> If cops can't qualify for a NYC mortgage and are forced to live in NYC, many will quit. They have very transferable skills and there are loads of police departments with staff shortages in places where housing is affordable on a police officer's salary.
This is true for every other civil servant in NYC; they haven't quit. People want to live here.
Overtime does indeed contribute to burnout. But overtime use by the NYPD is culturally endemic and rampant[1]; individual anecdotes don't make a trend, but you can look up "NYPD overtime abuse" for widely shared "tricks" among NY's finest for getting paid extra money for indefinitely detaining suspects, conducting calls where they know an arrest won't be made, &c.
Finally: I agree that policing is a nasty, unpleasant job. To a certain degree, it's fundamentally nasty and unpleasant. But the current degree to which it's that way is a problem of our own making: police departments have been happy to absorb the budget that was slashed from mental health and community building programs, all while complaining about the overflowed social ills that come with doing that. I'd rather make the job more attractive by funding those things than dumping more money into the black hole that is the NYPD's labor budget.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-20/nypd-blow...