NEW YORK — The New York police commissioner announced on Monday (June 15) that he was disbanding the Police Department’s anti-crime units: plainclothes teams that target violent crime and have been involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings.

Roughly 600 officers serve in the units, which are spread out across the city and work out of the department’s 77 precincts. They will immediately be reassigned to other duties, including the detective bureau and the department’s neighbourhood policing initiative, commissioner Dermot F. Shea said.

Mr Shea said the plainclothes units were part of an outdated policing model that too often seemed to pit officers against the communities they served. He said the department now depends much more on intelligence gathering and technology to fight crime and “can move away from brute force”.

“This is a seismic shift in the culture of how the NYPD polices this great city,” Mr Shea said. “It will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect.”

The unexpected announcement came after weeks of protests and public unrest over police brutality after the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who was killed when a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Within the department, the anti-crime units were seen as an elite force aimed at disarming criminals in the city’s most violent pockets. Created with the mission of ridding the street of illegal guns and responding to violent crimes, the units were widely seen as a stepping stone for ambitious officers who hoped to join the Detective Bureau.

But for critics of the department, the anti-crime units have become a symbol of the aggressive policing strategies that are now being called into question by the protest movement. Not all are being disbanded: Those that work in the city’s transit system will remain in their role, Mr Shea said.

Mr Shea said on Monday that the unit was a vestige of the city’s era of “stop-and-frisk”, when officers routinely searched people in high-crime areas, a practice that a judge declared unconstitutional after finding it disproportionately affected people of colour.

“This is 21st-century policing,” Mr Shea said of his decision to disband the units. “The key difference — we must do it in a manner that builds trust between the officers and the community they serve.”

The anti-crime units had absorbed the remnants of the city’s plainclothes Street Crime Unit, which had begun three decades earlier.

The Street Crime Unit was disbanded by Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly in 2002 after years of simmering criticism over the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo. Plainclothes officers had shot Diallo, a street vendor, 41 times after mistaking his wallet for a gun. Kelly reassigned the remaining Street Crime officers to various anti-crime units across the city.

Though the anti-crime officers account for only about 2 per cent of the department’s uniformed force, they have been involved in a disproportionate number of shootings by the police.

A 2018 review of fatal police shootings in New York City conducted by The Intercept, an online publication, found that plainclothes anti-crime officers had been involved in 31 per cent of the incidents since 2000.

In 2006, two plainclothes detectives with an anti-crime unit shot and killed Sean Bell, a 23-year-old black man, on what would have been his wedding day, just as he was leaving a bachelor party. One of the detectives involved in the incident was fired by the department, and three other officers were forced to retire. The city eventually settled a federal lawsuit and agreed to pay US$7 million (S$9.7 million) to Bell’s family and two of his friends.

In 2018, anti-crime officers shot and killed Saheed Vassall, a mentally ill man who pointed a metal pipe toward them like a gun on a busy Brooklyn street. Vassall, 34, was known as an idiosyncratic fixture in the neighbourhood, and patrol officers were familiar with the man’s bizarre antics. The anti-crime officers who responded, however, were part of a team that did not routinely work in the area and didn’t know Vassall.

Last September, an anti-crime unit officer, Brian Mulkeen, was shot and killed by his partners in the Bronx while he struggled on the ground with Antonio Lavance Williams. Williams was also killed in a police fusillade. The police said Williams was found to be carrying an illegal gun, but it remains unclear why Mulkeen and his partners tried to stop and question him in the first place.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mr Shea also have come under pressure from protesters and elected officials to reduce the size of the Police Department and shift resources into social programmes. The City Council speaker Corey Johnson has proposed slashing the Police Department’s US$6 billion budget by US$1 billion. THE NEW YORK TIMES