Tisch unveils 'game-changing' effort to reduce ‘crime and disorder’

A series of department-led efforts to crack down on crime and disorder, particularly in the subway, will be instituted to combat so-called “quality of life” offenses, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced. 

Saying that officers have “too long” been tasked with quelling misconduct such as aggressive panhandling and public drinking without adequate direction, Tisch said a new chief of citywide quality of life would head a newly created division explicitly tasked with addressing the lower-level offenses. 

“Our work must not only make people safe, but it must make them feel safe too,” the commissioner said during her 2025 State of the NYPD address at the New York City Police Foundation last week. Tisch said the initiative, which will be implemented the coming months, will entail the centralization of department-wide units under the new command, with officers specifically tasked with addressing conduct that runs afoul of city ordinances. 

Tisch said the department is developing “Q Stat,” a database that tracks quality of life complaints and trends similar to the department’s Compstat tool, which charts crime complaints and according to which the department deploys cops. 

The department has periodically publicized renewed efforts to confront quality of life offenses, including within the subway system. But civil liberties advocates have long argued that policing low-level offenses often ends up targeting the misfortunate and people of color and do little to ensure residents’ safety

“The NYPD’s latest crackdown on so-called ‘quality of life’ offenses is the latest example of this administration’s unwillingness to think beyond the Giuliani playbook. Quality of life enforcement is a euphemism for broken windows policing, which we know will mean more police harassment and profiling of poor people and people of color,” the New York Civil Liberties Union’s assistant policy director, Michael Sisitzky, said following Tisch’s announcement. 

“This will result in even more time and resources being spent processing low-level arrests and summonses when those resources could have been better spent investing in the types of services that actually make New Yorkers' lives better,” Sisitzky added. 

Tisch, though, said Q Stat data and subsequent enforcement would “recenter our approach to public safety.”

She went on to note the year-over-year decline in violent crime, which dropped nearly 3 percent overall in 2024 compared with 2023. Even steeper declines were evident in December and January, with major crime ebbing 16 percent compared to a year earlier. 

As of early on Jan. 29, the month was on pace to have the fewest shootings since the start of the Compstat era in the mid-1990s, Tisch said, adding that the city recently went five straight days without a single recorded shooting victim for the first time since the 1990s. 

She credited a “game-changing” strategy for the declines, notably the use of Compstat tools to identify crime trends at the neighborhood level and even across blocks rather than at the much larger precinct level. What Tisch termed “zone-based” policing, “a location-based scalpel approach to crime,” details where best to deploy cops and also the types of crime that are being committed there. 

“We certainly can dig so much deeper into the numbers and be so much more precise,” she said, adding that police presence is a deterrent. “In a world with limited resources you can’t flood the zone across a four-square-mile precinct, and you don’t need to. But you can do that across 10 problematic blocks.” 

And quelling that disorder, whether perceived or actual, has been a major effort in the subway, where a series of violent incidents in recent months has compromised people’s sense of safety. 

In addition to the recent redeployment of hundreds of cops from turnstiles and entrances to subway platforms and trains — which the commissioner said resulted in a 36-percent year-over-year decrease in subway crime through the end of January — Tisch said the department has assigned two cops onto every overnight train. 

“The idea behind this initiative, frankly, is not only to make our riders safer, but also to make them feel safer,” she said. 

A third step in the effort to reduce crime and straphangers’ unease underground will involve the enforcement of transit rules, such as prohibitions of feet on seats, alcohol and smoking, which Tisch suggested correlated with “random acts of violence” in the subway. “Our officers will not simply walk by someone who is violating the law and disrupting passengers. We are going to correct the condition,” she said. 

But she also noted that the police had “a moral duty” to help people clearly in need, adding that cops respond to some 180,000 calls involving people in mental distress. To that end, Tisch said officers will receive enhanced training in crisis intervention, starting with the NYPD’s newest class, a cohort of 1,000 recruits — the largest in a decade — that have just begun their six months of academy training. 

The goal, Tisch said, “is to teach our officers to better understand, identify and de-escalate these high-stakes situations. Our first priority is to protect life.”

richardk@thechiefleader.com