A specialized police unit dispatched to the South Bronx – including the neighborhood where Amadou Diallo was shot – has frisked thousands of people and turned up only a handful of guns, The Post has learned.
Using the same tactics as the embattled Street Crime Unit but with far less success, these cops have frisked 3,118 people in three South Bronx precincts and found only six guns.
Such “tracer” units are sent to stabilize neighborhoods where major drug busts have taken place.
Like the SCU, tracer units are heavily involved in pat-downs.
But tracer-unit statistics from three South Bronx precincts – the 40th, the 41st and the 43rd – reveal a gun arrest rate of less than .5 percent.
Even the oft-criticized SCU, meanwhile, had an arrest rate of 21 percent in 45,000 frisks during in 1997 and 1998.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, a critic of the SCU, called the tracer units’ activities “more harassment than crime fighting.”
“Six out of 3,000 is not even 1 percent. Is it the intent to have aggressive policing or aggressive harassment?”
Arnold Cruz, 23, a bike messenger who lives near Diallo’s former home in the Soundview section of The Bronx, says he’s lost count of how many times he’s been frisked.
“If you live in The Bronx, police think they can just frisk you,” he said. “They just make up an excuse like there are gun shots or you fit some description.”
The police union, meanwhile, complains that the NYPD is taking street patrol cops and putting them into these special tracer units.
“The department is changing their goals from protecting and serving the public to handing out summonses and making arrests,” Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association board member Scott Williamson told The Post.
In The Bronx alone, more than 200 cops are assigned to seven tracer units, and the PBA says they’re all being diverted from normal patrol duties.
The situation is so dire that when Police Commissioner Howard Safir visited one precinct, the commanders had non-patrol personnel put on uniforms so roll-call wouldn’t look so pathetic.
The NYPD defended the tracer units’ role in policing.
Department spokeswoman Marilyn Mode said the stop-and-frisks are not used to boost arrests, but to get guns off the street and protect cops’ lives.
She also noted that as of last week, crime in The Bronx was down 11 percent, and murders had plummeted 32 percent over the previous year.
“The tracer units have contributed to this decline in crime,” she said.