Mayor Defends Precision Policing, Crackdown on Fraudulent License Plates as Keys to Driving Down Crime

By Yehudit Garmaise

     According to Mayor Bill de Blasio, his approaches to driving down crime are working perfectly.

     This morning, when BoroPark24 pointed out to the mayor that the crime rate is very low in Boro Park and other Orthodox Jewish communities: except when people who live outside our neighborhoods come in to commit hate crimes and other crimes, like last Friday afternoon when perpetrators came out of a car that had temporary New Jersey license plates, to steal, at gunpoint, more than a million dollars of jewelry from a resident who was parked on 47th Street.

     When asked how can policing be improved to deter people who come in from other communities to commit crimes, the mayor doubled down on his approaches.

     “Precision Policing would be very much looking for the exact kind of pattern you just described,” Mayor de Blasio said. “If we see robberies, if we see any kind of pattern: more than one occurring, what Precision Policing dictates is: Look at the pattern, determine where it might happen next, determine what kind of people might be behind it, what history they might have and find them and stop them. It has been very, very successful.”

     Mayor de Blasio then addressed the perpetrators’ temporary New Jersey license plates, which he said, “are often associated with a variety of crimes, even violent crime.”

     “Chief Rodney Harrison has told us about the NYPD’s huge push to go after drivers with temporary license plates that are fraudulent,” the mayor said. “That has been a systematic effort of the NYPD that has led to many, many arrests, many guns taken off the streets, many prosecutions.

     “So [the robbery in Boro Park] is exactly the type of thing that would cause the NYPD and the local precinct to focus on that type of problem.

     After the NYPD reported a dramatic increase in overall crime on the subway in September, BoroPark24 then asked the mayor whether he would consider deploying a visual array of uniformed police officers, who are not often seen at subway stations and in subways to both create a deterrence to crime and also make commuters and parents to feel safer, the mayor did not address the visibility of the NYPD on public transit.

     Instead, he responded by saying that more officers are now patrolling the subways than “than they have in decades, and it has been very effective.”

     The mayor did deploy more police to patrol the subways earlier in the year after a surge of subway shovings, however, when those police officers were not readily visible to commuters, MTA workers, conducted their own observational study to reveal that police officers were seen in only 14%, on average, of the city's subway stations.

     Additionally, NYPD Inspector Raymond Porteous told CBS New York that in September, the subways saw 68 more incidents than in September of 2020.

     One of those assaults was perpetrated by Anthonia Egegbara, who has been arrested three times in the past for assault, and who was charged, this week, with pushing a 42-year-old woman into a moving Uptown 3 train.

     Although shovings and stabbings have been intermittently occurring in waves in the past year, again, the mayor pointed to the need to see “some kind of pattern.”       

     “Whenever we see any kind of pattern [of crime on the subway], and some of the reporting this week [on Egegbara’s shoving] was exactly the kind of thing we can go after with Precision Policing: a specific pattern of a specific crime.

     “Often that comes down to very few people who are organized to commit that type of crime.”

     However, rather than being “organized to commit a crime,” Egegara is likely mentally ill.

     “We can find them, we can disrupt them,” the mayor said confidently of the NYPD's ability to anticipate people who shove others onto subway tracks. “We can arrest them. We can prosecute them.”

       Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.