Controversial Plainclothes NYPD Unit Coming To Astoria

ASTORIA, QUEENS — Controversial plainclothes police units will be revived and deployed to Astoria under Mayor Eric Adams' sweeping plan to fight gun violence, the NYPD said Tuesday.

Astoria's 114th precinct is among the 30 New York City commands that will get the civilian-dressed anti-crime units, which were previously disbanded under Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2020 amid a reckoning with police brutality.

Adams said Monday that the so-called "Neighborhood Safety Teams" will focus on 30 precincts that account for 80 percent of the city's gun violence. The list was first reported by the New York Post and confirmed by an NYPD spokesperson Tuesday afternoon.

The plan has already drawn criticism from advocates who point to the unit's history of excessive force, which has been disproportionally leveled against New Yorkers of color. (The southeast Queens neighborhoods where most of the anti-crime units will be reinstated in the borough are overwhelmingly populated by people of color, according to census data.)

Adams contended Monday that changes to the anti-crime units will help address issues from the past, including having them wear more identifiable clothing, though they will still be in unmarked police cars.

That did not sway a coalition of legal-aid groups, which released a joint statement saying Adams's announcement "gives the community members who live with the legacy of hyper-aggressive policing no comfort that Mayor Adams's Anti-Crime Unit will be different from its predecessors."

"The Mayor must focus on addressing long standing problems with NYPD's culture of impunity before he doubles down on strategies that will only perpetuate the harms of that culture," reads the statement, whose signers included The Legal Aid Society and Queens Defenders.

The mayor, however, said that it is important to ensure that the "right" officers are chosen for the job (which used to be widely seen as a stepping stone to more senior NYPD roles). He also pledged that the unit will use body cameras.

"You must have the right training the right mindset, the right disposition and be... emotionally intelligent that you are getting ready to engage with someone on the street," he said.

Astoria's City Council Member Tiffany Cabán also spoke out against the unit this week, in a statement that she issued in response to Adams' address on gun violence.

In addition to pushing back against the mayor's plans to send teenagers caught with guns to criminal court (instead of family court) and enforce stricter pre-trial detention rules, Cabán called his move to reinstate the plainclothes unit "particularly troubling."

"The plainclothes unit has a terrible record of increased violence," she said, pointing to the city's fatal police shootings, a third of which were committed by plainclothes officers since 2000, she said.

"Lawsuits against the NYPD for such misconduct have cost the city millions upon millions of dollars," she said, instead urging the mayor to invest more in the city's mediation-based Crisis Management System, which she said has reduced shootings by 80 percent.

As of Tuesday, there are more than 400 cops "in the pipeline" to join the new plainclothes teams (slightly short of the 600 that were reassigned in 2020) which Adams said will be put in place in about three weeks.