‘A blessing to our city’

The police are out in force.

A whopping 965 new NYPD cops filed into Madison Square Garden on Tuesday for a confetti-filled police academy graduation in a hopeful sign the department is turning a corner on its persistent staffing crisis.

The class is the largest since 2016, with more than a quarter of its grads — who will soon protect and serve New York City’s diverse population — born outside the US, officials said.

“I have felt the tide turning for policing generally and specifically for policing in this city for quite some time now,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told the graduates.

“This is a department and a profession that is once again attracting young and bright talent in big numbers, and that is a blessing to our city.”

The young and bright talent in the class includes 252 foreign-born officers, hailing from 41 countries, police officials said.

The Dominican Republic was the birthplace of the largest number of graduates — 51 — followed by 44 from Bangladesh, 23 from Haiti and 19 Jamaicans, officials said.

Hero NYPD Didarul Islam, who was fatally gunned down in last week’s Midtown mass shooting, originally hailed from Bangladesh.

And 476 of those new cops also speak a kaleidoscopic 39 different languages, officials said.

Tisch said the class reflects “every corner of the city and far beyond it.”

“You were born in places as close as the Bronx and as far away as South Korea,” she said. “From the mountains of Nepal to the streets of Santo Domingo, from Bangladesh, Ghana and the Philippines to Poland, Jamaica and Colombia, from Haiti, from Egypt, from China.”

The NYPD’s headcount has been a persistent cause for concern, as it plunged to roughly 33,500 last year — the lowest level since 1990.

A monthly exodus of 200 cops and a surge in retirements — fueled by increasing workloads, exploding overtime and higher-paying jobs in other nearby departments — left New York’s Finest in a precarious position.

The problem was compounded by the number of NYPD applicants plummeting from 18,000 in 2017 to just 8,000 as 2025 dawned.

Mayor Eric Adams, in response to the growing crisis, set a goal of 35,000 officers by late 2026.

Tisch, shortly after becoming the fourth police commissioner to serve under Adams, in February reduced the college requirements for prospective cops to enter the police academy.

The NYPD is among the last major police forces in the US to have college credit requirements. Before Tisch’s changes, it was mandatory for applicants to have at least 60 college credits.

The department now only requires 24 credits.

Police officials contended the change helped “level the playing field” and helped pave the way for this year’s mammoth academy class.

They also credited a social media push encouraging recruitment and holding the police department exam every month.

Addressing the graduates, Adams spoke of his own formative time as an NYPD officer — and again crowed about the city seeing record-low gun violence numbers.

“It made me the mayor that I am today,” he said. “And we were committed to bringing down crime and making sure our city was safe, to raise healthy children and families. 

“We’ve witnessed the lowest number of shootings and victims of shootings in the last seven months, and the recorded history of this city. In the first six months of this year, we we witnessed the lowest number of homicides in the recorded history of this city.”

— Additional reporting by Joe Marino