Top Cop Says NYPD Work ‘Slowdown’ Is Over

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New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has declared that a work "slowdown" by officers that arose amid a rift with Mayor Bill de Blasio is over, New York magazine reports.

"The slowdown is over in the sense that the numbers are starting to go back up again,” Bratton said, according to the magazine. “I anticipate by early next week that the numbers will return to their normalcy." 

Union leaders blamed the mayor for fomenting anti-police sentiments and rhetoric in the days and weeks before Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were assassinated last month as they sat in their patrol car on a Brooklyn street. As a result of the squabble, leadership has been accused of ordering a work slowdown by officers.

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Summonses have been down 90 percent for infractions like drinking and urinating in public and various traffic violations, causing the city to lose more than $10 million in projected revenue, the magazine writes. Meanwhile, arrests in the last week of 2014 and the first of 2015 declined by 56 percent in comparison with the same period last year, the report says.

"I don't know what the cause is,” Bratton said, according to the magazine. “That's 30,000-some-odd officers … their motivations might be different for different ones. I'm not aware of any formal encouragement by union leadership in this matter."

Read more at New York magazine.