NYPD Crime Scene Unit investigators collect evidence after a 38-year-old...

NYPD Crime Scene Unit investigators collect evidence after a 38-year-old man was fatally stabbed at the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall subway station in Manhattan in April. Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images

Each day in New York City, usually in the evening hours, some 1,500 police officers — a mix of new recruits and seasoned detectives — report to various precincts. After a quick briefing, they fan out to scores of special zones around the city where crime has been rampant.

Their job, sometimes many miles away from their home precincts, is to actively patrol and show a police presence on the streets, in subways and public housing areas in the latest effort by the NYPD to reduce serious crimes, homicides and shootings.

As summer nears, the NYPD is ramping up its presence in troubled areas.  Seventy special summer zones have been carved out of the city, amounting to a mere 12 square miles or 3.5% of the city land mass, but signifying areas where as much as 41% of shootings occur, officials say.

The use of the special zones was one of the first innovations by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch after she took office in November. The man overseeing that strategy, chief Michael LiPetri, head of the office of crime control strategies, told Newsday in an interview that the zone concept appears to be working.

WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND

  • NYPD officers are fanning out to scores of special summer zones around the city where crime has been rampant.
  • It is the latest effort by the NYPD to reduce serious crimes, homicides and shootings, officials say.
  • Seventy special summer zones have been carved out of the city, amounting to a mere 12 square miles or 3.5% of the city land mass, but signifying areas where as much as 41% of shootings occur, officials say.

'Cops on the dots'

Since the summer version of the zone concept got underway on May 5 with expansion to the 70 areas, LiPetri, a Nassau County native , said the results have been encouraging.

“It speaks for itself,” said LiPetri, who has held his post since 2019. “We have seen the lowest number of shootings and murders ever,” said LiPetri, referring the first five months of 2025 and going back to 1993, when the modern Compstat system of record keeping began.

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch speaks during a news conference on public...

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch speaks during a news conference on public safety at City Hall last week. Credit: Getty Images/Michael M. Santiago

Tisch’s challenge was to come up with a strategy of reducing crime at a time when the rank and file officers, suffering from morale problems, were witnessing their colleagues retire and resign in large numbers.

A data-driven leader, Tisch’s idea was to put “cops on the dots” and go after criminals where they commit offenses and not be restricted by regular precinct boundaries.

It is Tisch’s way of stretching the number of officers, currently at about 33,500, to try and get closer to pre-pandemic levels of 95,000 serious crimes, which includes rapes, burglaries, grand larcenies, robbery and felony assaults.

serious crimes down 28%

shootings down 65%

Last week at a news conference, Tisch noted that serious crimes in the special zones since May 5 were down 28%, with shootings down 65%.

“I think it is quite smart,” said Richard Aborn, head of the nonprofit Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, about the special zone tactics. The commission studies city crime policy and makes recommendations.

“It takes the concept of precision policing to the next level,” noted Aborn, and he believes the early success may make zone policing a model for the rest of the nation. Aborn likened zone policing to a physician’s use of an MRI , instead of a fuzzy X-ray, to get a clearer and more granular focus on an illness so that the right steps can be taken cure a condition.

LiPetri keeps thick record books on all 70 special zones to keep on top of crime trends on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. As crime patterns change, the boundaries of the zone may shift. So far, the Bronx has 23 special zones since it has historically seen high levels of shootings.

“That is why we put 42% of the [police academy] graduating class into the Bronx and that is why the [Bronx] 44 Precinct had no shootings in the month of May,” LiPetri said last week at the news conference with Tisch and New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Evolving crime strategy

The summer zones are the latest seasonal version of an evolving crime fighting strategy. The winter zones around Thanksgiving and Christmas are concentrated around shopping areas and tourist places like Times Square and Rockefeller Center, LiPetri said.

“The zones change from winter, to holidays to summer,” said LiPetri. “Obviously in the summer months people are out on the streets, there are more barbecues, so you really want to focus on those areas.”

Because the boundaries of the zones are new, it is hard to draw long-term comparisons to measure progress. However, in March, NYPD data showed that in six of the early winter special zones (located mostly in Manhattan and Queens) all serious crimes dropped by 7.5% in Times Square and 42% in downtown Flushing.

LiPetri indicated that any decrease of violence in these high crime areas contributes to the effort to drop the citywide statistics. According to NYPD data obtained by Newsday beginning in late November 2024, crime during 28-day periods citywide dropped as much as 17% over the same periods in prior year. Last year ended with 123,860 serious crimes. By early 2025 crime decreases shown in Compstat weekly reports fell back to as low as 5% and are currently at 6.1%, the data showed.

But on a local level, such as public housing areas, crime drops in the summer zones can be significant, LiPetri said.

“Right now, there is a 38% [crime] reduction during [zone] deployment in [public] housing with a 65% reduction in shootings,” LiPetri pointed out.

At last week's news conference Tisch applauded the crime trends, particularly the drop in shootings and homicides, giving credit to her officers and staff. She believed the efforts could drop shootings below the Compstat-era record low of 752 in 2018 and homicides below the number of 292 reached in 2017.

But, according to Chris Herrmann, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, while the zone concept is a good one and seems to be working, not all parts of the city are seeing positive shooting trends. Hermann said that the latest Compstat report for the Queens North Borough command showed a 230% increase this year in shootings and 250% rise in shooting victims.

Herrmann said the bad shooting trend in north Queens makes it a challenge for police because the incidents are occurring over a wide area and not focused into a tight area.

Recruits on summer zone duty

The 1,500 officers doing summer zone duty are mostly new recruits who have just graduated in recent months from the police academy, with some 350 to 400 other officers from the detective bureau and administrative positions. The officers are briefed before their tours begin and then go out on patrol, constantly moving through a zone, instead of being static, LiPetri noted.

LiPetri wouldn’t say when the officers are deployed in a various zones because he wants to keep the criminals off balance. But law enforcement sources said the nighttime hours are key and, according to one police official who didn’t want to be named, one tactic is to keep the critical 4 p.m. to midnight officers on overtime for a few hours to augment the zone staffing.

One police official said the new recruits are usually given days off during the week and then called back for critical Friday to Sunday patrols, the period in the summer when outdoor parties and club activities are widespread and in the past have often sparked gang violence.

However, some police union officials contend that the deployment of seasoned officers to the special zones can take away from other important jobs. Scott Munro, head of the Detective Endowment Association, didn’t want to criticize Tisch’s zone strategy but pointed out that each detective assigned to zone duty is one less detective working on the backlog of cases.

Pat Hendry, head of the Police Benevolent Association, has said repeatedly that the shifting of officers is only a temporary solution at a time when the NYPD is at a historically low level of staffing and desperately needs more officers.

New NYPD officers at a swearing in ceremony.

New NYPD officers at a swearing in ceremony. Credit: Corey Sipkin

Upcoming seasonal special zones

There will be at least be one or two more seasonal periods in 2025 when special zones will need to be staffed. Beyond that, the picture is unclear since It is not known how long Tisch will remain as police commissioner if Adams loses his reelection bid. Luckily, the police official said, an additional August class of about 900 new graduates can be used for patrols for the rest of the year.

Putting officers on patrol where they are needed remains vital as a deterrence. But there is also a bigger message to officers for them to refocus other efforts.

“It is not just the cops on foot,” said LiPetri. “The cops on foot are a huge part but it is not just that.”

The NYPD wants all officers, be they narcotics officers, warrant squad officers or field intelligence officers, to focus their activities on criminals in the zone, LePetri said.

“It is multilayered,” LiPetri said of the tactic. With all parts of the force pulling together department resources will be effectively used, LiPetri added.

 For Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD detective sergeant who now teaches as an adjunct professor at Pennsylvania State University-Lehigh Valley, the zone concept is actually something that was done years ago while he was with the department. Sometimes the units were known as “tracer units," he recalled.

Still, no matter what it is called, zone policing is very effective, Giacalone agreed.

But one thing Giacalone said the NYPD has to watch for is the displacement of criminal activity from one area to another in the face of focused police action.

“You have to worry about bad guys moving their operations,” Giacalone cautioned. 

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