Every new police officer in New York City will be sent onto the streets of some of the city's toughest neighborhoods as part of a broad anti-crime operation that the authorities say has helped produce historic drops in crime, the city announced on Wednesday.
Police officials and Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that each of the 914 police recruits being sworn in yesterday would join the program, Operation Impact. They also announced that crime in almost every major category declined again this year, with violence down in the schools and on the subways and with homicides on track to fall below 500 for the first time since reliable statistics became available 44 years ago.
Because some areas, mostly in northern Brooklyn, show stubbornly higher crime rates, they will get a bigger influx of Operation Impact officers, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. They include parts of Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York and Crown Heights.
Operation Impact, begun in 2003, matches new recruits with seasoned officers and supervisors to tackle crime spikes in narrowly drawn geographic areas. Coming at a time when the department is facing recruitment challenges, the new influx will double -- to more than 1,800 -- the number of officers assigned to those duties in a force that currently has 35,400 members.
"If you look at a map showing where crime is, it is clearly concentrated in a couple of areas and the people that live in those areas have a right to live in a safe neighborhood just like those who are lucky enough to do so today," Bloomberg said as he stood with Kelly and a phalanx of police commanders inside the 28th Precinct station house in Harlem.
As of 7:30am on Wednesday, 484 homicides had been recorded in New York City this year, Kelly said, 97 fewer than at the same time last year. Officials said the city was headed toward having fewer than 500 homicides this year, by far the lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963, when there were 548 killings.
Dennis Smith, a professor at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University and an author of an analysis of Operation Impact, hailed the new emphasis on the program as a "targeted use of scarce resources."
He said he had feared that city officials might curb the program.
"This is further validation of research that has been done around the country -- on smaller, more temporary versions of this approach -- that hot-spot policing really works," Smith said.
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