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<font size="1"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/16/nypd-anti-crime-unit/">https://theintercept.com/2020/06/16/nypd-anti-crime-unit/</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Disbanding Notorious NYPD Anti-Crime Unit Is a “Shell Game,” Critics Say</h1>
<div class="gmail-PostByline-names"><a class="gmail-PostByline-link" rel="author" href="https://theintercept.com/staff/alicesperi/"><span>Alice Speri</span></a>, <a class="gmail-PostByline-link" rel="author" href="https://theintercept.com/staff/ryan-devereaux/"><span>Ryan Devereaux</span></a><span class="gmail-PostByline-date"><span> - June 16 2020</span></span>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-line-height4 gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>Facing massive ongoing</u>
protests against police brutality, the New York City Police Department
announced on Monday that it is disbanding a hyperaggressive and
notoriously trigger-happy plainclothes unit.</p>
<p>A majority of the roughly 600 officers in the department’s
“anti-crime” units would be immediately moved to other assignments, NYPD
Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said in a <a href="https://www.pscp.tv/w/1dRJZZBvBZNJB">press conference</a>,
though a portion would continue to patrol the city’s subways. The
reassigned officers will take up positions in the detective’s bureau and
the department’s community policing efforts, Shea said, as the NYPD
replaced its prior emphasis on “brute force” with an embrace of
intelligence and technology-driven policing.</p>
<p>“This is a seismic shift in the culture of how the NYPD polices this
great city,” Shea told reporters. “It will be felt immediately in the
communities that we protect.”</p>
<p>But it was hardly the first time the NYPD had promised change, and
the announcement was met with a great deal of skepticism by advocates
wary of empty talk of reform. Monifa Bandele, vice president of criminal
justice campaigns at MomsRising and a member of the policy leadership
team for the Movement for Black Lives, called the move a “shell game”
and a “distraction,” aimed at diverting New Yorkers’ attention from
growing calls to <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/05/22/la-budget-nyc-police/">defund the NYPD</a>.</p>
<p>“It’s moving around resources and actual police officers, shuffling
them around within the department to make it look like what we’re asking
for, but we’re actually calling for a much larger systemic shift,”
Bandele told The Intercept. “We’re not talking about shuffling resources
and people within the police department. We’re talking about moving
around resources within the citywide budget in a way that makes our
communities safer. That means actually moving money out of the NYPD
budget, and moving those resources into education, housing, mental
health services, homelessness services.”</p>
<p>“Internal personnel changes don’t really address the fact that our communities are over-policed and under-resourced.”</p>
<p>Albert Cahn, director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, called the move to disband the unit “a publicity stunt.”</p>
<p>“They tried this same tactic before,” Cahn told The Intercept. “It’s
simply an easy way for them to take a page out of the NYPD PR handbook
and avoid real structural reform. And if these officers are simply
doubling down on the NYPD bias and broken surveillance of communities of
color, it’s going to result in more police violence.”</p>
<p>“I’ve seen this cycle play out before, where you have outrage and
then the NYPD claims it will fix it,” he added. “And then they do a mild
change.”</p>
<p>Indeed, while the disbanding no doubt reflected the immense pressure
that more than two weeks of sustained protests have had on the
decision-making of even the largest police department in the country,
the move was also infused with a bit of déjà vu.</p></div><div><p>The
modern anti-crime units in New York City were born in a similar period
of unrest more than two decades ago. On a winter night in February 1999,
four plainclothes NYPD officers roaming the south Bronx spotted a
22-year-old man stepping out of his apartment. The man’s name was Amadou
Diallo: He was a West African immigrant who sold socks and gloves in
Manhattan to make money for his family back home. The officers would
later claim that Diallo made “furtive gestures.” They opened up on him,
firing 41 shots, 19 of which hit their target.</p>
<p>Diallo’s killing was a critical moment in New York City policing
history. In the aftermath, there were protests and litigation —
including a lawsuit that, 14 years later, would find that the NYPD had
engaged in a widespread pattern of racial profiling and give the current
mayor an issue on which to propel himself to office. At the center of
the civil turmoil was the supposedly elite police crew behind the
shooting: the Street Crimes Unit.</p>
<h3>Reform From Within</h3>
<p>The plainclothes cops were the rough face of a new form of
numbers-driven policing, supported by the latest in law enforcement
technology and undergirded by an increasingly fashionable theory of
policing called “broken windows.” A <a href="https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/bp56.pdf">2000 report</a>
by the Cato Institute described the culture of the unit as
“militaristic,” with officers talking of “retaking neighborhoods.”
Members even designed T-shirts to represent their clique. Borrowing a
line from Hemingway, they read: “Certainly there is no hunting like the
hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and
liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”</p>
<p>In 2002, with the Street Crimes Unit tied up in litigation stemming
from the Diallo killing, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly announced that the
officers would be rolled into newly emerging, borough-wide units that, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/10/nyregion/police-commissioner-closing-controversial-street-crime-unit.html">according to the New York Times</a>
would, “perform much the same function as the Street Crime Unit,
patrolling in unmarked cars looking for criminals.” The name of the new
units was anti-crime.</p>
<p>More than a decade and a half later, the NYPD is now saying that
anti-crime, too, has got to go. In the press conference announcing the
decision, Shea praised the “thoughtful discussions about reform” that
emerged from two weeks of protests. The commissioner went on to
highlight a number of bills passed at the state and local levels.</p>
<p>“The truth is that most of these bills will not have significant
impact on day-to-day operations of the NYPD — I say this because most of
what is codified in these bills was already being practiced by policies
and procedures of the NYPD,” Shea claimed. “We welcome reform, but we
also believe that meaningful reform starts from within.”</p>
<p>It was hardly the first time a police commissioner had promised the
department would reform from within. In 2016, two-time NYPD Commissioner
William Bratton, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/retiring-nypd-commissioner-william-bratton-claims-police-will-reform-from-within-why-havent-they/">argued on his last day</a> before retirement that police reform couldn’t be legislated and that only police could change themselves.</p>
<p>“There are police reformers from outside the profession who think
that changing police culture is a matter of passing regulations,
establishing oversight bodies and more or less legislating a new order,”
Bratton wrote in an op-ed then. “It is not. Such oversight usually has
only marginal impact. What changes police culture is leadership from
within.”</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>Those
who have been calling for radical changes to policing for years warn
that what the NYPD is calling a seismic shift may in fact be a
distraction to appease the protesters before returning to the old status
quo under a new name.</p></blockquote><div><p>And as Shea is doing now, Bratton’s successor, James O’Neill, promised a new era of “<a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/08/11/new-nypd-commissioners-focus-on-community-policing-is-a-distraction-not-a-solution/">community policing</a>”
in New York City. Before being appointed commissioner, O’Neill had
spearheaded the city’s Neighborhood Coordination Program, New York’s
version of a nationwide push toward what proponents had promised would
be a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/defund-the-police-joe-biden-cops/">gentler, friendlier</a>
police presence. The pivot towards community policing, aided by
significant federal investment in local departments, came as the Obama
administration’s response to the protests that from Ferguson, Missouri,
spread across the country starting in 2014.</p>
<p>In New York City, despite little evidence it had done anything to
improve police-community relations, O’Neill’s neighborhood policing
initiative was replicated across precincts, and earlier this year, Shea
announced <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/02/13/new-york-city-schools-gang-law-enforcement/">a new youth-focused police initiative</a>
modeled after the Neighborhood Coordination Program. Earlier this
month, before capitulating to protesters’ demands that the city cut the
NYPD’s budget, Mayor Bill de Blasio again touted community policing as
the reason why the NYPD’s resources couldn’t be cut. “I do not believe
it is a good idea to reduce the budget of the agency that is here to
keep us safe and the agency that is instituting neighborhood policing,”
said the mayor, calling the initiative a “game-changer” and the “future
of policing.”</p></div><div><div><p><a href="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/06/edit_GettyImages-1216620885.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90"><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/06/edit_GettyImages-1216620885.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=684" alt="NEW YORK, NY - MAY 31: An plainclothes police officer detains and then releases a person alleged to have vandalized a store on May 31, 2020 in New York City. Major cities across the United States have seen increased protests against police brutality and civil unrest since the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="451" height="301"></a></p><p class="gmail-caption">An
plainclothes police officer detains and then releases a person alleged
to have vandalized a store on May 31, 2020 in New York City.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images</p></div></div><div><p>But
the NYPD had plenty of opportunity to show that community policing
works, or that, as Bratton and Shea have both claimed, police can reform
from within. The latest protests, in New York as elsewhere, are yet
more <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/george-floyd-minneapolis-police-reform/">evidence of the failures of police reform</a>
— but those who have been calling for radical changes to policing for
years warn that what the NYPD is calling a seismic shift may in fact be a
distraction to appease the protesters before returning to the old
status quo under a new name.</p>
<p>Community policing, they say, is particularly insidious because of
the false image it evokes. “It’s a word that they’ve clearly polled and
workshopped,” said Bandela. “So by calling it community policing,
they’re basically pitching an idea to people that feels good and sounds
good. But what we know, in essence, is that it is just the continued
over policing of our community.”</p>
<p>Assigning police to community outreach work, she added, “continues to broaden the job description of police officers.”</p>
<p>“There are people for whom, that’s their passion, they went to school
for that, they dreamed of being that their whole lives,” she said. “We
should resource them… Continuing to adjust police officers’ job
description to justify their excessive budget has to stop.”</p>
<p>Instead, advocates say, reform should happen at the budgetary and
legislative levels. Since the protests started, New York state
legislators passed two major bills that had been on the table for years:
one banning chokeholds and the other repealing a law, known as 50-a,
that has long protected officers accused of misconduct from public
scrutiny. This week, legislators are expected to vote in favor of the
Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, or POST Act, another
piece of legislation that advocates for greater police transparency have
lobbied in favor of for more than three years.</p>
<p>“Right now we have more state and local policing reform legislation
posed to pass in New York City and New York state than in the past
decade combined,” said Cahn. “I think lawmakers know that it’s not a
matter of whether they can take on NYPD, it’s that they have to take on
the NYPD if they want to keep their jobs.”</p>
<h3>21st Century Policing</h3>
<p>In 2018, an <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/05/09/saheed-vassell-nypd-plain-clothes/">investigation by The Intercept</a>
found that the anti-crime officers Shea is now assigning to detective
work and community policing shot people to death at a considerably
higher rate than their colleagues. Analyzing data from the Fatal
Encounters project, the investigation found that despite their
relatively small numbers, plainclothes NYPD cops were involved in nearly
a third of the city’s lethal police shootings recorded in the nearly
two decades after Diallo was killed.</p>
<p>“I think we can do better,” the commissioner told reporters, noting
anti-crime’s “disproportionate” representation in shootings and civilian
complaints. “I think policing in 2020 is not what it was five, 10, or
15 years ago,” Shea said, adding that he began reviewing the unit’s
impact on communities last year. “It was always in the back of my mind.”</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>Anti-crime
units are self-directed, meaning that they spend much of their time
prowling neighbors in unmarked cars looking for “activity” to respond
to.</p></blockquote><div><p>Unlike uniformed patrol
officers, whose work is largely dictated by 911 calls that come over the
radio, anti-crime units are self-directed, meaning that they spend much
of their time prowling neighbors in unmarked cars looking for
“activity” to respond to. The units are plainclothes but not undercover —
while they are not dressed in NYPD blue, they are not in disguise
either. Like the Street Crimes Unit of the 1990s, anti-crime units have
been known to wear civilian gear — <a href="https://twitter.com/_elkue/status/1272630598146932739">T-shirts, patches</a>
— that mark their allegiance to a militarized strain of modern American
law enforcement. When anti-crime officers gunned down Saheed Vassell in
Brookyln in the spring of 2018, for example, one of the officers
involved was seen wearing a Punisher T-shirt — the comic book
vigilante’s logo is one of the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/06/police-brutality-protests-blue-lives-matter/">most popular symbols</a> of warrior-style policing.</p>
<p>The Vassell killing was one of several high-profile incidents
anti-crime officers have been linked to in recent years. In 2013,
anti-crime officers in the hyperpoliced neighborhood of Flatbush shot
16-year-old Kimani Gray to death as his friends and neighbors watched,
sparking days of protests. The police claimed that the teen had a gun.
Eyewitnesses said Gray was <a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2013/03/13/eyewitness-certain-kimani-gray-was-unarmed-when-police-shot-him/">empty-handed and begging for his life</a>
when he was killed. During a historic federal trial later that year,
challenging the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices, anti-crime officers
were often <a href="https://ccrjustice.org/files/Floyd-Liability-Opinion-8-12-13.pdf">linked</a> to some of the department’s most egregiously unconstitutional policing. The following summer, <a href="https://www.wnyc.org/story/face-broken-windows/">anti-crime Officer Daniel Pantelo</a> choked an unarmed Eric Garner to death in Staten Island, sparking another round of protests.</p></div><div><div><p><a href="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/06/editGettyImages-942471628.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90"><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/06/editGettyImages-942471628.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=683" alt="NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 5: Mourners embrace as they arrive before a rally in protest of the police-involved shooting death of Saheed Vassell, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, April 5, 2018 in New York City. Saheed Vassell, 34, was killed by police officers on Wednesday afternoon in Crown Heights. He was unarmed but was reportedly acting erratic and wielding a curved silver pipe that witnesses thought could have been a gun. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="451" height="301"></a></p><p class="gmail-caption">Mourners
embrace as they arrive before a rally in protest of the police-involved
shooting death of Saheed Vassell, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of
Brooklyn, April 5, 2018 in New York City.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images</p></div></div><div><p>The
NYPD is seeking to distance itself from this violent legacy, Shea said.
“This is 21st century policing,” the commissioner explained.
“Intelligence, data, ShotSpotter, video, DNA, and building prosecutable
cases.” Shea added that, in his view, the decision to disband anti-crime
marked a “closing of one of the last chapters of stop, question, and
frisk.”</p>
<p>“I think it’s time to move forward and change how we police in this
city,” the commissioner said. “We can do it with brains, we can do it
with guile, we can move away from brute force.”</p>
<p>Shea added that plainclothes units will continue to serve in the
department for the purposes of surveillance, drug enforcement, “or
things of that nature.”</p>
<p>But the NYPD’s announcement that former anti-crime unit members would
shift toward intelligence and technology-driven policing was a red
flag, advocates noted.</p></div><div><p>That shift
has been underway for years as, mostly in response to the ruling that
found stop-and-frisk to be unconstitutional, the NYPD largely moved from
arbitrarily stopping New Yorkers in mostly black and Latino communities
toward surveilling those same communities under the guise of anti-gang
policing. Starting in 2012, with the launch of the anti-gang “Operation
Crew Cut,” the NYPD started devoting large resources to track the social
media activities of many of the same people officers used to stop and
frisk in the past. As The Intercept has previously reported, the
surveillance effort led to <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/07/12/in-new-york-gang-sweeps-prosecutors-use-conspiracy-laws-to-score-easy-convictions/">a series</a> of <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/04/25/bronx-120-report-mass-gang-prosecution-rico/">mass raids</a>
and indictments that caught up dozens of young people based largely on
those they interacted with online and off. It also led to the severe
expansion of a secretive <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/06/11/new-york-gang-database-expanded-by-70-percent-under-mayor-bill-de-blasio/">“gang” database</a>
maintained by the NYPD, which as of 2018 included some 42,000 people,
based on a set of arbitrary criteria and often in the absence of
criminality.</p>
<p>Much of what the NYPD does as part of what it calls “intelligence and
technology-driven policing” is shielded from public scrutiny, noted
Cahn, who added that the expected passage of the POST Act should shed
some light on those practices.</p>
<p>“We have absolutely no idea how intelligence resources are being
allocated because they’re able to circumvent public oversight and
purchase many of these systems with private and federal funds, and not
even tell the city council what sorts of systems they’re using,” he
said. “I’m terrified that this will mean more reliance on facial
recognition, more reliance on ShotSpotter, more reliance on the
so-called gang database, which was explicitly built out as a digital
version of stop-and-frisk.”</p>
<p>And the prospect of more surveillance-based policing, with little
public accountability, was particularly worrisome at a time when the
NYPD faced some of the greatest challenges to its legitimacy as tens of
thousands of New Yorkers took to the street to protest them for more
than two weeks.</p>
<p>“We’re absolutely terrified that we’re going to see people going into
NYPD databases for years,” said Cahn, “simply because they exercised
their First Amendment right to protest.”</p></div></div></div></div>
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