Police Commissioner Bill Bratton at a City Council hearing Tuesday laid out his vision for the NYPD — including a plan to move cops away from antiterror details in Manhattan and send them to fight street crime at gun-plagued housing projects.
The top cop says he hopes the redeployment will quell a troubling spike in shootings, which have jumped 32 percent since the beginning of the year.
“We’re assigning additional patrol cars [to] housing developments that have shown an increase in shootings,” said Bratton, who plans to move 23 units, each of which includes a patrol car and two officers.
“They have in past years been concentrated primarily in Manhattan to deal with the counterterrorism threat issue,” he added. “We are broadening their use to basically assist in issues such as the current circumstance in some of the housing developments in Brooklyn and The Bronx.”
The commissioner — who outlined his new ideas as he presented his proposed police budget to the council — also wants to assign 15 officers to college campuses, such as Columbia University and Hunter College.
He hopes they will to help drive down the number of sexual assaults reported recently by getting crime victims to come forward. He hopes the specially trained officers will work with sex-assault victims to “assist them to not be revictimized as they go through the criminal process.”
Bratton also said he wants the department to become more active on social media.
“Our goal is to create Twitter accounts for every one of our precinct, Housing PSA [police service areas] and transit district commanders by the end of the year, so that they can share timely and important information directly with the public,” he said.
The commissioner pointed out one recent social-media success, in which the NYPD used Twitter to help straphangers after the May 2 F-train derailment in Queens.
The local precinct commander kept the public informed with continuous online updates, and even tweeted 20 minutes before the MTA, Bratton said.
Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said Bratton’s call for public-housing cops bolstered her argument that the city needs to hire another 1,000 officers.
“We believe that based on the additional enforcement needs and visions that are being outlined by the mayor and the administration . . . we need to bring more police into the precincts,” she said after the hearing.
Bratton, however, stressed that the funding for more cops isn’t in the cards right now. He said that even if more officers were hired, they probably wouldn’t be ready to hit the streets until the summer of next year.