Criminal Justice
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Officials can maintain critical connections through crises
The commissioner is reassigning about 600 officers from teams that target violent crime. He called it a “seismic shift” in police culture.
By Ali Watkins
June 15, 2020
The New York police commissioner announced on Monday that he
was disbanding the Police Department’s anti-crime units:
plainclothes teams that target violent crime and have been
involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings.
Roughly 600 officers serve in the units, which are spread out across
the city and work out of the department’s 77 precincts and nine
housing commands. They will immediately be reassigned to other
duties, including the detective bureau and the department’s
neighborhood policing initiative, the commissioner, Dermot F.
Shea, said.
Mr. Shea said the plainclothes units were part of an outdated
policing model that too often seemed to pit officers against the
communities they served, and that they were involved in a
disproportionate number of civilian complaints and fatal shootings
by the police. He said the department now depends much more on
intelligence gathering and technology to fight crime and “can move
away from brute force.”
“This is a seismic shift in the culture of how the N.Y.P.D. polices this
great city,” Mr. Shea said. “It will be felt immediately in the
communities that we protect.”
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The unexpected announcement came after weeks of protests and
public unrest over police brutality after the death in Minneapolis of
George Floyd, a black man who was killed when a white police
officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
Within the department, the anti-crime units were seen as an elite
force aimed at disarming criminals in the city’s most violent
pockets. Created with the mission of ridding the street of illegal
guns and stopping violent crimes, the units were widely seen as a
steppingstone for ambitious officers who hoped to join the
Detective Bureau.
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But for critics of the department, the anti-crime units have become
a symbol of the aggressive policing strategies that are now being
called into question by the protest movement. Not all are being
disbanded: Those that work in the city’s transit system will remain
in their role, Mr. Shea said, and plainclothes units will continue to
operate in other divisions of the police department.
Mr. Shea said Monday that the anti-crime units were a vestige of
the city’s era of “stop-and-frisk,” when officers routinely searched
people in high-crime areas, a practice that a judge declared
unconstitutional after finding it disproportionately affected people
of color.
“This is 21st-century policing," Mr. Shea said of his decision to
disband the units. “The key difference — we must do it in a manner
that builds trust between the officers and the community they
serve.”
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The anti-crime units have been routinely touted by the
department’s leaders as a key tool to fight crime in some of the
city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. They have been credited
with taking thousands of illegal guns off city streets.
The officers in the units took on their own roguish image: The
assignment was seen as dangerous, reserved for the tough and the
brash, the pinnacle of good-guy-gets-the-bad-guy policing. Among
the rank-and-file, the abolishment of the plainclothes units is likely
to be seen as a retreat from traditional police work.
“Anti-crime’s mission was to protect New Yorkers by proactively
preventing crime, especially gun violence,” said Patrick J. Lynch,
the president of the Police Benevolent Association, the city’s
largest police union. “Shooting and murders are both climbing
steadily upward, but our city leaders have clearly decided that
proactive policing isn’t a priority anymore.”
But among experts on policing, Mr. Shea's announcement was seen
as an enterprising response to mounting pressure to overhaul how
the department operates within the city.
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“It’s really sending the message that we have to work on trust
building. You can reduce crime, but if the public still feels that they
don’t trust the police, then you’ve lost the moral high ground,” said
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research
Forum, a law enforcement policy nonprofit. “Police departments
across the country will see this as a wake- up call.”
Public defenders and civil rights lawyers viewed the move with
wary optimism, saying they could not be sure if it would turn out to
be cosmetic or a lasting change.
Darius Charney, a staff lawyer with the Center for Constitutional
Rights, a civil rights group, said that the decision to disband the
anti-crime teams seemed sudden and rushed. He also noted that
Mr. Shea did not mention the borough-based anti-crime teams that
were “some of the worst” offenders at the height of stop-and-frisk.
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“For this change to have any meaningful impact on how
communities experience policing in N.Y.C., these former anti-crime
officers will need to change the way they police communities of
color, and nothing the commissioner said gives me any confidence
that the N.Y.P.D. has a plan to make sure that happens,” Mr.
Charney said.
Mr. Charney noted the city had embarked on a similar mission in
2002, when it disbanded its plainclothes Street Crime Unit. “The
problem got much worse over the next 10 years,” he said.
The anti-crime units had absorbed the remnants of the city’s
plainclothes Street Crime Unit, which had begun three decades
earlier.
The Street Crime Unit was disbanded by Commissioner Raymond
W. Kelly after years of simmering criticism over the 1999 shooting
of Amadou Diallo. Plainclothes officers had shot Mr. Diallo, a street
vendor, 41 times after mistaking his wallet for a gun. Mr. Kelly
reassigned the remaining Street Crime officers to various anti-
crime units across the city.
Though the anti-crime officers account for only about 2 percent of
the department’s uniformed force, they have been involved in a
disproportionate number of shootings by the police.
A 2018 review of fatal police shootings in New York City conducted
by The Intercept, an online publication, found that plainclothes
anti-crime officers had been involved in 31 percent of the incidents
since 2000.
In 2018, anti-crime officers shot and killed Saheed Vassell, a
mentally ill man who pointed a metal pipe toward them like a gun
on a busy Brooklyn street. Mr. Vassell, 34, was known as an
idiosyncratic fixture in the neighborhood, and patrol officers were
familiar with the man’s bizarre antics. The anti-crime officers who
responded however, were part of a team that did not routinely work
in the area and did not know Mr. Vassell.
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Last September, an anti-crime unit officer, Brian Mulkeen, was shot
and killed by his partners in the Bronx while he struggled on the
ground with Antonio Lavance Williams. Mr. Williams was also
killed in a police fusillade. The police said Mr. Williams was found
to be carrying an illegal gun, but it remains unclear why Officer
Mulkeen and his partners tried to stop and question him in the first
place.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mr. Shea also have come under pressure
from protesters and elected officials to reduce the size of the police
department and shift resources into social programs. The City
Council speaker, Corey Johnson, has proposed slashing the Police
Department’s $6 billion budget by $1 billion.
Ashley Southall contributed reporting.
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N.Y.P.D. Disbands Plainclothes Units Involved in Many Shootings
“This is 21st-century policing,” Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said. Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
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