NYPD brass crowed Friday that they are continuing to reshuffle desk officers to where crime is spiking — as Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell glossed over the city’s disturbing jump in most major crimes.
In the department’s first crime-statistics briefing to the press in three months, Chief of Department Kenneth Corey did not provide specifics on what exactly the officers would be doing and only named the 109th Precinct in Queens as a targeted command, which has seen the highest year-over-year crime spike in the city at 81%.
The precinct, which covers Whitestone and Flushing, has seen large jumps in grand larceny and non-violent petty thefts, NYPD data show.
A spike in grand larcenies and burglaries is fueling the movement of the reinforcements, officials said.
“We take that supplemental deployment, those 650 officers that we deploy every day from non-enforcement functions that we have been putting out since February, and we are going to start to shift some of those into the areas where we see other crimes spiking,” Corey told reporters.
“We deploy it when we need it and where we need it,” he said of the reinforcements, who were yanked from their desk jobs last winter to hit the streets amid a crime surge.
“We are initially targeting 20 commands that are driving a large majority of the increasing crime,” Corey said. “Many of these commands are very different from the places where we saw violence spiking.”
The NYPD’s public-information office, when asked for specifics later by The Post, sent a list of the commands that would be targeted and said, “The numbers of officers in any area will vary depending on crime trends and crime analysis – sometimes even within the same twenty-four-hour period.
“Additionally, the plan calls for officers who graduate from the Police Academy on October 17th to be assigned to foot patrol in every precinct,” a spokesperson said in an e-mail.
The press conference, which had been planned for more than a week, abruptly ended in the middle of Chief of Detectives James Essig’s briefing so that Sewell could attend an undisclosed engagement scheduled for noon.
She only took a handful of questions before leaving with other NYPD executives.
In Sewell’s opening remarks, she celebrated a 13% citywide decrease in shootings in September compared to the same month last year – a feat experts previously told The Post would be hard to accomplish – but appeared to shrug off the spike in overall crime as she blamed the rise on grand larcenies and scams.
“Nearly 40% of all major crime in New York City is grand larcenies. Part of this is attributable to the Internet and phone-based scams,” Sewell said, before touting a new hot line the department set up to field questions about scams.
Compared to last September, burglaries, grand larceny, grand-theft auto, robbery and rape in the city all shot up last month, leading to a 15.2% increase in major crime, department data show.
Burglaries were up 22.7%, vehicle thefts jumped 21.5%, grand larcenies went up by 21.3% and rapes increased by 10.7% last month compared to September 2021, data show.
Corey said a class of about 700 rookies set to graduate the Police Academy over the next couple of weeks also will be deployed to highly-visible shopping areas throughout the city to “enforce the law and address quality-of-life conditions.”
“So think Fordham Road in The Bronx, think Broadway in Manhattan, think 86th street in Brooklyn, Jamaica Avenue in Queens, New Dorp Lane in Staten Island and so on,” Corey said.
The newly minted cops will be in the areas from 7 a.m. to midnight, and when stores close in the evenings, the officers will be shifted to busy bar and restaurant areas, he said.
