NYC mayoral hopefuls line up against Eric Adams $225M Cop City training facility: Boondoggle of taxpayer dollars

A $225 million plan by Mayor Eric Adams to erect a 16-agency public safety training facility on the NYPD academy’s campus is being panned by nearly all of his Democratic primary challengers.Not only is newfound “defund the police” enemy Andrew Cuomo against the so-called “Cop City,” so are many actual NYPD officers.The mayoral hopefuls, including democratic socialist firebrand Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, agree that shelling out a quarter billion dollars on a training facility does nothing to help the NYPD’s ongoing crisis with hiring and keeping cops on the force.“From an NYPD perspective, it’s dumb,” one law-enforcement source said Friday.“The NYPD does everything anyway — we do everyone’s job, and now we’re going to train other agencies to continue to not do our job.It’s just another waste of our resources.”Another mayoral candidate, State Sen.

Jessica Ramos (D-Queens), argued the money would be better spent on increasing base pay, among other bread-and-butter public safety items.“It’s another Eric Adams boondoggle of taxpayer dollars,” she said.Adams last year announced plans to build the facility by repurposing money his predecessor Bill de Blasio had set aside for a Department of Correction training center.He argued putting all the city’s public safety training in one facility — with construction slated to begin in early 2026 — would be more efficient and save taxpayers money.City Hall, however, did not provide The Post an estimate for savings.Leftist police reform advocates quickly lambasted the facility as the Big Apple’s own version of Atlanta’s controversial “Cop City,” but the furor largely faded until Politico first reported that eight of Adams’ mayoral challengers opposed it.“Quite frankly, the Adams administration doesn’t care what a bunch of ‘defund the police’ career bureaucrats – who have only made it more difficult for us to protect New Yorkers’ public safety – have to say about o...