A new NYPD division focused on quality-of-life issues like illegal parking, noise complaints, and homeless encampments will begin work across New York City next week. Starting Monday, the new units, called “Q Teams,” will begin work in five precincts and a public housing development, covering neighborhoods like the South Bronx, Far Rockaway, Coney Island, Union Square, and East New York. Officers will respond to a growing number of 311 complaints, even as major crime declines. Some New Yorkers fear the units will unfairly target low-income communities, drawing comparisons to Giuliani-era street crime squads that harassed Black and Latino men, as the New York Times reported.
The quality-of-life units will be staffed by NYPD employees—like neighborhood coordination, youth coordination, and traffic safety officers—many of whom already have ties to the community, as reported by Gothamist.
Officers will be trained to handle issues like homeless encampments, panhandling, illegal parking, reckless driving, illicit drug use, and noise complaints. They’ll also receive instruction in using “Q-Stat,” a new system for analyzing and responding to 311 calls more efficiently. The system tracks quality-of-life issues the same way that CompStat, the NYPD’s crime database, tracks criminal complaints.
Every month, the NYPD will hold Q-stat meetings to identify areas across the five boroughs where quality-of-life issues persist. The unit will be led by Deputy Chief William Glynn, who previously headed a multi-agency effort to address crime and disorder along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.
The program will begin with a pilot phase, with plans to eventually expand to cover the entire city. That effort will require the reorganization of roughly 2,000 NYPD staff, according to the New York Times.
Announced by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch during a Thursday news conference, the program is not a “dragnet” or part of a “zero tolerance” approach, but rather a response to New Yorkers’ concerns about safety, as reported by the Times.
It also overhauls the NYPD’s approach to issues like illegal street vending, homeless encampments, public urination, and other minor crimes, as foreshadowed in the commissioner’s first “State of the NYPD” address in January.
“Today—and this may sound strange coming from the police commissioner—is not about crime,” Tisch said, according to the Times. “Today is about improving the quality of life for everyday New Yorkers in their neighborhoods, on their blocks and at their front doors.”
However, many New Yorkers fear the plan will revive the “broken windows” theory—championed by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the 1990s—which led to the disproportionate targeting of Black and Latino men.
“There’s never been a study that proves that broken windows policing or quality-of-life policing is effective in reducing crime,” Robert Gangi, the founder of the Police Reform Organizing Project, a watchdog organization, told the Times. “The quality-of-life policing, one way or another, ends up targeting low-income people of color.”
Tisch addressed the criticism directly, calling the comparison “a complete mischaracterization,” and further labeling the plan as “a different policy for a different purpose.” Additionally, she said that the new officers would not have quotas to meet and that they would be free to decide how to best respond to complaints.
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