Police Commissioner Bill Bratton laid out his vision for the NYPD Tuesday, telling the City Council that he would love to get more cops on the street, but the funding just isn’t there.
At his first budget hearing since reassuming the role of top cop, Bratton griped that the budget just isn’t there to bring on another 1,000 cops as some in the city council have suggested.
Instead, Bratton want’s to shake up the personnel he does have, telling the council he’d rather shift officers currently working in counter terrorism to crime ridden housing projects to combat a spike in violence.
“We’re assigning additional patrol cars from our CRV (Critical Response Vehicles) deployments to patrol housing developments that have shown an increase in shootings,” he said.
“We have as many as 23 extra patrol cars now covering violence-prone areas.”
The commissioner said he would also like to assign 15 officers to to college campuses to drive down the number of sexual assaults reported recently.
Bratton said he is also planning to expand a pilot program that allows all precinct commanders to operate twitter accounts.
“Our goal is to create twitter accounts for every one of our precinct, housing PSA, and transit district commanders by the end of the year, so that they can share timely and important information directly with the public.”
The top cop also touted the success of the social media initiative by citing the May 2 derailment in Woodside, when a F train jumped the tracks and the local precinct commander kept the public informed with continuous updates, even beating the MTA by tweeting 20 minutes ahead of them.
“Captain Thomas Conforti, commanding officer of the nearby 112th precinct, immediately began tweeting information to users of the system about how to get in and out of the area,” Bratton bragged.
“He continued to provide updates on the best options for the next morning’s commute, what lines were open, and the best way to get home.”