NYPD Buys $7.5M in Additional Police Protection Gear

NEW YORK CITY, NY — The NYPD spent $7.5 million last week on 20,000 new helmets and 6,000 new vests capable of stopping bullets from the types of military-grade guns used in two recent attacks on police, one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the second in Dallas, Texas.

The purchase was announced at a Monday press conference outside the NYPD's 84th Precinct, which patrols parts of Dumbo, Brooklyn Heights and BoCoCa.

The 84th was the precinct officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos belonged to when they were fatally shot in December 2014 in Bed-Stuy by a man who had pledged to kill police officers.

Pictures of Ramos, left, and Liu outside the 84th Precinct on Monday.

NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton, who led the press conference said the vests were ordered just days after officers were fired on by a Clinton Hill man, Jermaine Johnson, whom police said was acting erratically in East Williamsburg. Johnson was killed by police during the exchange.

Two of the vests will be put in 3,000 police cars used for patrols, according to James O'Neil, the NYPD's Chief of Department, while the helmets will be distributed to all patrol officers. The equipment will start arriving by September, Bratton said.

A new vest and helmet

The vests and helmets are just the latest expenditure by the NYPD focused on officer safety. Bratton said the city has spent $320 million over the past 18 months on equipment, and $1.9 billion in the past 30 months on training, equipment, overtime pay, and upgrades to facilities to guarantee "our offices have what they need to do their job safely and to protect the public to the greatest degree possible."

"We will not have a Police Department that will bring a knife to a gunfight," said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who also attended the press conference, along with Mayor Bill de Blasio. "We will bring the right equipment to fend off anyone that endangers the public."

De Blasio lauded the courage of the city's cops, offering particular praise for Sergeant Hameed Armani, an immigrant from Afghanistan, and officer Peter Cybulski, who last week drove what they thought was a bomb thrown into their vehicle away from pedestrians in Columbus Circle. (The bomb turned out to be fake.)

"Their first impulse was to immediately drive away from a crowded area to protect the lives of others with absolutely no regard for their own lives," de Blasio said. "All they thought about was protecting others. This takes extraordinary courage and strength."

Both the mayor and Bratton also stressed that NYPD officers are being constantly trained and retrained in how to deal with emerging security threats and how to use the new equipment they receive.

"A few years ago, we were talking about a very different picture in terms of terrorism," de Blasio said. "It’s necessary to constantly improve the training of our officers and to make it an every-year kind of thing because we’re in a different world now."

In 2015, 42 on-duty officers were killed by gunfire nation-wide, according to a review of available data by NPR, down from 49 in 2014. So far this year, 32 officers have been shot dead across America, according to data compiled by the Officer Down Memorial Page.

Pictured: two officers wearing the new helmets and vests ordered this week by the NYPD. Photos by John V. Santore