Mayor Eric Adams vowed Tuesday that the new plainclothes NYPD unit tasked with wiping out gun violence will be a fresh start — and nothing like the department’s notorious anti-crime unit of the past.
“We are going to learn from the past so we don’t repeat the past, and we will never use, under my administration, any abusive targeted tactics that goes after people based on their ethnicity and where they live,” Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” — a day after rolling out his plan to curb violence in the city.
“That is not going to happen under my administration.”
Former Police Commissioner Dermot Shea in mid-2020 disbanded the 600-person, undercover anti-crime unit, saying its officers were behind a “disproportionate” amount of “complaints and shootings” compared to the rest of the force.
But in his series of TV and radio interviews Tuesday morning, Adams promised that the new unit — dubbed “Neighborhood Safety Teams” — will serve as “real guardrails” in preventing police misconduct.
He said the officers would be required to turn on their body cameras while interacting with the public and wear apparel, like windbreakers, that make them easily identifiable as cops.
“Too many officers were turning off their cameras when they had interactions with civilians — that is not happening anymore,” Adams said on MSNBC, while promising more training and discipline, where needed.
Later, on 1010 WINS, the former NYPD captain doubled down: “We are not going to have tactics used in this city that will be abusive to any New Yorker in general, specifically to black and brown men.
“This is going to be a unit that is going to zero in on guns and gangs and violence,” he said.
The police department will start with adding the teams to the 30 police precincts where 80 percent of the city’s violence takes place. The teams will be deployed to the 20 most dangerous neighborhoods over the next three weeks, Adams announced Monday.
During his mayoral campaign, Adams promised to bring back the NYPD’s dissolved undercover unit.
Since he was sworn in as mayor on Jan. 1, five NYPD cops have been shot, a baby girl was shot in the face, a mentally ill man killed a woman by shoving her in front of an oncoming subway train and a teenager was gunned down in cold blood while working at a Manhattan Burger King.
The most recent deadly incident came Friday evening, when rookie Officer Jason Rivera, 22, was shot dead while responding to a domestic violence call in Harlem.
Rivera’s partner, Wilbert Mora, 27, was also critically wounded when Lashawn McNeil, 47, allegedly opened fire on the pair of officers.
Last week, Adams, a former transit cop, admitted that he often doesn’t feel safe riding the subway.
