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During a press conference last month, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch stood alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani and expounded upon the success of the NYPD’s “precision policing” efforts. According to Tisch, the “data-driven” initiative led to a recent drop in crime in the Bronx, a borough that has long had a disproportionate share of the city’s homicides and is home to some of the highest rates of vehicle stops and stop-and-frisk encounters. Tisch’s casual utterance of “precision policing” seemed to imply that everyone understood what she was talking about. But as a New Yorker and a police reporter, I wasn’t familiar with the term.
So I reached out to the NYPD to get more specifics.
The department’s spokespeople pointed me to the arrests of 12 alleged gang members in 2025. The men were indicted on charges that included conspiracy and attempted murder in relation to a spate of shootings in Queens. According to the NYPD, all of the men had been entered into the department’s gang database before they were arrested, and officers stationed in specific areas based on “excellent intelligence” were able to confront alleged gang members, recover some weapons, and potentially deter more shootings.
This takedown seems to exemplify the definition given to me by John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and former Baltimore police officer Peter Moskos, who explained that precision policing is supposed to encompass the strategic use of crime-fighting resources, guided by information from the community or collected and analyzed by the police’s technical tools, such as the crime-tracking CompStat system. But Moskos cautioned that regardless of the buzzwords, nothing is really new in law enforcement. “There’s only so many ways you can actually police. At some point, choices have to be made,” he said. “You see someone suspicious in an alley. You have reasonable suspicion. Do you stop that person or not?”
Michael Sisitzky, the assistant policy director of the New York City Civil Liberties Union, is worried that despite the initiative’s name, when NYPD officers stop people, they are anything but precise. Part of this is because the data informing their deployments and tactics is not unbiased. “A lot of that data is driven by past NYPD enforcement practices, and we know the NYPD has historically over-deployed resources to policing in low-income communities of color,” Sisitzky said.
Although Tisch celebrates the NYPD’s gang database for predicting crime hot spots, Sisitzky sees it as one of the department’s most arbitrary and discriminatory tools. The NYPD is currently facing an NAACP lawsuit over the database, alleging that nearly 99% of people on it are Black or Hispanic, and that police have listed people for innocuous things like “liking a post on social media.” The suit argues that being in the database opens people up to “persistent surveillance and harassment by officers,” including getting stopped for “low-level infractions such as jaywalking, littering, or traffic offenses,” and being subjected to “erroneous and invasive interrogations.”
Sisitzky is also worried that tying initiatives like the database to the presumption of technical impartiality implied by the term precision policing is a way to launder potential civil rights violations. He noted that it was also under the banner of that initiative that NYPD Director of Legislative Affairs Joshua Levin recently defended the fact that Black drivers are 10 times more likely than White drivers to have their cars searched at traffic stops in New York.
While the cameras and computers of precision policing might be new, for Professor Phillip Atiba Solomon (fka Goff), the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, these interactions and disproportionate outcomes remind him of an earlier NYPD initiative: “broken windows.”
That was a policing strategy of vigorously policing minor crimes, like subway fare evasion, ostensibly in order to catch or deter people who’ve committed or who will go on to commit more serious crimes, like shootings. NYPD officials frequently employed a broken windows policing strategy until the 2010s, when the Black Lives Matter movement helped make the term toxic by raising awareness that the increased police interactions encouraged by the strategy could lead to tragic deaths, like the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014. Officers first approached Garner on suspicion that he was selling untaxed cigarettes.
Tisch has rejected the notion that her new initiative has anything to do with broken windows policing. She emphasized that precision policing relies on gathering information, like the volume of 311 calls in an area, to inform tactics. But experts I spoke to, like Solomon, believe that this data-driven intelligence can be used as a pretext for unnecessary interactions and can produce some of the same racial disparities as the broken windows era.
Solomon also questioned the connection Tisch has made between precision policing and the city’s apparent drop in crime, pointing out, “After record spikes, there are record declines. So, sure, crime declines could be a result of this precision policing, but because I teach statistics, I think it’s important to remind people that correlation is not causation.”
Solomon also worries that smaller police departments across the country that may not have the resources to follow the NYPD’s entire approach might still pick up on the rebranding power of precision policing. If there’s a technocratic way of “updating the ‘broken windows’ theory that will get you in less trouble and get you more supporters,” Solomon said, then that is “something that will appeal to police and politicians outside of New York City.”
To see what everyday New Yorkers think, I went to the Bronx, which recently received 200 additional officers and is the site of a recent lawsuit filed by citizens who believe they’ve been unlawfully searched and arrested under the auspices of precision policing solely because they are Black.
I focused on the Mott Haven neighborhood, which is part of the precinct where the NYPD piloted its now citywide Quality of Life Division, which has faced criticism for hitting citizens with criminal summonses for low-level traffic offenses. Giovanni Gaudarrama and Jerry Greenberg, 23-year-old Bronxites with Mexican heritage, said they have noticed an increase in patrols focused on quality-of-life crimes. While Greenberg felt it deterred erratic behavior from people with mental health issues, Gaudarrama saw it as a hassle. He said he’s been pulled over 10 times for no reason, sometimes dragged out of his car. It has happened so often recently, he said, that he has learned to enjoy the disappointed look on the faces of officers when they fail to find a reason to arrest him. “It feels so dumb, but what’s the point of arguing with them,” Gaudarrama said.
Although the two men differed on the impact of increased police presence in Mott Haven, both were adamant that there was little upside to adding any more targeted patrols. This reflects the nuanced way communities like Mott Haven see the police: They often desire policing, but have concerns about how it is practiced. While polling by the conservative Manhattan Institute has found broad support for more police officers in New York City, the liberal Vera Institute found in both national and New York-based polls that what people want is better policing, including more accountability, and that officer count is low on people's priority list when compared with other options.
When I asked Greenberg if Mamdani should allow the NYPD to send even more cops to Mott Haven, he said, “Start investing in something else, man. It’s oversaturated … What Mamdani’s got to do next is get them to chill on the rent.”