Mayor de Blasio Unveils New Groundbreaking Neighborhood Policing Vision

Mayor de Blasio Unveils New Groundbreaking Neighborhood Policing Vision ‘ONE CITY: SAFE AND FAIR – EVERYWHERE’

Comprehensive approach designed to fully engage community as coequal partner to keep neighborhoods safe, support officers, and keep crime at historic low levels

Mayor de Blasio and New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton today unveiled One City: Safe and Fair – Everywhere, a groundbreaking plan of action to guide the work of the nation’s largest police force. The plan outlines a series of strategic changes that taken together form a new comprehensive framework for neighborhood policing – building a true partnership with neighbors and residents in the fight against crime.

The plan recognizes that the best way to keep crime at historically low levels, and drive it down even further, is to engage and activate community members as coequal partners in the fight against crime like never before.

To achieve this critical goal, One City: Safe and Fair – Everywhere introduces a comprehensive, pioneering plan for neighborhood policing. The plan is designed to solve the central problem in implementing the community policing ideal: providing officers with the time and training necessary to deepen relationships within the communities they serve, and transforming the role of officers from traditionally reactive responders to calls for service into something more – proactive problem solvers in true partnership with the community. The result, already being felt in four pilot precincts, is increased community engagement for officers, yielding collaboration and increased trust and respect between police and the communities they serve. This reduces and prevents crime, improves quality of life for all New Yorkers, and builds stronger relationships between residents and cops.

One City: Safe and Fair – Everywhere is a central pillar of the Police Department’s broad plan to define and implement new initiatives in five key areas, otherwise known as the Five “Ts”.

• Tactics – A neighborhood-policing plan that is rooted in local communities and tied to local concerns.

• Technology – A revolution in NYPD technology, bringing its full capabilities to police officers in the field.

• Training – Field training for recruits and recurring training for veterans, imparting the skills to manage the human encounters that are the fundamental business of street policing.

• Terrorism – Strengthened investigative enforcement efforts with federal, state and local partners, as well as significantly enhanced critical-incident response capabilities in evolving overseas conditions that have altered the local threat picture.

• Trust – A compact with both the communities and the cops to deal fairly and respectfully with one another.

Since May, the neighborhood policing plan has been piloted in four precincts in Washington Heights (Manhattan) and the Rockaways (Queens). In the coming months, the program will be expanded to additional precincts across the city, with a specific focus and emphasis on high-crime areas. In developing this vision, the Police Commissioner and members of the Department met with hundreds of community leaders to help identify existing challenges and realistic and workable solutions. In addition, Mayor de Blasio announced the addition of 1,297 new officers as part of the final budget negotiations with the City Council. The force equivalent of much of this new staffing will be dedicated to One City: Safe and Fair – Everywhere.

Key features of the plan include the division of a precinct into four or five fully staffed sectors, as opposed to the existing eight to ten sectors that often aren’t fully staffed; newly-drawn sector boundaries that closely conform with neighborhood boundaries; the establishment of Neighborhood Coordinating Officers (NCOs) in each sector to identify and manage community concerns; and dedicated time each day for NCOs to be out in the community to establish and nurture relationships. The plan establishes “true sector integrity,” where the same two officers are in the same sector every day with the potential for an additional two regularly-assigned cars depending on the sector’s crime rates; the designation of two newly-created Neighborhood Coordination Officers per sector who will have the resources and training to work within the community to leverage NYPD assets and partner agencies to help address local problems; the allocation of four cars and eight officers for precinct-wide rapid response; and the utilization of technology and databases at officers’ fingertips in the field.

YM & YWHA of Washington Heights and Inwood

54 Nagle Avenue

New York, NY 10040

June 25, 2015