NYPD LACKS ‘CUSTOMER SERVICE’: DeB
Cop scoffs, ‘When did policing become walking into T-Mobile?’
Kids are being gunned down on New York City’s streets and junkies have taken over a swath of Midtown, but Mayor de Blasio summed up his policing priorities in two words on Thursday: “customer service.”
During his daily City Hall news conference, de Blasio ignored the pressing issue of public safety and called his “revolutionary” initiative for the NYPD “a paradigm shift,” saying, “Customer service has to be what the NYPD is about.”
He said part of the push would involve putting a “community guide” in each of the city’s police stations to greet visitors at the door.
The mayor, whose term ends this year, said he was motivated by years of complaints about cops who are sometimes “gruff and dismissive.”
“So many people who just were trying to exercise their rights to get information or file a concern or complaint, find out what’s happening with a case, they were treated in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with customer service or respect,” de Blasio said.
“That’s not acceptable, and it’s not going to build the bond we need.”
NYPD Chief of Patrol Juanita Holmes, who took part in the news conference, said that “all police officers are greeters” but added that de Blasio’s plan would help create a “warmer, kinder, friendly . . . gentle environment.”
De Blasio didn’t answer directly when asked about the cost of hiring workers to provide the service seven days a week. But City Hall later said the program would cost $5.7 million a year for 180 new, full-time employees with benefits and pensions.
Hizzoner’s remarks came hours after Jaden Turnage, 16, was chased down a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and fatally shot at around 6:15 p.m. Wednesday.
The brazen killing followed the slaying of Cahlil Pennington, also 16, who was shot in the head in a broad-daylight gun battle along a commercial strip in East New York, Brooklyn, at around 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
A third 16-year-old, reputed gang member Nisayah Sanchez, died early Thursday after being gunned down in The Bronx by two shooters who jumped out of a car and opened fire at around 12:50 p.m. on Wednesday.
On Saturday, The Post exposed the rampant, open-air sale and injection of narcotics in Manhattan’s Garment District, which John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor Michael Alcazar, a forme r NYPD detective, said had helped turn the Big Apple into “the city of the walking dead.”
In response to a question from The Post at Thursday’s news conference, the mayor defended his decision to focus on “customer service” amid the city’s surge in shootings, claiming that improving police-community relations “is absolutely [a] prerequisite to being as safe as we need to be.”
Holmes also said the NYPD was “always focused on violence, that’s at the top of the list.”
“If you think we can’t focus simultaneously on gun violence, you’re truly mistaken,” she said. “We have eyes on both areas, which are equally important.”
Holmes said the new program began this week, with half of the NYPD’s 77 precincts assigned a community guide and all expected to have at least one by November.
An NYPD source called de Blasio’s “customer service” plan “just stupid and crazy,” while another described it as “utterly the most horrific idea I’ve heard thus far being on the job.”
“Since when did policing become like walking into a T-Mobile store? Policing is not a pretty business, so let’s not pretend that it is,” the cop said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams’ campaign said Adams saw de Blasio’s program as “an important step . . . but the work of bridging the divide should extend beyond the walls of the precinct.”