The NYPD will soon have a shiny new division, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced last week, dedicated to handling the city’s pressing quality-of-life issues.
The squad, she told the Association for a Better New York, will focus on community concerns, from aggressive panhandling to drag racers to pervasive homeless encampments.
That’s welcome news. But it comes after more than a decade of the city neglecting disorder under the guise of “racial justice.”
Now, fewer than 30% of residents are satisfied with quality of life in the city, the Citizens Budget Commission found in 2023.
That’s down from a majority in 2017, the last time the poll was conducted. Something must be done.
New Yorkers, therefore, should regard Tisch’s initiative with skeptical optimism.
She can get this right — if she follows the old “broken windows” policing playbook, ignores far-left critics and puts communities’ concerns first.
In her remarks, Tisch gave a few hints as to how the new units will work.
Rather than engaging in “zero tolerance” enforcement, she said, the QOL officers will have discretion to prioritize real sources of disorder.
At the same time, their lodestar will be civilian complaints — not major-crime statistics.
In so doing, Tisch appears to be following the playbook of her mentor, former commissioner Bill Bratton, who brought broken windows policing to New York in the 1990s.
Bratton’s philosophy recognizes that individual cases of disorder are usually caused by some bigger problem. Such “problem-oriented policing” focuses on finding the source of the issue and addressing it, using whatever enforcement is necessary.
That can mean shutting down a particularly disruptive bar, clearing a tent encampment that’s generating drug deals, or dedicating a “burst” of police patrols and resources to a problem area for a limited time, until it becomes easy to police.
Such approaches helped clean up Bryant Park, the Port Authority area and Times Square in the 1990s. The “burst” strategy rid the streets of the city’s once-infamous squeegee men.
New York’s historic crime drop was thanks to Bratton’s big thinking.
A “problem-oriented” approach doesn’t mean being soft on crime. It means being smart and focusing police resources, giving cops the discretion to solve community problems.
Such plans have been consistently shown to reduce disorder and crime, and are in fact more effective than a “zero tolerance” approach, which targets every offense without a bigger strategy in mind.
Nonetheless, the new initiative will doubtless receive pushback from the usual anti-police radicals. They will call Tisch’s unit racist, abusive and illegal, and clamor for its defunding.
It’s those same arguments, and the policies they created, that caused New York’s disorder problem in the first place.
Sanctuary policies, pushed by the left, have created a migrant homelessness crisis, with over 50,000 still receiving shelter services as of January.
New York’s haphazard marijuana-legalization scheme covered the city with illegal pot shops and the stench of smoke.
Opposition to farebeating enforcement from progressive leaders sunk subway ridership and MTA revenues, and the repeal of a law banning loitering for purposes of prostitution, under the guise of helping trans people, drove the explosion of hooking on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.
New Yorkers want a better quality of life. Tisch needs to listen to them — not people who think shooting up in public and defecating on the subway are human rights.
If she backs down, the initiative will fail.
At the same time, she really does need to listen.
In her comments, Tisch spoke of “the people in our neighborhoods who are calling 311 and pleading for someone to come and help them.”
Public complaints — about smell, noise, drug use or camping — are the right metric for understanding disorder. Tisch has committed to developing a quality-of-life data system, like the COMPSTAT database the NYPD uses to track major crimes.
If it comes together, that would be an invaluable tool. But it must be public-facing, so citizens can review it and hold the new squad accountable.
Moreover, Tisch needs to supplement the data with community outreach.
Regular attendance at police-community meetings, she and her deputies will find, is one of the best ways to hear about what’s really straining city neighborhoods.
The NYPD has a real chance to correct a decade’s worth of quality-of-life neglect. But Tisch has to get it right.
Focus on running the Bratton playbook, ignoring progressive critics, and listening instead to everyday New Yorkers: If Tisch can do that, a grateful city will thank her.
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
