NYPD welcomes 800 teens to summer jobs program

The NYPD opened its doors Tuesday to 800 teens as it kicked off its summer youth employment program.

More than half of the summer hires, who range in age from 16 to 24, were sworn in at police headquarters before taking jobs in department facilities across the city.

Each of the city’s 77 precincts will get four teens, as well as all of the NYPD’s housing and transit units, the police said.

The teens will be working in every aspect of the department, from detective squads to fleet services, where they assist mechanics and learn a trade other than policing.

NYPD Chief Donna Jones, who is Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell’s chief of staff, said the students will be doing everything under the sun “except emptying the garbage.”

“You’re going to see what it’s like to be a police officer, and it’s nothing like you’ve seen on TV,” she said.

Most of the new hires are at-risk youth. The NYPD also hired 24 deaf teens who will be working with staffers who are deaf or are fluent in sign language, said Director Alden Foster of the NYPD’s Community Affairs Bureau,

“We want to be as inclusive as possible and engage with people who might think they can’t have an opportunity or a job like this,” said Foster, who held a summer job with the NYPD when he was a teen. “These teens will be working with someone who might be a cop, but when they become an adult, the person they worked with might be a chief or a police commissioner. The networking they make here will go very far.”