Over the next three weeks, Adams said the city will launch Neighborhood Safety Teams focused on gun violence in the city’s 30 worst precincts responsible for 80% of the city’s violence.
The blueprint drew a connection between the new teams and the city’s old anti-crime units that former Mayor Bill de Blasio disbanded last year after decades of complaints.
The city will hold a series of listening sessions in key neighborhoods around the city about how to prevent abuses of the past units, while providing additional training, supervision, analytics and risk monitoring, according to the blueprint.
Adams said the use of video technology, particularly officers’ body-worn cameras, alterations to the “plain clothes” dress code with the use of clear NYPD markings to better identify officers, and the recruitment of different officers than in the past to man these units.
“You must have the right training, the right mindset, the right disposition, and be, as I say all the time, emotionally intelligent enough,” he said of the new units’ officers. “We’re going to make sure that they’re the best fit for the unit.”
Addressing the apparent contradiction in a plain clothes unit wearing identifiable markings, Adams said the unit’s unmarked cars provide those units’ real strength.
Adams said more than 400 officers would be assigned to the new units, along with a number of additional steps he intends to implement at the local level.
On law enforcement, the city will work to identify inefficiencies in the department that allowing the transfer of officers from desk and event duties to patrol, Adams said they’d also work to increase NYPD and state police presence around interstate transit hubs like Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal where many of the city’s guns come in.
— Paul Liotta in Here’s how Mayor Adams will address NYC gun violence