The NYPD, still reeling from a weekend of extraordinary gun violence and facing pressure from Mayor Adams to make the city safer, announced Wednesday it will renew its focus on quality-of-life offenses.
The announcement followed a Tuesday meeting at City Hall in which Adams told Police Commissioner Sewell and Chief of Department Kenneth Corey that last weekend’s mayhem, which included 29 people shot, one fatally, cannot happen again, police sources said.
“Let’s put it this way,” one source said. “The mayor was not happy.”
The new initiative amounted to an escalation of “broken windows”-style enforcement. Sewell cast the effort as a way to respond to both community concerns and a continued spike in shootings.
“To be clear this is NOT a return to stop, question, and frisk – nor is it ‘policing for numbers,’” Sewell said in a statement.
“This is precision-policing aimed at reducing violence in the neighborhoods seeing disproportionate numbers of shootings – and it is what the public is demanding.”
But critics see as it a return to a policing model that targeted minorities for minor offenses, fostering a mistrust of the nation’s largest police force.
“Let’s be clear: this plan reinstates broken-windows policing, and it will undoubtedly send more Black and Latinx New Yorkers to Rikers Island, a facility that is wholly incapable of caring for the people in its custody,” said Legal Aid Society attorney Jennvine Wong. “Broken windows policing has long been discredited for furthering mistrust between the police and the communities we serve, and this rebranded version will yield those same results, with the same disparate enforcement.”
Adams campaigned on the promise he would bring back a better version of the plainclothes Anti-Crime Unit, that was tasked with taking guns off the street. The unit was disbanded nearly two years ago because it was involved in a disproportionate number of shootings and citizen complaints.
The new Public Safety Unit hit the streets March 14. But sources said Adams was at the same time pushing for a more proactive approach to quality of life offenses, such as public urination and drinking, that he believes contribute to a feeling of disorder in many pockets of the city.
“For a lot of people, it’s about the loud noise, the public drinking, all these quality of life violations,” a second police source said. “Those are the complaints we hear most about, even with all the violence.”
According to the NYPD, quality of life complaints since 2019 have soared. Drinking in public complaints have doubled, to 3,193 from 1,452. Calls about loud parties in public have more than doubled, to 9,013 from 3,338.
According to NYPD stats through Sunday, 284 people were shot in the city so far this year — up 17% from the 242 during the same period last year.
“We know from experience, as the weather gets warmer, that 30% of all shooting incidents are preceded by multiple reports of other lawbreaking and violations leading up to that violence,” said Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael LiPetri. “Engaging in proactive enforcement can be the difference that prevents that next shooting, and prevents the next child from being harmed.”
But Christopher Dunn, legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the answer to reducing violent crime is not “another Giuliani-era broken-windows policing initiative.”
“Locking up people caught drinking a beer in public or shoplifting food will only ensnare more Black and brown New Yorkers in a regressive and abusive criminal legal system — not address violent crime,” Dunn said.
Mayor Adams’ office did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
©2022 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
““This is precision-policing aimed at reducing violence in the neighborhoods seeing disproportionate numbers of shootings – and it is what the public is demanding.”
“Black people make up 23 percent of New York’s population, but they commit 75 percent of all shootings. … Whites are 33 percent of the city’s population, but they commit fewer than 2 percent of all shootings…
“These disparities mean that virtually every time that police in New York are called out after a shooting, they are being summoned into minority neighborhoods looking for minority suspects.”
Profiling? “If a Dalmatian has been biting the children in the neighborhood, I think we’re going to look for a black and white dog.”
GEE wizz.. So broken windows, under Guillanii, was SPOT ON!
There is no way to win as a police officer. If crime goes up, people want it brought under control. When measures are taken to bring it under control, cries of racism reverberate from every direction.
AND ITS NOT the cops, that keep letting crooks GO Repeatedly.
ITS THE BLOODY DA’s office, and the judges..
Distrust of police can be laid directly at the feet of the Democrats and no where else. Their obsession with defund the ploice is only the tip of the iceberg. Any incident involving the police and a black peron was instantly categogized has hate and police brutality regardless of the facts which were smothered by a very compliant media in the Democrat coterie. Np specifics were given of how this would be brought about before the Civil Liberties crowd was complaining.
Hey, whaddya know kids – “broken windows” policing is BACK in the NYC!!! Simple cause and effect – if you let your neighborhood become a cesspool, then criminals will flock to it .. to commit crimes! Keep it presentable, stop folks from going potty on the sidewalk, then the opposite will happen.
Some other things they can do to clean up the city and reduce crime.
– Lose the No Cash Bail law. Do the crime, expect to do time.
– Get rid of the ridiculous gun laws – they don’t work. Places that don’t regulate/ban guns like NY does have lower crime rates, because the bad guys know they might actually encounter an armed citizen.
– Prisons – someone in the article whined about Rikers once again. Solution there is to send folks to those nice uncrowded upstate prisons.
How’s about send them all to UKRAINE!! One way!
NEW YORK CITY is the example of how to do all things wrong but they accidentally did one thing correct–their bad prison conditions are the one good thing giving the criminals a place they will not want to return to…..Let New York City Rot—they voted for all their woes.
More and more, i just want to DOME the entire bloody city off, from the rest of humanity.. AND Leave that dome up there, for eternity.