NYPD to crack down on quality-of-life crime in NYC

NYC quality-of-life policing

The NYPD has announced a return to cracking down on quality-of-life crimes.

NEW YORK - In an effort to combat crime in the city, the NYPD is focusing its anti-gun efforts on the Bronx and parts of Brooklyn where nearly half of all shootings happen. The department is also launching a new initiative to get back to cracking down on quality-of-life crimes.

Here are some examples from the latest potpourri of violent crimes in the city:

A group of males attacked a 14-year-old boy, repeatedly punching him at the Van Siclen Avenue station in East New York, Brooklyn. One of them recorded it and posted it on social media.
Three people who robbed a spa on East 19th Street in Manhattan kicked an employee as she tried to stop them.
Someone slashed a man on his forehead in a subway station in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. An MTA worker then had to mop the platform.

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To combat crime, Mayor Eric Adams has been rolling out the NYPD's new anti-gun teams over the past two weeks. And now the NYPD has announced a return to cracking down on quality-of-life crimes.

"These are the things that work. It's about deterrents," Joe Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and retired police sergeant, told Fox 5 News. "When people know that they can get a summons, they can get arrested, they tend not to do these things."

The NYPD said it is responding to the communities' complaints about open drug selling, public drinking, dice games, and public urination, which the department said can lead to more serious crimes.

On Monday, the mayor called on district attorneys to start prosecuting subway turnstile jumpers.

"They need to — it's a crime," Adams said. "It's a crime."

But Legal Aid Society attorney Jennvine Wong said, "A long-term solution to public urination is more public bathrooms — not more police officers."

The Legal Aid Society said this is a return to so-called broken-windows policing enacted under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s.

"Broken-windows policing — it's been long discredited for furthering mistrust between the police and communities," Wong said.

Statement by the Police Commissioner

"As I stated on my first day as Commissioner, after visiting an officer who was shot two hours and thirty-nine minutes into the New Year, there are too many people carrying illegal guns and too many people willing to use them. That has to change. Now. To be clear, this is NOT a return to Stop, Question, and Frisk — nor is it 'policing for numbers.' This enforcement will be responsive to community complaints and concerns, and will address the violent crime patterns officers and detectives are confronting. This is precision-policing aimed at reducing violence in the neighborhoods seeing disproportionate numbers of shootings — and it is what the public is demanding." —Commissioner Keechant Sewell

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