Adams revives ‘plainclothes’ units
BY BEN BRACHFELD
The NYPD will be sending
new, updated “plainclothes”
units to police precincts with
high rates of violent crime as
part of Mayor Eric Adams’
plan to combat gun violence
in the city — likely including
several precincts in central
and eastern Brooklyn, police
sources said.
Adams said the work of the
new unit will be concentrated
in “30 precincts where 80 percent
of violence occurs.”
The mayor did not say
which precincts those would
be, but police sources told
Brooklyn Paper that, based on
aggregate statistics on violent
crime such as homicide, shootings,
and robberies, it would
probably include the 67th precinct
in East Flatbush, the
73rd in Brownsville, the 75th
in East New York, the 77th in
Crown Heights, and the 79th
in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The revived plainclothes
units, now dubbed “neighborhood
safety teams,” are delineated
in the mayor’s “Blueprint
to End Gun Violence,”
which was released on Monday
in the wake of the shooting
death of NYPD Offi cer Jason
Rivera in Harlem.
“Although we became safer
as a city, trust me, there are
neighborhoods that never
saw the relief. And I’m going
to go and fi nd those neighborhoods,”
COURIER L 6 IFE, JAN. 28-FEB. 3, 2022
the mayor told reporters
on Jan. 24. “We have 30
precincts in this city that contribute
to 80 percent of the violence,
out of 30 precincts. The
resources need to be there.
That’s what we’re going to do.”
The original plainclothes
units were phased out in
2020 under former Mayor Bill
de Blasio; the units, which
had offi cers go undercover
in civilian attire, were historically
responsible for a
disproportionate share of
use-of-force and shootings,
particularly when utilizing
stop-and-frisk. Adams had
been a fi erce critic of that
move, and campaigned for
mayor on reinstating it.
The new units, Hizzoner
says, will still be identifi able as
NYPD offi cers based on their
attire, and will be specially
trained — with the department
taking care to assign “the right
offi cers” to the units.
“You must have the right
training, the right mindset,
the right disposition, and
be…emotionally intelligent
enough that you are ready to
engage with someone on the
street,” said the mayor, who
then noted that over 400 offi
cers are currently “in the
pipeline” to join the unit.
The teams will be deployed
in about three weeks,
and the city will hold “listening
tours” in affected communities
to learn from the
mistakes of past plainclothes
units, Adams promised.
The nabes the units are
set to be deployed to are majority
Black, per census data
compiled by the Department
of City Planning. The old
plainclothes units were heavily
involved in stop-and-frisk
during the Bloomberg era,
when, at its 2011 peak, nearly
700,000 people were subjected
to stops later declared unconstitutional.
That year, 88 percent
of those stopped were not
guilty of any crime, and 87
percent were Black or Latino.
Criminal justice reform
advocates reacted negatively
to the mayor’s announcement,
on plainclothes units and
other aspects. The Legal Aid
Society, Brooklyn Defender
Services, and other public defender
agencies said in a statement
that without addressing
the “culture and policies” that
drove abusive and racially
discriminatory practices by
plainclothes units, the city
would simply return to the
mistakes of previous eras.
“Reinstating the NYPD’s
Anti-Crime Unit without
also addressing the culture
and policies that drove
that unit’s decades-long pattern
of harassment and violence
targeting Black and
brown New Yorkers is a mistake,”
the joint statement
read. “Today’s announcement
gives the community
members who live with the
legacy of hyper-aggressive
policing no comfort that
Mayor Adams’s Anti-Crime
Unit will be different from
its predecessors. The Mayor
must focus on addressing
long standing problems with
NYPD’s culture of impunity
before he doubles down on
strategies that will only perpetuate
the harms of that
culture.”
Mayor Eric Adams speaks in front of seized fi rearms at a gang takedown
press conference in January. Photo by Dean Moses
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