NYPD Officials: New Tactics Slashing Murder Rate

Feb. 25, 2013
Strategies targeting youth gangs and domestic violence have been credited with the continuing decline.

The city’s murder rate, which hit an all-time low last year, continues to plummet thanks to creative new police strategies that target youth gangs and spouse beaters.

The innovative tactics helped send the city’s homicide numbers tumbling to a record-low 414 murders in 2012 and they’re down another 33 percent so far this year, police said.

One novel approach involves charging teen gang members with conspiracy, using taunts and threats they post on social-media sites to build mafia-style cases against them.

These small crews of trigger-happy thugs are responsible for 30 percent of all the shootings in the city, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told The Post.

“For the last couple years, we’ve seen the emergence of younger males committing crimes in small geographic areas — turf,” he said.

“My idea, the Crew Cut concept, focuses on this directly, and we’re addressing it with the gang unit, patrol and SNU [street narcotics units] in the precincts that need it most in each borough,” he said.

The new units — dubbed SETs for Strategy Enforcement Teams — operate in eight precincts in all five boroughs.

Kelly also revealed he’s doubling the gang division’s strength, from 150 to 300 officers.

“In each initiative, the teams help us monitor social media and we gather information we can use on these groups.”

“We think that it’s working. We started in October, and it’s paying dividends now.”

The program scored a major success in Brownsville Brooklyn’s 73rd Precinct, where commander Joseph Gulota had his SET team pore over tweets and Facebook posts from the area’s known street gangs.

The information was handed off to prosecutors, who used the conspiracy rap to nail dozens of gangbangers in sweeps akin to the big Mafia takedowns.

“They were locking up 40 to 50 people at once,” said one police supervisor.

Direct quotes from thugs provided a new way in.

“If you have a victim who is assaulted, they won’t talk to police,” said the source. “But when gang members threaten each other on Facebook, that’s enough to get a conspiracy charge.”

Cops also set up special units in each precinct to crack down on domestic-violence incidents, helping pre-empt murders by abusive husbands and boyfriends. “They revamped how they’re going after these misdemeanors,” an NYPD insider said. “Now you have a sergeant and four or five officers in domestic-violence units.”

“A lot of that stuff fell through the cracks,” said one NYPD insider, noting that overwhelmed detectives simply didn’t have the time to round up every abusive spouse.

Kelly hailed the initiative. “Domestic violence is a key component to addressing violence and addressing murder.”

He also credited stop-and-frisk, the real-time crime center, Compstat and new technologies for reducing the murder plunge.

Record low crime

The city’s murder rate has dropped another 33 percent this year. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly credits two new efforts:

* The NYPD is charging gang members with conspiracy, using threats they make on social media such as Facebook.

* More officers are devoted to arrests for domestic violence, helping to prevent possible murders by abusive spouses.

Republished with permission of The New York Post.

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