The New York Police Department over the last 12 years has made extraordinary progress in
reducing crime in New York. It started 20, 25 years ago with an idea called CompStat which
was the idea that turn all the data that we have about crime transparent, let us see in
infinite detail where it's happening, who's doing it, gives us the opportunity to then
manage crime control very precisely and very effectively and move our resources where crime
was and, in effect, bring it down in extraordinary ways. But what we also saw was that over these
last 12 years the move to crime control cost the New York Police Department citizen support.
It cost the New York Police Department the support of citizens for an incredibly important
mission which was crime control. We know that it's possible to have great crime control
and strong citizen support. And we know that it's possible as well to truly engage police
officers in that work.
When you have those three things moving together and when you keep your eye not only on citizen
support and workforce engagement and crime control but finally then on outcomes for neighborhoods,
and we see, we measure our success by whether people are playing in parks, whether kids
can walk to school safely. Then we'll have success in a way that we've never had before.
We've lost a large segment of New Yorkers. We know that we can get them back and we need
to. And we need in order to do that we'll be successful with crime control when we are
able to mobilize all segments of New York in support of it. If we can't then we're not
going to have the information that we need. We're not going to have the support that we
need. Today's witness won't come forward tomorrow if they don't see the results.
So we're in a new world today where some of the traditional tools of law enforcement have
been taken away from the New York Police Department by the courts. Stop and frisk. And we see
the effect on the street corners. And public housing trespass laws have been a very effective
tool for law enforcement because we don't need to ask permission. We are the agents
of the public housing . We can use trespass summonses for that kind of control. Even marijuana
stops have been a way of control. Those three important control tools are now changing for
the New York Police Department and we have to find new ways to assure safety and security
for our citizens. To do that we will need to engage and to do that we will need to understand
far better than we do the sources of citizen support and to see far better than we ever
have before crime as it begins to emerge.
We know now that in some of the hardest pressed precincts and boroughs of New York that crews,
small groups of kids, teenagers, have come together, you know, hundreds of crews that
are responsible for a great deal of the gun violence in New York. By hearing them speak,
watching them speak, looking at them on social media we understand who is doing a lot of
the -- who is causing a lot of the damage in the city and we've been able to address
that not by hammering entire communities but by precision targeting these young people.
Not all of them are bad boys and bad girls. A lot of them are good kids just getting mixed
up with bad stuff. And instead of hammering whole communities begin to work very surgically.
That's the future of policing in New York. It's a future that's data driven that looks
for the support of communities by building up our contacts and our engagement. By social
media. By using social media also to understand the ebb and flow of crime and disorder in
communities. Using it appropriately and safely. This is the new wave of policing in New York.
It's the next generation where we measure our success not simply by CompStat crime control
numbers but by crime control plus citizen support plus workforce engagement plus neighborhood
outcomes. And we're now able to measure all of those in ways that we never have before
and we plan to so that as we achieve crime control we lift support and we lift workforce
engagement and we achieve great results for neighborhoods. That's really our goal and
I think what we can do next.