The NYPD has helicopters, and while it used to fly them around quite a bit, under Mayor Eric Adams it is flying them around a whole lot, according to a report in Bloomberg that analyzed the last five years of the department's helicopter flight data.
According to the Bloomberg report, which you should really read in its entirety, the police spent $12.4 million dollars flying their helicopters around in the 2023 fiscal year, a figure which doesn't include the personnel costs. That's more than double what was spent in 2021, the last fiscal year of the de Blasio mayoralty.
What is the NYPD doing on all those flights? If you judge by what the department puts out on its in-house social media channels, it's a lot of rescues. Local TV news, whose dual enthusiasms for police puff-pieces and for engine-powered rotary-wing aircraft achieves near-orgasmic Venn overlap when discussing police helicopters, has cast a gauzy eye on the NYPD helicopter operations more than once. PIX11 alone ran two police helicopter pieces in just over 18 months, one of which concluded, in the hard-hitting, holding-power-to-account style that marks the best the of American journalistic tradition, "It was an awesome experience flying with these airborne cops. It’s reassuring to know they are there. Next time you look up and see a blue and white police helicopter, you should feel an extra sense of security, knowing someone is looking over you."
"We’re not up here to do sightseeing,” Deputy Inspector Louis Soviero of the Aviation Unit told the New York Post when the Post ran its own soft-focus celebration of the police helicopters last year.
But according to Bloomberg's analysis, sightseeing is exactly what it appears the NYPD pilots are doing much of the time. "The flight records show that many of the department trips left city limits and some followed trajectories that hit multiple city landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Yankee Stadium, the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center," the story notes.
Sometimes, Bloomberg says, the flight records suggest that the helicopters are being used to ferry passengers to and from a location, like a sort of taxpayer-funded Blade service. One flight highlighted in the investigation zipped out to the Hamptons and back on a Friday evening in August. Another went to Philadelphia and then Albany before returning to New York City. Another time, an NYPD helicopter just went to Philly and back so a deputy commissioner could roll up to a gala event in style.
What's the deal with those trips? None of your business, actually. Per Bloomberg, "both the NYPD and City Hall declined to comment on the purpose of those trips, or whether the helicopters were used by administration officials." The NYPD did provide a more general statement to Bloomberg, saying the department's seven helicopters are used for "operational and training use, and official-use travel."
All told, in 2023 NYPD helicopters made 3,938 separate flights and spent 2,857 hours in the air—a roughly 63 percent increase from 2021.
If you have ever taken part in a street protest in New York City, or lived in a neighborhood within earshot of where other people are taking part in a street protest, you may have appreciated a different aspect of the NYPD's helicopter practice, namely its fondness for hovering noisily—and sometimes quite low—over political expressions protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, the settlement the NYPD committed to in order to resolve a suite of lawsuits brought over its suppression of the 2020 George Floyd protests specifically bars the NYPD from flying its helicopters over protests "with the intent of intimidation or the intent of disrupting, interfering with or dispersing a lawful [First Amendment activity]," though as with other terms of the settlement, it’s not entirely clear that the NYPD is so far embracing its commitment.
(Going further, back, in 2005 the NYPD Aviation Unit—perhaps inspired by seminal 1983 police-helicopter action-drama Blue Thunder—was found to have been using a helicopter to film a couple having sex on their roof.)
In the grand scheme of the City budget, $12.4 million for police helicopter operations is not a ton of money. But at a time when the mayor is pushing through austerity budgets that slash everything from social safety net programs to library hours, the police department's lavish budget for helicopter jaunts comes at a very clear cost.
Next time you look up and see a blue and white police helicopter, you could feel an extra sense of security, knowing someone is looking over you—or you might remember that, as Bloomberg notes, "if the [NYPD helicopter] unit returned to its previous spending levels, there would be enough left over to cover the mayor’s proposed cuts to at-risk youth recreational programming and a mental health response program."
