Mayor Adams vowed to rein in NYPD overtime. It spiraled out of control instead.

As a candidate for mayor, Eric Adams pledged to cut NYPD overtime spending in half. He vowed to identify police officers who abuse the opportunity for extra pay and subject them to discipline. But since Adams entered office, overtime spending has reached record highs.

Current and former police officials attributed the problem to a breakdown in the chain of command, where the agency’s checks and balances don’t apply for those with a direct line to City Hall. Adams, a former cop himself, offered some of his top officials an unusually close hand in NYPD affairs — at times allowing them to leapfrog the commissioner on issues like promotions and policing policies.

Department veterans told Gothamist that the close involvement of both the deputy mayor for public safety and an inner circle within the police department under Adams disrupted the NYPD’s hierarchy and facilitated lapses in oversight.

“The controls are in place,” said Ray Kelly, a former police commissioner who served under mayors David Dinkins and Michael Bloomberg, about overtime spending. “They just weren’t properly used or paid attention to.”

Police overtime spending – which in the past year cost roughly double what the city allocated to parks — is supposed to be tracked by several individuals, for example, including the supervisor of each unit. But under Adams, it came more directly under the purview of City Hall.

After slashing city budgets, Adams signed a 2023 executive order that assigned his administration's budget office, his first deputy mayor and his deputy mayor for public safety — at the time Sheena Wright and Phil Banks III — with close monitoring of overtime spending. The order was addressed to the commissioners of public safety agencies, who are supposed to act as a buffer between their departments and the administration.

As Adams has cycled through four NYPD commissioners during his tenure, observers have pointed out that the first three didn’t really appear to be in control. Many veteran police officials said the weakening of the commissioner created a power vacuum that fostered dysfunction and overtime abuse.

“The police department is a quasi military organization,” said George Grasso, a first deputy commissioner between 2002 and 2010. “You have to have a defined chain of command.”

Grasso added, “The overtime [abuse] is just one element of the kind of mismanagement and disrespect for the chain of command.”

The latest scandal came to the fore when former chief of department Jeffrey Maddrey resigned amid allegations that he tried to use his authority to sign off on overtime to coerce his former lieutenant into sex. His accuser made over $200,000 a year in overtime while working in an administrative role, as the New York Post reported. With overtime spending running rampant in the department — up 60% overall since 2022 — Maddrey’s lawyer has argued that the accuser was trying to distract from her own overtime abuse.

As chief of department, Maddrey was the highest-ranking uniformed officer, in charge of operational aspects of the NYPD’s roughly 33,000 police officers. His relationship with Adams stretched back decades, with Maddrey earning the now-mayor’s support while he rose through the ranks as a beat cop in Brooklyn and even as he suffered a series of scandals that included accusations of misconduct. Others included Kaz Daughtry, Maddrey’s former driver and a deputy commissioner who reportedly earned overtime despite managers being prohibited from collecting such pay.

“You just didn’t understand who was running the department,” said Edwin Raymond, a former lieutenant who retired in 2023, after 15 years and a since-dismissed lawsuit over arrest quotas that he said disproportionately affected Black and Latino people. “In all my years, no matter what criticism I had, it never felt that way.”

Banks, who Adams assigned to oversee issues including overtime and technology use, reportedly met with top NYPD brass without former commissioner Keechant Sewell present. Sewell resigned amid widespread reports that she was unable to make her own decisions over promotions. Her successor, Edward Caban, was often absent at public safety press conferences that were instead led by Adams and Banks.

Grasso said that in most cases, it’s unacceptable to go around the commissioner.

"If people were doing that in our administration, we’d demote them and tell them to retire.”

Adams, he added, created a “bad structure” that “invited chaos.”

Jessica Tisch, the fourth police commissioner to serve under Adams, may be able to exert more power than her predecessors. She started her tenure by cracking down on hundreds of informal transfers that let officers effectively “hide” on the job. An NYPD spokesperson told Gothamist that she’s instituting monthly overtime caps, assigning compliance officers for each bureau, monthly overtime reports, and stricter guidelines for officers to report overtime.

But Bill Bratton, a former NYPD commissioner who served under mayors Rudy Giuliani and Bill de Blasio, said those controls are not new and existed during his tenure.

Since he became mayor, Adams’ statements on overtime have shifted. He now justifies the use of such spending for public safety and argues that the criticism fails to recognize the reality of the demands on the police force.

Adams has pointed to the number of protests over the last year to explain the recent high levels of overtime spending. In a detailed report on three months of overtime spending that the NYPD quietly published the day Maddrey was suspended, protests and demonstrations accounted for about 15% of overtime costs between April and June 2024.

Adams has bristled at criticisms of mismanagement and his appointment of friends.

“I hear this over and over again about personal relationships,” he said at a press conference last week. “The people who came on board had a depth of knowledge and experience.”

He pointed to Banks as an example, noting that the former deputy mayor had once served as the NYPD’s chief of department, the highest-ranking uniformed position. But Banks was forced to resign from that position in 2014 amid a federal corruption probe.

Banks and Wright, the two deputy mayors charged with monitoring overtime, resigned from the Adams administration late last year. Both had been searched by federal agents amid an ongoing series of investigations into the administration.

But Adams did agree with his critics that he should ultimately be held accountable for overtime spending and abuse.

“So yes, whomever said I'm responsible, tell them I agree,” Adams said. “The mayor is responsible for this city and I'm also responsible for the safety of the people of the city.”