City Is Doubling Police Program to Reduce Crime

NEW YORK, NY — Every new police officer in New York City will be sent onto the streets of some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods as part of a broad anticrime operation that the authorities say has helped produce historic drops in crime, the city announced on Wednesday.

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Police officials and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that each of the 914 police recruits being sworn in on Thursday would join the program, Operation Impact. They also announced that crime in almost every major category declined again this year, with violence down in the schools and on the subways and with homicides on track to fall below 500 for the first time since reliable statistics became available 44 years ago.

Because some areas, mostly in Brooklyn, show stubbornly higher crime rates, they will get a bigger influx of Operation Impact officers, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. They include parts of Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York and Crown Heights.

Operation Impact, begun in 2003, matches new recruits with seasoned officers and supervisors to tackle crime spikes in narrowly drawn geographic areas. Coming at a time when the department is facing recruitment challenges, the new influx will double — to more than 1,800 — the number of officers assigned to those duties in a force that currently has 35,400 members.

“If you look at a map showing where crime is, it is clearly concentrated in a couple of areas, and the people that live in those areas have a right to live in a safe neighborhood just like those who are lucky enough to do so today,” Mayor Bloomberg said as he stood with Commissioner Kelly and a phalanx of police commanders inside the 28th Precinct station house in Harlem.

As of 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, 484 homicides had been recorded in New York City in 2007, Mr. Kelly said, 97 fewer than at the same time last year. Officials said the city was headed toward having fewer than 500 homicides this year, by far the lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963, when there were 548 killings.

Asked why the officials had gathered in Harlem, Mr. Kelly said that so far this year, there have been three homicides in the 28th Precinct, while “we had over 100 homicides here, consistently,” in years past.

Homicide, which is often viewed as a bellwether for larger trends in crime, was not the only type of violent crime to decrease.

Through Dec. 23, the latest date for which overall police statistics were available, crime had fallen by 6.3 percent compared with the same period in 2006, officials said. Rapes, robberies, burglaries, grand larcenies and auto thefts also declined, compared with last year. Only felony assaults increased, to 16,864 from 16,801, a 0.3 percent rise.

Officials said crime in the subway system fell by 13 percent compared with last year. In 1990, the officials said, 48 crimes were committed, on average, each day in the subway system, compared with a current average of 6. The decline occurred despite increasing numbers of riders and a Police Department that has nearly 2,500 fewer officers than was allowed for in the city budget.

Police officials said crime in the school system dropped 20 percent compared with last year.

Dennis C. Smith, a professor at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University and an author of an analysis of Operation Impact, hailed the new emphasis on the program as a “targeted use of scarce resources.” He said he had feared that city officials might curb the program because of a crisis in the recruitment of city police officer candidates.

“This is further validation of research that has been done around the country — on smaller, more temporary versions of this approach — that hot-spot policing really works,” Professor Smith said.

Homicides hit their peak in 1990, with 2,245. Mr. Bloomberg said on Wednesday that he hoped the declines would continue after he left office in two years. “I think Ray and I have one hope, and that is whoever succeeds us takes the numbers that we left and takes them down dramatically more,” the mayor said.

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that stamping out crime was “good and important.” But in doing so, she said, the Police Department could not engage in tactics that alienate the community and violate individual rights.

“We have concerns, of course, about the possibility, or indeed the likelihood, that flooding the streets that are identified as ‘high crime’ will result in a sharp escalation of suspicionless street stops and breed antagonism on both sides,” Ms. Lieberman said.

“If police come in there with a hostile attitude and the assumption that everyone on the street is suspicious because it is a so-called high-crime neighborhood, then that is an invitation for civil rights violations that breed hostility, mistrust and bad experiences all around, and certainly no guarantee of a good result in reducing crime in the long term.”

Since criminals can get a sense of police operations, police officials must continually change their tactics, said Thomas A. Reppetto, a police historian who monitors the city’s crime numbers.

“The police in New York have to continue to be two steps ahead of the criminals,” Mr. Reppetto said. “There is now a lot more pinpointed police activity, aimed at smaller locales. It used to be, 10 or 12 years ago, there was drug gangs on every corner and the police swept through a whole precinct. But now there are smaller pockets of crime, and that is what these impact areas are for, and the areas are constantly shifting.”

Of the 76 police precincts in New York, there were 6 that showed slight increases in overall crime, officials said. Of those, four were in Brooklyn — the 73rd, 77th, 79th and 84th Precincts; one in Queens, the 101st Precinct; and one on Staten Island, the 122nd Precinct.

In one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods, Brooklyn Heights, the increase was very small, 0.65 percent higher than last year, the police said. And homicides rose in only one of those precincts, the 73rd, reaching 28 compared with 22 last year, officials said.

Mr. Kelly said that overall shootings — the number of occurrences and the number of victims — were down compared with last year.

He said that the Operation Impact program was being changed: Rather than moving the roughly 900 officers currently in the program to precinct assignments — and replacing them with two-thirds of the recruits graduating from the Police Academy on Thursday — the existing officers will remain in the program and be joined by all 914 recruits, who will go to existing zones or to others being newly configured.

Mr. Kelly said that about one-third of the 1,800 officers in the program would be sent to central Brooklyn precincts: the 70th, 71st, 73rd, 75th, 77th and 79th. Also, 45 officers will be assigned to northern Brooklyn as Impact Response Team officers, a flexible component within Operation Impact where the borough commander has the option of using the officers as he sees fit.

In the Bronx, the 44th, 46th and 52nd Precincts will get Operation Impact officers. In northern Manhattan, the 32nd Precinct in Harlem will get them. In southern Manhattan, the Midtown North and Midtown South Precincts will get Operation Impact officers. In Queens, the 103rd, 110th and 115th Precincts will get additional officers in the program.

In addition, a housing police unit in Brooklyn will get an Impact Response Team. Police in the transit system will get a similar team of officers, known as an Impact Task Force. Staten Island will also get more overtime tours for the program.

Mr. Kelly said that if he had to identify one program “that has been the prime reason why crime has gone down in this city, at least in this administration, it has been Operation Impact.”

The program could have fallen victim to the continuing recruiting crisis, officials said. But a historical oddity in hiring numbers is allowing Operation Impact to continue and expand. There were about 800 officers hired in 1988, compared with 5,000 the previous year, and since about 81 percent of police officers retire after 20 years on the job, Mr. Kelly said, a large loss of officers was not expected to occur in the coming year.

“We’re going to give this a try, and we’ll monitor it very closely to see if in fact we have to take officers from Impact and put them into precincts,” the commissioner said. “We’ll monitor it literally on a daily basis.”

The authorized head count for the Police Department is 37,838 officers — which is what is allowed for in the city budget. But the department has not been able to meet that goal.

Several city officials have criticized the starting salary for officers in their first six months of employment — $25,100, which first went into effect for officers hired in January 2006 — as a reason for the current recruitment crisis.

The department is now authorized to hire 2,400 new officers, but as a result of the shortage of recruits, it says it will hire only 1,000 officers for the class that begins in January.