Neighborhood Policing Model Coming To Brooklyn Subways, City Says

BROOKLYN, NY — The city plans to bring their neighborhood policing model underground to subway lines in Brooklyn and The Bronx in an effort to drive down crime on the trains, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Thursday.

The initiative will assign the same officers to the same lines every day, riding the subways and patrolling stations, and shorten the distance of patrols in their transit districts, officials said. The city will also install posters on platforms with photos of the cops and station agents along with their email addresses.

"If you ride the subway you know you get to know a lot of your fellow riders, a lot of friendly faces," de Blasio said in the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station Thursday.

"It is so important that those friendly faces now include our officers, guaranteeing you that as that as that develops, there's going to be a flow of information that's going to make a huge difference."

Neighborhood policing, which the NYPD launched in 2015, encourages officers to meet with residents face-to-face to help improve relations between them and the community to help drive crime down. Officials have praised the model and expanded it to 63 precincts around the city.

In the subways, the NYPD will first roll out the model to Transit District 30 in Brooklyn — which covers stations along the 2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, B, D, Q, F, G and R lines — and District 12 in The Bronx, which covers the 2, 5 and 6 subways, the city said. The city plans to expand the model to the entire subway system by the beginning of next year.

And while New Yorkers tend to keep to themselves while riding the subways, officials said simply seeing the same officers on their way to work daily will give straphangers a person to reach out to when they have a problem on the trains.

"You see something, you now have an email to reach out to that cop, who you see as you come on," Chief of Department Terrance Monahan said. "It just gets you that familiarity with that cop."

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