The starting salary for a NYPD officer doesn’t even cover the rent of the median 1BR apartment in NYC. Hard to recruit under those economic circumstances. This is way more problematic than whatever a politician says about racism. Even with the pandemic uptick in crime the stats show that the city is much safer than 30 years ago.
The subjective statement "its much safer than (insert time period)" is just that - subjective. If you want to show less murders or violent crime, show empirical data. Of course, if its empirical like the stuff coming out of San Fran (where they claim a drop in violent crime because they stopped reporting on violent crime) then that's just garbage. I grew up in the NYC area and was there 30 years ago. I don't remember seeing anything like I'm seeing today, though admittedly there is an amplification factor from social media that didn't exist back then. Cops were respected. You didn't throw stuff at or attack cops unless you were suicidal. You cannot possibly suggest the respect for the police is the same.
Not talking about how cops were treated, but the overall crime rates were much higher. The homicide rate is much lower today. It’s even lower than 10 years ago. However, I think it’s important to note that the salaries of cops is too low to sustain a middle class life style living in NYC. The starting salary is like $42.6k a year which is a complete joke when you consider the cost of rent. If that doesn’t change they can praise cops all they want, recruiting will be tough.
I don't disagree with the salaries being low (though you are likely not including overtime which is a big part of police officer pay). And homicide isn't the only statistic.