The coronavirus pandemic has hit the state of New York especially hard. With more than 68,000 confirmed positive cases, and 2,700 deaths, New York has become the largest hot-spot for the virus in America. New York City has been following lockdown procedures, however, with over 9 million people living in Manhattan alone, it begs the question of what else can be done to slow the spread of covid-19.
This past Sunday, The New York Police Department lost Auxiliary Police Officer Ramon Roman to health complications brought on by the coronavirus. Roman is the twelfth NYPD officer to die due to some sort of health ailment brought on by the virus.
Additionally, 20% of the entire department is currently out sick and self-quarantining even if they haven’t tested positive yet, as a means of protecting other healthy officers. First-responders, law enforcement, and healthcare workers should be some of the most protected individuals continuing to work in the US, as they’re literally risking exposure everyday to keep all of us safe and healthy.
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“There is nothing that can compare to this. As in many other police departments across the United States, those in the NYPD who can are working from home, but many are still out on the streets, delivering groceries to the elderly and even, as was the case recently in the Bronx, delivering babies, I can tell you we’re in good shape despite so many people going down with this sickness. We’re in good shape because everyone is pitching in. Some precincts are minimally staffed, and if it goes below the minimum we have people ready to backfill there,” New York Police Department Commissioner Dermot Shea said.
The NYPD will likely need to outsource state police to come into the city to help pick up the slack from the quarantined officers who are doing their part by staying home. In general, Shea also reported that while there has been an obvious surge in 911 calls within the past month, the amount of calls that are actually funneled down to the NYPD to investigate are way down. However, while service calls may be down significantly, Shea stated that disorderly conduct calls have been up 300%.
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A majority of those calls have to do with grocery stores that have a limit on how much one person can buy a certain thing, which has led to some rather intense altercations. The NYPD, and police departments across the country, are trying to reduce the amount of in-person response calls so that officers don’t have to be dispatched unless there’s a real emergent high-priority situation; this is all a part of coronavirus protective measures.
Other measures include trying to keep jail population sizes down by not making any arrests for lower-level crimes. Officers have been working with district attorney’s and NYC judges to determine what crimes are actually deserving of putting someone in a much higher risk environment at being exposed.
Currently, around 2,000 NYPD officers tested positive for coronavirus, making it likely that Commissioner Shea will begin implementing 12-hour shifts to make up for the increase in case numbers. However, she’s also confident that within the next week a majority of the officers who initially tested positive will be returning to work after being quarantined for at least two weeks.
Like every industry in the world, the next few weeks will be unpredictable in terms of what’s open, and who’s able to go to work. If we want to protect our country’s law enforcement and healthcare workers so that they can do their jobs to the best of their ability, we all need to be taking this pandemic seriously, and listen to our government when they tell us to stay inside.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
