Eric Adams is speaking out of both sides of his mouth about how the migrant crisis will supposedly “destroy” our city if he doesn’t get more money from Washington, but also about how New Yorkers should trust him as he talks about cutting the NYPD’s head count to its lowest level since the late 1980s.
“There has to come a point that people are saying this man knows what he’s doing,” he said. “The mayor ran on the platform of [keeping] the city safe. I know what I’m doing. And I need New Yorkers right now to trust me.”
But Adams and his inner circle of old friends running the NYPD outside of its formal chain of command haven’t earned that trust, said one frustrated officer who recently resigned from a position of some authority after two decades in the department.
“It’s rudderless right now,” the official said. “Nobody knows who’s calling the shots.”
Speaking of shots, the official noted — and the rest of this column summarizes this person’s informed perspective — that while Adams promised to zero in on shootings, his new NYPD gun-crime teams have recovered more fake license plates than firearms while failing to meet legal standards in a third of their stops.
So much for Adams’ claim that “I know how to do it right because I fought against what was being done wrong” back when he was a police officer.
Instead, his NYPD is reverting to bad old habits, relying on a resource-intensive approach that’s had limited success.
There are hundreds of rookies being dropped into crime-ridden “zones” as part of the NYPD’s fall crime-reduction plan. That’s effectively a revival of the program that drove the abuse of stop and frisk under Commissioner Ray Kelly and was part and parcel of the bad policing practices Adams vowed to end.
Adams says trust him, but this is just Operation Impact minus the training infrastructure Kelly had in place.
What’s more, flooding these zones hasn’t entirely worked: During the NYPD’s 137-day fall plan, shootings dropped 25% in precincts with zones — and 29% in precincts without them.
That followed a summer violence reduction plan where thousands of cops in 69 zones made 61% more arrests and issued 235% more criminal court summonses — including many issued in violation of NYPD policy that should have been civil summonses.
This is not the precision policing Adams promised.
Nor was the reckless increase in vehicle pursuits, a deviation from the NYPD’s own policy and widely recognized best practices that left several New Yorkers injured or killed before reporting prompted the department to tap the brakes and reconsider.
Because current police leadership confuses concern with dissent, the chief tasked with inspecting these sorts of problems was forced to resign. That’s a signal: This is an organization where you can’t bring up problems.
Without bosses communicating expectations, vision or a strategy, the NYPD has been operating largely on inertia, with officers transferred or assigned forced overtime to respond to the day’s concerns. That includes a never-ending series of surges of cops into the subway system that so far have brought crime there down just 2.5% this year.
Overall, the seven major crimes are down 0.7% to date this year after they spiked in 2022. They’re still up 28% compared to 2021.
Shootings in New York City are down 26% this year, but it’s hard to say if that’s because of any NYC-specific intervention when the 20 jurisdictions in New York State’s Gun Involved Violence Elimination initiative also had a 26% decline in shootings.
Adams says he’ll cancel the next five Police Academy classes, but there’s really no extra staff for discretionary deployments. There aren’t hundreds of administrative cops to redeploy. There’s no way to functionally maintain current operations and call volume. They’d have to close precincts.
Navigating this will take managerial chops not yet seen in this administration.
The NYPD’s senior managers, who were middle managers in the Kelly era, are retreating to what they know: more enforcement activity.
Officers are writing criminal court summons and making up bogus reasons why because that’s a category, a metric, that their bosses are tracking.
Like in 2010, they do a lot of activity in the zone. Half the people have prior arrest histories, but most have nothing to do with the gun violence or the problems there.
Adams’ NYPD talks about fancy analytics, but this is about rookies dropped in high-crime zones with days off on Tuesdays or Wednesdays — cops on footposts whose bosses expect them to do numbers.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.
Harry Siegel: The NYPD can’t match the bluster of Mayor Adams
6
0
26.11.2023
Eric Adams is speaking out of both sides of his mouth about how the migrant crisis will supposedly “destroy” our city if he doesn’t get more money from Washington, but also about how New Yorkers should trust him as he talks about cutting the NYPD’s head count to its lowest level since the late 1980s.
“There has to come a point that people are saying this man knows what he’s doing,” he said. “The mayor ran on the platform of [keeping] the city safe. I know what I’m doing. And I need New Yorkers right now to trust me.”
But Adams and his inner circle of old friends running the NYPD outside of its formal chain of command haven’t earned that trust, said one frustrated officer who recently resigned from a position of some authority after two decades in the department.
“It’s rudderless right now,” the official said. “Nobody knows who’s calling the shots.”
Speaking of shots, the official noted — and the rest of this column summarizes this person’s informed perspective — that while Adams promised to zero in on shootings, his new NYPD gun-crime teams have recovered more fake license plates than firearms while failing to meet legal standards in........
© NY Daily News
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
