> Cops are leaving the NYPD in record numbers, but Eric Adams doesn’t seem terribly concerned. > As moderate Democratic politicians try to unshackle themselves from their party’s “defund the police” wing, police officers around the country—and especially in New York City—are retiring and resigning in record numbers. If the trend continues, the defund movement will achieve its aims by default. > New York has seen record departures by police for each of the past three years, and the trend started even earlier. Already in 2019, the year before the George Floyd protests and riots, about 3,000 officers left the department. In 2022, about 3,700 departed (an increase of 32 percent over the previous year), and fewer than 2,000 were hired. And it wasn’t only uniformed officers exiting. According to the Detectives Endowment Association, in June 2022 alone, more than 100 detectives left the job. > Based on the first two months of 2023, the NYPD is likely to continue bleeding blue. In January and February, 239 officers left—almost 40 percent more than in the same period in 2022, and a 117 percent jump over 2021. If the pace keeps up, the department could lose more than 5,000 officers this year, which would make 2023’s exodus the largest since at least 2002, when more than 3,800 cops left after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.