In an item on the Occupation and overtime, Al Baker of the New York Times reported the following:

Nearly a month after protesters took up residence at a park near Wall Street, Mr. Kelly said that overtime costs to police their activities and marches had hit nearly $2 million.
On Wednesday, word came that those costs had increased to $3.2 million. Where the final figure will land is anybody’s guess.
“We use people who are working their regular tours of duty, but sometimes those tours are extended,” Mr. Kelly said in explaining the management issues after a news conference at 1 Police Plaza on Friday. “You know, we are down 6,000 officers from where we were 10 years ago, so it’s difficult to do any sort of protracted operation with people who are working in their regular tour of duty. So oftentimes, demonstrations of any type require overtime.”
Those added costs come at a difficult time.
The Bloomberg administration has asked for another round of spending cuts from city agencies in the face of lingering financial troubles, which are bleeding the city’s coffers. An open question is whether any savings plan devised by police numbers-crunchers — as their piece of the $2 million in cuts that City Hall wants — forestalls the hiring of a next round of police recruits. The next class is scheduled to enter the Police Academy in January.
But, as Mr. Kelly said, the protests must be policed. [Emphasis added]

It is certainly true that “lingering financial troubles” are, as Al Baker observes, “bleeding the city’s coffers.” But as we’ve discussed, there is another structural issue at work:

During the late 1990s, when New York City’s coffers were flush, annual pension contributions averaged about $1.4 billion. In fiscal year 2012, the city has budgeted $8.4 billion for pensions. To get a sense of what exactly this $7 billion increase means for the city, it helps to know that the entire cost of the Police Department in fiscal year 2012 is around $8.7 billion. …
By hiring more police officers, we could deter more crime. This, in turn, would reduce the number of arrests and the number of women and men the city incarcerates every year. The trouble is that soaring pension costs make hiring more police officers extremely difficult.

Over the past two years, I’ve had a number of conversations with people eager to join the NYPD, yet who’ve been frustrated by the hiring freeze. It is easy to see why our interlocutors on the left would want to blame fiscal austerity policies. The mystery is why those of us on the right aren’t talking about the crowding-out effect of the rising cost of poorly-designed deferred compensation policies.