highly immersive but also exceptionally realistic — creating a simulation that closely mirrors real-world scenarios and fully engages participants in a way that enhances learning and retention.

“Not just any sequence of events will do. You put a human player into this situation, and especially if it’s someone who maybe hasn’t played a lot of video games before, they do all kinds of unexpected things,” Ware said. “Having an algorithm that can respond to those unexpected situations and still create a believable and useful training simulation is really challenging. Navigating those trillions of possibilities and figuring out which ones are going to seem realistic and are going to be a useful training exercise is the computer science challenge behind what we’re doing.”

Recently, officers from the UK Police Department participated in a simulation they helped design, drawing from a real-life experience in the field.

“The entire simulation is better than what I’ve experienced in the past,” said UKPD’s Lt. Robert McPherson. “AI is able to take a situation in various directions, and as the participant, you have to think on your feet.”

“The AI is basically solving a complex game theory problem about how characters can maximize the good outcomes and prevent the bad outcomes,” Ware added. “When best practices are broken, we’re making sure you see the consequences of those actions.”

Ware, who started at UK in 2019, directs the Narrative Intelligence Lab and teaches artificial intelligence and game development courses. His work has earned three best paper awards to date. Since 2014, he has received more than $2.4 million in sponsored research funding from federal, state and local agencies. Ware serves as a referee for the IEEE Transactions on Games journal and as an organizer for top conferences and workshops in his field, such as the AAAI international conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment.

“I like waking up every morning and working on something that no one’s ever done before. There’s a small, but growing, artificial intelligence research community that’s working on storytelling,” he said. “And I love to collaborate with those people to train the next generation of students that are working on these problems and to say, ‘Hey, it would be really cool if AI could do this. No one currently has a solution. I wonder if we can design it.’”

Additionally, the Pigman College of Engineering offers an AI certificate — allowing degree-seeking undergraduate students an opportunity to explore AI technologies from several perspectives. Learn more about the program here. You can also view an extended video here.

According to the latest August data obtained by amNewYork, the attrition rate of officers either retiring or calling it quits before reaching the 20-year mark has reached a staggering high. The department has lost some 14,500 cops in the past 4 1/2 years, that’s almost half of the number of officers currently on the job.

An average of 316 NYPD rank-and-file officers departed the NYPD every month. Police have lost 5,248 individuals since January 2024 and have hired just 4,244 new officers in return.

Speaking with amNewYork under the assurance of anonymity, a recently retired cop who gave his name as John said due to the NYPD’s fleeting numbers he was worked to the bone, leaving a tremendous toll on his personal life.

“It just doesn’t affect me. It affects my immediate family. It affects my extended family. It even extended to my friends. I’d have to say: can you walk my son to school? I got stuck in this shift, and now I gotta work this day,” John said. “The job just didn’t affect you or your wife, your husband. It affects everybody. It really starts to bleed into people who aren’t even affiliated with the NYPD.”

John told amNewYork that he was part of a specialized unit but due to the lack of resources was often utilized as a beat cop and placed on a footpost, not only overworking him but also lowering his morale.
“You get brought into this unit, you achieve where you want to be. You get certain training, they spend a lot of money on training for you, and all they do then is basically use you as a rookie. You’re back on footpost again,” John said. “It’s crushing.”

As of August, the current NYPD headcount stands at 33,740, short of 1,261 of the department’s budgeted headcount of just over 35,000. It also falls below the 2019 numbers, which stood at 36,461, and well below 25 years ago, in 2000, when the city boasted some 40,285 members.

Delving into the numbers further reveals that so far in 2025, 1,807 cops have retired, and 517 have quit outright.

Officers amNewYork spoke with stated that the workload and its impact on family life have many cops trading in their NYPD patches for other law enforcement agencies.

Police sources reported that 21 former NYPD officers are set to start in Suffolk County this week. While the starting salary for a Suffolk County Police Department officer is just $50,000, after eight years, an officer can earn more than $189,000; by contrast, an NYPD officer’s salary starts at $60,884 and rises to $126,410 after 5 1/2 years of service.

An NYPD spokesperson said that the department has been attempting to attract more recruits by waving the application fee for police officer exams scheduled to take place next month, while also lowering the minimum age for police officer applicants to 20-years-old, something NYPD hopes will increase the amount of prospective cops. The Spokesperson also stated that the last NYPD graduating class was the largest in almost a decade.

“The NYPD recently welcomed nearly 1,000 officers to our ranks – the largest class since 2016. This is a department and a profession that is once again attracting young and bright talent in big numbers at scale. We will continue to attract the highest level of candidates to protect this city, and that starts with making the path to policing more accessible.”

Additionally, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has made several efforts to bolster her waning ranks. One is lowering the college credits needed to become a cop and boosting the number of college credits officers receive upon graduating from the academy. Still, the numbers are struggling to grow.

Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry — who previously fought for a better pension for officers and, in turn, laid an incentive to keep cops on the job longer — says that the blue exodus will not be slowed unless the department alters the way in which cops are treated and lightens the workload.

“The NYPD’s staffing crisis is continuing to take an enormous toll on our members’ family lives and their physical and mental well-being. The burden is unsustainable, and it’s driving too many talented cops out the door,” Hendry said.

“The city needs to use every tool at its disposal to not only attract recruits but also keep the cops we already have. That means not only offering competitive pay and benefits, but also providing more time off, more predictable schedules and treating them like the professionals they are.”

John stated that he loved his job as a cop and yearned to stay longer than his 20 years, but told amNewYork he could no longer handle the toll of duty and the disproportionate number between cops and New York City citizens. He estimated that one cop alone would be responsible for nearly 400 New Yorkers.

“If there were three of us on this interview right now and we’re standing on a police footpost together, each of us would be responsible for 395 people on average. I always make the joke that I have a hard time controlling my two kids, but you want me to be able to control 395 people?” John asked. “We’re on one, maybe two or three hours of sleep sometimes, and then they expect you not to make mistakes. Nobody wants to be in that situation.”

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