Photo Credit: Shutterstock The New York City Council's approved budget for the city's upcoming fiscal year includes $15.3 million in additional funding for the city's five district attorneys offices to be spent on pay raises for prosecutors, hiring new staff to sift through police body cam footage and programs to address the opioid crisis. The allocation was included in the $89 billion budget for the city's 2018-19 fiscal year, for which the council gave final approval on Thursday. The budget now awaits Mayor Bill de Blasio's signature. About $5.5 million of the funding increase will be earmarked for increasing the pay of line prosecutors, for which the city's DAs have pleaded for the last several budget cycles. Assistant district attorneys tend to leave the offices within a few years, sometimes for better paying jobs at other city agencies such as the Law Department or the Department of Education, said City Councilman Rory Lancman, a Queens Democrat who chairs the council's Courts and Legal Services Committee. For example, according to testimony by Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark before council members in March, the starting salary for her office is $61,200, while assistant corporation counsels start out with the Law Department at more than $68,000. Lancman said increasing pay for prosecutors could help the DA's offices better implement a “vertical prosecution” model in which the same prosecutor can stay with a case from arraignment to adjudication. “You can't have a well-functioning criminal justice system when the front-line prosecutors are doing three years and out,” he said. The budget also allocates $2.5 million for the offices to hire additional staff to review body cam footage. The additional monies will also support the creation of a conviction review unit within the Staten Island District Attorney's Office, the expansion of human trafficking units in the Bronx and Queens DAs offices and to support diversion programs for defendants suffering from opioid addiction, such as the Brooklyn District Attorney Office's Collaborative Legal Engagement Assistance Response (CLEAR) program.