A Policing Playbook for Gotham’s Next Mayor

As the mayoral election approaches, New York City finds itself at an odd juncture. After several years of rising crime, New Yorkers have recently seen meaningful progress on public safety, especially with respect to homicides and shootings. Despite these real gains, many city residents see the new peace as fragile.

One reason why is that the city’s crime wave ended only recently, after 2023. Another is that New Yorkers still see signs of persistent disorder—public drug use, flagrant prostitution, and seriously mentally ill vagrants—throughout the city. Then you have the cases of sporadic violence, like the mass shooting at 345 Park Avenue, which remind the city of the stakes of its public-safety debate.

If the next mayor wants to enhance public safety, he will need to manage wisely the city’s most important agency: the NYPD. To do that, he must handle three challenges: ensure that the department is adequately staffed; boost the rank-and-file’s morale by showing he is a partner to officers; and deliver measurable wins on serious crime, while remaining responsive to New Yorkers’ concerns about disorder and quality-of-life issues.

Start with recruitment and retention. The NYPD, with about 33,000 uniformed personnel, is significantly understaffed. While that may not sound right to some, given that it is still the nation’s largest police department, consider that the NYPD at the turn of the century had more than 40,000 uniformed officers. Today, it’s handling more work with fewer officers, stretching the department thin. In 2015, for example, the NYPD fielded approximately 4.5 million service calls with over 35,000 cops. In 2023, the department fielded approximately 6.8 million calls with fewer than 34,000 uniformed members.

The next mayor needs to hire more cops. He also needs to ensure the department attracts quality candidates by implementing stringent educational and physical fitness standards. One way to do this is to offer certain highly qualified, well-educated, and psychologically stable recruits a clearer and more-streamlined career path.

Some mayoral candidates might be tempted to address the NYPD’s staffing problem by shrinking the department’s footprint and restricting the scope of its work. In other words, instead of hiring more police officers to meet New Yorkers’ demand for their services, these candidates might propose reducing demand by removing certain responsibilities from the NYPD’s purview, moving them to civilian agencies instead.

This is the wrong approach for several reasons. One is that it communicates hostility to the NYPD and its mission. Another is that there are no viable alternatives to having the police handle things like traffic enforcement and emotionally disturbed persons (EDP) calls. The city can, of course, keep using automated camera enforcement of speed limits and traffic lights, but those cameras won’t discover the illegal firearms and other contraband that cops consistently find during interactions that begin as traffic stops.

While the city can also experiment with mental-health responder models like Eugene, Oregon’s oft-touted CAHOOTS program, New York does not have nearly enough qualified mental-health professionals willing to accept government salaries to be on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week—one reason why CAHOOTS responders handle only a small share of Eugene’s EDP calls. Another reason the mental-health-responder model isn’t scalable is the inherent difficulty that dispatchers face in identifying which calls require a police response. According to a 2021 study, “About 20% of activity in this area does not appear predictable from the initial call type as handled by police dispatch,” in part because “events eventually determined to be police/crime activity can initially appear to be public health related.”

Hiring officers to keep up with the demand for police services is only part of the next mayor’s public-safety challenge. For the NYPD to reach its full potential, the mayor needs to cultivate high officer morale.

The first step in achieving that will be retaining Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. After three tumultuous years with three different commissioners—one leaving under the cloud of a corruption investigation—the NYPD seems finally to have a leader with the acumen to run a large organization and a data-driven crime-fighting vision. Tisch’s most important achievement, other than presiding over meaningful declines in serious violence, has been to support rank-and-file officers by pushing back on misguided criminal-justice reforms.

Surveys of cops consistently show that officers want to serve their communities by fighting crime, and that having the mayor on their side enhances morale. The next mayor should think long and hard about how to signal support for the kind of aggressive crime-fighting posture that restored New York after the darkest days of the early 1990s.

Finally, the next mayor’s public-safety legacy will hinge on whether he can preside over reductions in crime and address voters’ concerns about quality-of-life issues, such as public drug use, aggressive panhandling, and mopeds and e-bikes speeding down sidewalks. Politicians for too long have abandoned the idea of Broken Windows policing, missing the theory’s most profound insights: that the perception of safety in public spaces is driven by the orderliness of those spaces; and that enforcing public order offenses gives officers the probable cause they need to initiate interactions that often reveal more significant criminal conduct.

New Yorkers should be able to enjoy every inch of their city. That means the city’s leadership must not surrender public spaces to anti-social forces. Suppressing major crime is obviously crucial, but city residents want and deserve the kind of order that the NYPD—if adequately staffed and properly motivated—can deliver. The question for the city’s next mayor is: Can you deliver for the NYPD?

Top Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images