Over 3,000 New York Police Department officers have fallen ill just two weeks after New York’s Police Benevolent Association filed a complaint with state health and safety regulators saying the department failed to provide adequate protective equipment or cleaning and sanitizing supplies to their officers.
One NYPD officer who is part of the Department’s Critical Response Team, the unit that surrounds the city carrying M4’s wearing full SWAT gear, told the Washington Examiner the city cleanup crews are better protected than him and his fellow officers.
“So, I’m watching the news, and they show the cleaning crew at La Guardia High cleaning a facility that will be closed for at least two to three months. They are fully outfitted with PPE and N95 masks. For a school that is closed,” the officer said. “I’m out on patrol and have been given a painter’s mask that wasn’t sealed, and the guy that gave it to me says it’s not sealed, and we don’t know where it came from.”
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea is not saying if most of the sick officers were ill because of the coronavirus. But 177 uniformed members of the NYPD had previously been confirmed to have contracted the COVID-19 virus, along with 34 civilians employees.
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PBA President Pat Lynch excoriated the city for not providing enough necessary protective equipment for its law enforcement officers.
“We’re still battling City Hall and 1 Police Plaza for adequate supplies of equipment and the policies we need to protect our members. It’s important for our leaders to remember that we aren’t the only ones at risk,” Lynch said one week after the PBA filed its complaint. “Our families are in harm’s way, too. Our husbands and wives and daughters and sons didn’t pick this job, but they share our sacrifice. They deserve respect. But above all, they deserve to be protected.”
An NYPD spokeswoman countered, “The PBA’s assertion that we failed to meet our obligation as an employer is empty rhetoric.”
On Feb. 23, the NYPD claimed it purchased the N95 masks, but the PBA says those respirators were still limited in supply, so those masks were not sent out to many on the force.
“As of yesterday, they are being given non-N95 masks, just regular surgical masks, which are better than nothing, but they’re still not the protocol,” an NYPD source told the Washington Examiner. “When they first had hand sanitizer, it was all expired. The hand sanitizer expired in 2016.”
“They’ll be given one or two pairs of gloves for an entire shift, and they’re not even given a small bottle of hand sanitizer anymore,” the person noted. “Now, they’re given one or two Purell wipes.”
According to the source, the NYPD is not testing officers for coronavirus infection by request and compared the department’s response to its response after the 9/11 attacks, when officers became sick as a result of the toxicity in the air near the cleanup site at ground zero.
