New York City will build a new facility on the NYPD Academy campus where several city agencies with public safety functions outside of the police department will begin training their new recruits, Mayor Eric Adams announced on Friday.
Hizzoner announced the new “Public Safety Academy” during a promotional ceremony at the NYPD Academy campus in College Point, Queens on May 31. He said it aims to better coordinate operations across separate city agencies with enforcement arms while saving the city money by consolidating their training into one facility.
“We were so disjointed because of the color of our uniform or what our patches stated, instead of realizing we were one team,” Adams said. “Even if there were different jerseys, we were team public safety. Today, the announcement of this public safety campus is bringing all of that experience together.”
Those that will move their training to the new facility span from more traditional law enforcement agencies like the Departments of Correction and Probation to parts of the city’s government with border missions like the Departments of Sanitation and Parks. Currently, all of those agencies outside the NYPD have their own separate smaller training centers.
“We will learn from the Department of Correction and how they’re able to identify gang behavior within their walls,” the mayor said. “We will learn from Sue Donoghue, the commissioner of Parks Police, as they look at what is taking place on our parks and other green spaces … This is how you build a law enforcement apparatus that we can respond to the crises that we know are important for us to face day to day.”
The city is set to break ground on the new facility in 2026, with construction expected to wrap in early 2030, according to the mayor’s office.
The academy will be funded in part by $225 million earmarked in 2021 for a new DOC training facility, City Hall said. The campus will include both the training spaces specifically for the Corrections Department and multipurpose facilities that will be shared by over a dozen other city agencies.
The campus is part of a broader effort by the Adams administration to bring separate city agencies with public safety functions under one umbrella.
The facility’s development has been driven primarily by Adams’ Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, who has spent much of his two and half years in office working on it, according to a report from the Daily News. The paper reported that Banks hopes the academy will be a model for other cities across the country.
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