Terror target New York City got beat out by sleepy burgs like Frenchtown, NJ, and Broken Bow, Okla., when it came to the Justice Department’s allocation of stimulus money to hire more street cops.
“Perverse might be the word I would use,” Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday in describing the feds’ thinking.
“Government always . . . tends to move money from programs that do work to programs that don’t work,” he added. “In this case, it’s not programs, it’s locations that work and don’t work.”
Although the city has been the target of the World Trade Center bombing, the 9/11 attacks and numerous foiled plots since — including plans to bomb synagogues in The Bronx and blow up a fuel pipeline in Brooklyn and Queens — it didn’t get one cent from the $1 billion Justice Department-run program.
But Sen. Charles Schumer told The Post that the city is about to receive almost $36 million in Homeland Security money to beef up police presence on mass transit.
“This will put more than 120 new cops on our trains and buses, and will be a shot in the arm for New York’s successful fight against crime,” Schumer said about the funds to be allocated to the city from a grant program for municipalities with large mass-transit programs.
Schumer said the number of new cops would far exceed the 50 cops the city would have been able to hire had it received money under the Justice Department program.
Spokesmen for the mayor and the NYPD said they had no immediate comment on the Homeland Security money.
But many still raised eyebrows that places like Frenchtown, a tiny town on the Delaware River, and Broken Bow, labeled by its chamber of commerce as the “gateway city to Broken Bow Lake,” got one new cop apiece from Justice Department money, while New York got stiffed.
“We’re down over 5,000 officers from where we were in 2001,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday, before getting word of the Homeland Security funds.
“We’re projected now to go down another thousand. We will have no hires this fiscal year, so were disappointed.”
Gov. Paterson wouldn’t challenge how the Justice Dept. funds were allocated, but said, “We must remember New York City has been the epicenter of terrorist attacks for a long period of time.”
Attorney General Eric Holder said the money was divvied up according to “crime rates, financial need and community-policing activities.”
New York City officials initially asked for $648 million, enough to hire 2,000 cops over three years, but they thought they’d end up with $200 million to $300 million, enough for 600 to 900 new officers.