Broken Windows Is Back: NYPD Targets Quality-Of-Life Offenses

NEW YORK CITY — New Yorkers soon will have to think twice before they relieve themselves in public after guzzling a sidewalk beer on the way to Washington Square Park to buy marijuana.

A crackdown on quality-of-life offenses is the NYPD's latest tactic to reduce a citywide spike in violent crimes and thefts, police officials announced Wednesday.

The plan could put New York City back into the "broken windows" era of the 1990s, when NYPD officers targeted minor offenses under the thinking that disorder led to serious crimes.

Indeed, the NYPD's announcement cited "disorder" as a result of rising quality-of-life complaints.

“We know from experience, as the weather gets warmer, that thirty-percent of all shooting incidents are preceded by multiple reports of other lawbreaking and violations leading up to that violence,” said Michael LiPetri, the NYPD's chief of crime control strategies, in a statement. “Engaging in proactive enforcement can be the difference that prevents that next shooting, and prevents the next child from being harmed.”

The initiative was preceded by a New York Post report that Mayor Eric Adams — a former police captain who worked during the "broken windows" era under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani — reamed NYPD brass behind closed doors over a weekend spate of shootings. Police officials left the meeting with a new target of anti-crime efforts: quality-of-life infractions.

An NYPD release argued that community complaints that could be precursors to violence include open-air selling of drugs, public drinking, public urination, dice game that lead to disputes and shootings and the dangers of unlicensed, unregistered or uninsured drivers on the city's crowded streets.

“These are the things that people are calling to complain about, and the NYPD owes them a response," said Kenneth Corey, the NYPD's chief of department, in a statement. "And while most encounters begin with a warning, when our officers see someone ignoring those warnings there will be enforcement."

Critics of "broken windows" policing tactics argue they're ineffective against reducing violent crime. And, worse, they disproportionately affect Black, Brown and low-income people who end up bearing the brunt of enforcement, critics contend.

Within an hour of NYPD officials announcing the new quality-of-life crackdown, attorneys at The Legal Aid Society lambasted the effort as a botched opportunity to address the root causes of crime: poverty and lack of robust services. The plan "will set our entire city back decades," said Jennvine Wong, an attorney with The Legal Aid Society's cop accountability project.

“Let’s be clear: this plan reinstates broken-windows policing, and it will undoubtedly send more Black and Latinx New Yorkers to Rikers Island, a facility that is wholly incapable of caring for the people in its custody," she said in a statement.

"Broken-windows policing has long been discredited for furthering mistrust between the police and the communities we serve, and this rebranded version will yield those same results, with the same disparate enforcement."

NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell, in a statement of her own, preemptively tried to quell fears.

“To be clear, this is NOT a return to Stop, Question, and Frisk – nor is it ‘policing for numbers,'" she said. "This enforcement will be responsive to community complaints and concerns, and will address the violent crime patterns officers and detectives are confronting. This is precision-policing aimed at reducing violence in the neighborhoods seeing disproportionate numbers of shootings – and it is what the public is demanding.”