Following a deadly shooting that left one person dead and seven people shot late Sunday night, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said Monday to put reform police politics aside and bring back the police department’s plainclothes anti-crime unit while taking the abundance of cops deployed in Midtown Manhattan and move them to the higher crime areas of the city.
Adams made his call at a press conference outside an apartment building on Albany Avenue near Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant where the shooting took place at a “sweet 16” afterparty. The gunplay, which took the life of a 20-year-old woman, started at a party hall in East New York that then moved and led to the multiple shootings in Bed-Stuy, police said.
“We cannot let politics get in the way. If you do an analysis let the police do their job. Urgencies must meet crises,” said Adams, a retired NYPD captain, noting shootings citywide have doubled and murder is up 37 percent for the year.
“We reinvent the former anti-crime unit as an anti-gun unit, using cops with the proper temperament/skills to clean up communities while maintaining good relations that help catch the bad guys,” he added.
The move to reinstate the anti-crime unit comes after the de Blasio administration disbanded the unit in June. The roughly 600-member unit targeted violent crime and took many guns off the street. At the same time, the unit often did many stop-and-frisks and have been involved in a number of police shootings.
The anti-crime teams worked out of all the NYPD’s 77 precincts and nine housing commands. Since they have been disbanded crime has soared, particularly in Brooklyn.
According to the latest police statistics issued on Friday, 153 or more than 30% of the city’s 405 reported murders thus far for the year have come out of Brooklyn; and 578 or the 1,359 reported shootings citywide have come from the borough.
Adams also called to civilianize areas of policing that don’t need to be staffed by cops, and take the money saved and put it directly into local anti-violence programs that work like the City’s Crisis Management System, which must be fully funded.
Adams also complimented Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez‘s recent takedown of a large gun-smuggling operation where guns from the southern part of the country are smuggled up to the streets of New York. There needs to be an even more coordinated effort to stop this “iron pipeline” from the south, he said.
