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350 NYPD Cops Armed With Machine Guns And Rifles To Assigned City Patrol Duty

Tension in New York is about skyrocket…

Via CapitalNewYork

New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton unveiled a sweeping new plan to redeploy officers in order to boost police-community relations, while also increasing the city’s counterterrorism efforts.

At a breakfast hosted by the Police Foundation at the Mandarin Oriental, Bratton announced 350 officers will be permanently assigned to rove throughout the city, with rifles and machine guns, in anticipation of possible terrorist attacks. These officers will also be used to assist on crime scenes, and help with crowd control and other large-scale events.

Previously, some of this work was done by officers assigned to local precincts throughout the city. Now, those officers will be able to stay in their regularly assigned precincts, enabling them to work in a more focused way on their beats, Bratton said.

Also, officers assigned to local precincts will see their work re-prioritized.

Bratton called it a “new patrol model for how we deploy resources.”

Though crime is down citywide, there are pockets where it is still a problem. Bratton said as many as half the officers working in local precincts have a “specialty role,” and are not in cars patrolling their sectors—subsections of a precinct.

The other half of patrol officers are often going from “call to call to call,” Bratton said.

“They never have a chance to really have time to build relationships, to work on the problems in these distressed neighborhoods,” he said. “They’re indentured to the radio, running from call to call, in a department that does not have enough police officers often times and not enough cars out there to handle all the calls as they continue to come in.”

Cops mobbing in the streets with machine guns and rifles sounds like 3rd world policing…

The plan will start in two precincts in Manhattan and two in Queens, Bratton told reporters. He said this pilot program is similar to one he began rolling out when he was an officer working in Boston in the 1970s. It was so successful in his precinct, he was promoted within the Boston department to expand the program citywide. It never happened though, because Boston ended up laying off officers before Bratton’s plan could be implemented. Bratton also said there is a similar program used in the Los Angeles Police Department, which he led for seven years in the 2000s.

Oh, yeah, because the LAPD is the model of purity when it comes to community relations…

Image via AP

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