NYPD commissioner talks challenges, goals for 2020

In December of 2011, Shea was working in the Detectives Bureau when he first got the call to work at One Police Plaza. “In fact, I was very successful about avoiding this building,” he joked. “When you are working out in the street, you really don’t want to have to come down here.”

Shea spent the next two years working at CompStat, where he began to see the big picture of crime in New York City from a perspective he didn’t have when he was working on the street.

“I learned a hell of a lot about data,” he said. “For the next two years I saw the interdependency of the policy side and the laws. I knew for years what was broken on the street because I was in the fight, now I was working behind the scenes with an opportunity to change what was broken.”

Shea was promoted to deputy commissioner, and in January of 2014 he was tapped by former commissioner Bill Bratton to head CompStat. He quickly set about using the data to change the way the department fights crime.

“You can cut a lot of arrests, you can cut stops, but you have to concentrate on the people that are doing the most crime, and not just arrest them but make sure we get convictions,” he said. “Not just make a gun arrest and be happy with a gun off the street, but the person carrying the gun has to go to prison.

“We realized you had to convince 30,000 cops that there was a different way to police,” Shea added.

Between 2014 and 2016, the number of arrests fell from about 400,000 per year to approximately half that. At the same time, crime plummeted. Soon, the number of homicides fell under 1,000 annually, and then 800. Today, that number consistently hovers around 300.

“Every year we do a press conference, and every year we would start to see crime going down,” Shea said. “People would say ‘amazing year you had, you must be at the bottom.’ We aren’t anywhere near close to bottom, we are going to keep pushing.

“As all this is going on, we interject the neighborhood policing piece,” Shea explained. “If we don’t’ have cops flooding zones to suppress crime by throwing a wide net, if we can do it smarter, more efficiently and get better results, we are freeing up tons of cops that can now start building relationships with the community.”

POLICE COMMISSIONER DERMOT SHEA (CENTER) ON THE DAY HE GRADUATED FROM THE POLICE ACADEMY.

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