New York City will spend at least $225 million on building a new facility in Queens where training for the NYPD and all other municipal enforcement agencies is set to be centralized as part of a new “Public Safety Academy,” Mayor Adams’ administration announced Friday.
Construction on the new facility, located on the NYPD Police Academy campus in College Point, will start in early 2026, with completion expected in early 2030, officials said.
Funding for the facility — where enforcement officer candidates will train to join agencies ranging from the Parks and Health Departments to the city Sheriff’s Office and the NYPD — is going to “include” $225 million in city taxpayer money allocated in 2021 for a Department of Correction training facility, according to a press release from the mayor’s office. It’s unclear how much more money beyond that will be needed, and spokespeople for the mayor did not immediately return requests for comment.
Under the current system, the 18 municipal agencies, including the NYPD, that have enforcement arms currently train at separate facilities throughout the city.
But the Adams administration has long sought to consolidate the system so that all enforcement agency training is housed under one roof, with the end result being the new Public Safety Academy, initial plans for which were first reported by the Daily News earlier this month.
In a Friday morning press conference on the College Point campus, Adams said the idea for centralizing city agency enforcement training was in part born out of watching what “bad guys of this city have been doing for so long.”
“They were unified,” Adams, a retired NYPD captain, said. “They were unified in the disruption, they were unified in their saturation of fear, they were unified in how they were harming innocent people of this city, and we were so disjointed, because of the color our uniform or what our patches stated, instead of realizing we were one team.”
By consolidating training at one facility, Adams said enforcement agencies will be able to learn from each other.
“We will learn from the Department of Correction of how they’re able to identify gang behavior within their walls, we will learn from the Department of Probation as they see those probationary individuals who are continuously committing crimes or who are attempting to turn their lives around,” Adams said, offering examples of what he sees as the benefits of training consolidation.
Among the other agencies that will start training at the facility are the Departments of Sanitation, Homeless Services and Citywide Administrative Services as well as the Administration for Children’s Services and the Taxi & Limousine Commission.
“This is the coordination we are talking about,” the mayor said. “This is how you build a law enforcement apparatus.”
