The Mark Simone Show.

710 W-O-R.

Well, Michael Goodwin is the finest columnist in America.

You can read them every Sunday and every Wednesday in the New York Post.

He's with us every Monday. Michael Goodwin. How you doing?

Good morning, Mark. Thank you.

Well, you wrote a very important column yesterday, reminding everybody.

Eric Adams' proposal cut 5%.

You're reminding everybody what happens historically when we do this.

Tell everybody how bad this could be.

Well, look, according to Mayor Adams' new budget proposals,

that NYPD would be allowed to drift down to 29,000 officers.

Now, it stands today at about 33,500. So that's a cut of about 13% which he would achieve

by canceling the next five recruiting classes.

So you're talking about an enormous shift in the number of cops.

And I point out that 29,000 is a magic number in the sense that that's what the city

had in 1993.

And officials then, everybody, from David Dinkins to the city council,

had decided it was too few.

Now, it was this legislation called Safe Street, Safe City, which did a lot of things about criminal justice, including adding more police officers.

And as I wrote in the column, by 1996, roughly three and a half years or so after the legislation passed,

maybe closer to four years, there was something like 36,300 police,

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