ALBANY, NY—Roughly a quarter of the city’s budget goes to the Police Department.

Mayor Dorcey Applyrs’ proposed 2027 budget allocates $65.8 million to the department, a figure that underscores the high cost for the city to try to control lawlessness and keep the community safe.

But during his budget presentation last week, police Chief Brendan Cox explained how that is money well spent. He began with the statistics, which he said document a steady decline in some of the crimes that have been a blight on the city in recent years.

Cox told lawmakers that the city has recorded a decrease in crime across almost every major category with year-over-year reductions in homicides, sexual assaults, robberies and aggravated assaults. Overall, Cox said, violent crime is down 10%. He said shooting incidents are on par with 2025 but that the number of people shot in the city had decreased by 10%. Those statistics mirror a national decrease in violent crime this year.

The chief told lawmakers the department is willing “to do more with less” amid the fiscal crisis that has gripped the city, but to do that he needs significantly more officers, a longstanding department goal. In his Oct. 5 presentation to the Common Council’s Finance, Assessment and Taxation Committee, Cox said his goal is to have 320 officers serving by the end of 2027, up from the current staffing level of 264.

Hiring, training and ultimately deploying 56 new officers would leave the department in “much better shape” — both operationally and in controlling overtime, a major driver of city spending, he said.

Overtime costs have exceeded the amounts budgeted in department spending plans for years. In 2025, the department budgeted $8.3 million for overtime, but the actual cost was $11.7 million.

This year’s budget allocated $8.8 million to overtime, a figure the department has already surpassed, Cox said in an interview Wednesday.

“We have to find a different strategy, plain and simple,” Cox told lawmakers last week. “I recognize that we can sit here and say (that there is) the $8 million budget line that’s in there when in reality we’re spending $12 million a year in overtime.”

He framed the runaway costs in the physical toll the long hours take on officers who are often required to work 16-hour shifts for as many as 40 days in a row. Cox said he would return to retirement rather than continue with the current system.

Among the subjects of negotiation with the city’s police unions to address overtime costs was a departmental proposal to move from eight-hour shifts — which are often mere suggestions compared to actual hours worked — to 10-hour shifts. He described negotiations with the unions as being at the “5-yard-line” — as in the department has 95 yards to go to come to an agreement on a new contract.

Police Benevolent Association President Michael Delano said in an interview Wednesday that there is “such a distance” between the two sides based on preliminary discussions and that the city had not submitted a proposal for the union to review.

“We’ve paused negotiations so they can figure out their financial situation,” Delano said. “We’ve had meetings, but there’s no proposal.”

He agreed with Cox’s remarks before the council that officers need raises to be competitive with other departments in the area that pay more and demand less. He also described reaching 320 officers at least by the end of 2027 as “not realistic,” though acknowledging “ultimately he can catch up” with the target.

Cox said he hopes to graduate two classes of new officers in the coming year to reach the goal.

“You’re getting anywhere from 10 to 20 (officers) in a class,” Delano said of the police academy. The most recent class, which graduated in June, had 15 officers.

The chief said the department is also reviewing minimum staffing levels on shifts and that the fee for hiring off-duty staff would be increasing starting Nov. 1.

Cox also discussed how the department had cut costs as part of the citywide effort to address the fiscal crisis. Those moves included one termination and a crime victim advocate being laid off.

Cox noted there was a “mistake in the budget book that got printed” that showed a computer technology aide would be losing their job. It’s unclear if that was an error by the department or the city budget office, which released a hastily “revised” budget book five days after the mayor’s Oct. 1 budget proposal. The revision was made after the original spending plan contained significant errors, which Cox attributed to “fluid communication going on between the police department and the budget office.”

“I don’t really want to say it was an error on anybody’s part; rather, it was a communication issue,” the chief said.

Cox said a number of open positions, including a confidential secretary, would go unfilled. He also addressed cuts to the part-time school crossing officer staff, which includes eliminating 16 crossing guards and two supervisors.

Cox said Wednesday there would still be crossing guards at city schools in the mornings and afternoons and that the city had been able to safely make the cuts, in part, because the school district had expanded the busing radius from 1½ miles to 1 mile, meaning that a child living at least a mile from their school is eligible for school bus transportation.

The chief also addressed the costs of operating the high-tech systems that have become a feature of modern policing. In 2025, the city signed a 10-year contract with Axon Enterprise, a company best known for making body-worn cameras for police but which also provides other services for police departments. In Albany, the deal includes the body-cameras, in-car cameras, interview room cameras, the department’s drone system, its records system, “and a whole lot of other things,” Cox said.

He described the company, which has been sued in federal court for anticompetitive practices by other municipalities, including the city of Baltimore, as “almost a monopoly” in his presentation to lawmakers.

Cox described the costs, for which the city has to borrow millions of dollars a year, as worth it because of the services the new technology offered by the company will provide. Among the new tools is an artificial intelligence-powered real-time translator that will allow officers to communicate with members of the public in a host of languages, including Farsi and Mandarin.

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