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 Shea said the plainclothes units were part of an outdated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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