New York City Police Department

• 1. Introduction

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  The New York City Police Department was founded on the 23rd of May 1845, replacing a patchwork night watch system that had long struggled to keep order in a rapidly expanding city. Today it stands as the largest municipal police force in the United States, with more than 30,000 sworn officers and a total workforce exceeding 40,000 people. Its jurisdiction covers a city of roughly eight million residents spread across five boroughs, and its Intelligence Division posts officers in eleven cities around the world.

  What does it take to police one of the most densely populated and closely watched cities on earth? How has an organization built in the mid-nineteenth century adapted to facial recognition software, robotic dogs, and networked private surveillance cameras? And what happens when the people tasked with maintaining public safety become the subject of public complaint? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. From Night Watch to CompStat

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  Mayor William Havemeyer was the figure who shepherded the original Municipal Police into existence in 1845. The department he helped create would spend the next century and a half expanding, contracting, and absorbing rival agencies.

  The first Black officer joined the force in 1911. The first female officer followed in 1918. In 1924, during Commissioner Richard Enright's tenure, the NYPD became home to the country's first Shomrim Society, a fraternal organization for Jewish police officers, at a moment when the department counted roughly 700 Jewish officers in its ranks.

  In 1961, Mario Biaggi, a highly decorated officer who later served in the United States Congress, became the first police officer in New York State inducted into the National Police Officers Hall of Fame. By the mid-1980s, the department had turned sharply toward intensive enforcement of street-level drug markets, a shift that drove a steep rise in incarceration across the city.

  The most consequential organizational innovation of the modern era came in 1994, when the NYPD developed CompStat, a computer system for tracking crime geographically. Louis R. Anemone, who served as Chief of Patrol from 1994 to 1995, originally instituted weekly CompStat meetings in the Chief of Patrol's office. When William Bratton promoted Anemone to Chief of Department, CompStat moved with him, and it has remained under the Chief of Department's command ever since. Research on whether CompStat actually reduced crime rates has remained mixed, but the system spread to police departments across the United States and Canada.

  The 1990s also brought a wave of consolidation. In 1995, the New York City Transit Police and the New York City Housing Authority Police Department merged into the NYPD, becoming the Transit Bureau and Housing Bureau. A year later, the city's Traffic Operations Bureau followed. In 1998, the School Safety Division of the Department of Education was absorbed into the NYPD's Community Affairs Bureau, giving the department a direct footprint inside the city's public schools.

• 3. The Architecture of Command

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  At the top of the NYPD sits the police commissioner, a civilian position appointed by the mayor and technically carrying a five-year term, though in practice commissioners serve at the mayor's pleasure. On the 1st of January 2022, Keechant Sewell became the first woman to hold that office. She announced her resignation on the 12th of June 2023, without giving a public reason. On the 25th of November 2024, Mayor Eric Adams appointed Jessica Tisch, making her the second woman to serve as commissioner.

  Below the commissioner, the organization divides into 20 bureaus grouped under four umbrellas: Patrol, Transit and Housing, Investigative, and Administrative. The Patrol Services Bureau is the largest single unit, overseeing eight borough commands and 78 precincts across the city. Precincts are commanded by a captain, deputy inspector, or inspector depending on their size.

  The most senior uniformed officer is the chief of department, a post that before 1987 carried the title chief of operations and before that, chief inspector. Joseph Esposito holds the record as the longest-serving chief of department in the institution's history, occupying the role from 2000 to 2013.

  Promotion follows two distinct logics inside the department. Advancement to sergeant, lieutenant, and captain runs through competitive civil service examinations. Above captain, every promotion to deputy inspector, inspector, deputy chief, assistant chief, bureau chief, and chief of department is entirely at the commissioner's discretion. Officers graduate from the Police Academy after 26 weeks of training and spend their first 18 months designated as Probationary Police Officers. Badges in the NYPD are traditionally called shields, and lower-ranked officers carry shield numbers that identify them; lieutenants and above carry tax registry numbers instead. Officers who risk losing their shield are often issued replica badges called dupes, since losing a shield can cost up to ten days' pay.

• 4. Crime Numbers and Public Trust

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  In 1990, the NYPD recorded more than 2,200 murders and nearly 147,000 auto thefts in a single year, at the height of the crack epidemic. By 2019, murders had dropped to 319 and auto thefts to 5,430. Total major felonies fell from more than 527,000 in 1990 to roughly 95,600 in 2019, a span of nearly three decades.

  Public approval of the NYPD has tracked unevenly against that crime decline. The Quinnipiac University Polling Institute began measuring NYPD approval in 1997, when just under half of the public said the department was doing a good job. Approval climbed to 78 percent in 2002, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Since then it has ranged between 52 and 72 percent. Approval has consistently divided along racial lines: black and Hispanic respondents have been persistently less likely to express approval than white respondents. A 2017 Quinnipiac survey found overall approval at 67 to 25 percent, with white voters approving at 79 to 15 percent and black voters approving at 52 to 37 percent.

  In 2021, the NYPD ceased enforcing marijuana crimes other than driving under the influence. Three years later, in 2024, the department changed its official motto from "Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect" to "Fighting Crime, Protecting the Public."

• 5. Brutality, Corruption, and Oversight

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  In 1970, the Knapp Commission documented systematic corruption throughout the NYPD. The finding was not a surprise to insiders, but its public confirmation put pressure on the institution that persists in various forms to this day.

  In 1992, Mayor David Dinkins created an independent Civilian Complaint Review Board to investigate misconduct allegations against officers. The NYPD's own union responded with a protest that turned violent: officers blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, demonstrated at City Hall, and shouted racial epithets at elected officials. The board survived, and today it operates as a 13-member civilian panel handling complaints about abuse of authority, discourtesy, excessive force, and offensive language.

  In 2009, officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded evidence that NYPD supervisors were deliberately under-reporting crimes and manufacturing arrest quotas. His fellow officers arrested him, took him against his will, and had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. Schoolcraft filed a federal lawsuit against the department, and the city settled the case before trial in 2015, also restoring his back pay for the period of his suspension.

  During the George Floyd protests of 2020, an investigation by New York City's Department of Investigation concluded that the NYPD had used excessive force against protesters. Footage reviewed included incidents of officers removing a protester's mask before pepper-spraying him and police vehicles driven into crowds. On the 8th of June 2020, both houses of the New York state legislature passed the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act, making it a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for a New York officer to injure or kill someone using a chokehold or similar restraint. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the measure into law on the 12th of June 2020.

  In 2024, the NYPD discarded more than 400 civilian complaints without examining the underlying evidence, despite those cases having already been investigated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board. That same year, Commissioner Edward Caban came under federal scrutiny after a Brooklyn bar owner alleged that Caban's brother had offered preferential treatment in exchange for payment. Three days before resigning, Caban reduced penalties for officers found guilty of abusing authority, using offensive language, failing to accept civilian complaints, and conducting unlawful searches. According to a 2021 analysis by FiveThirtyEight, New York City spent an average of at least 170 million dollars per year settling police misconduct claims over a ten-year span.

• 6. Surveillance and Its Discontents

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  Scholars who study racialized policing in New York have traced the roots of targeted surveillance back to 18th-century colonial "lantern laws," which required Black, mixed-race, and Indigenous enslaved people to carry candle lanterns after sunset if they were not accompanied by a white person. Simon Brown, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued that those laws established a legal framework that shaped surveillance practices into the modern era.

  In 2014, the NYPD launched a strategy called Omnipresence in public housing developments, stationing officers as stationary sentries and installing floodlight towers powered by diesel generators in neighborhoods including Brownsville, Brooklyn. Each tower emitted approximately 600,000 lumens, roughly four times the intensity of the brightest lights at Yankee Stadium. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found the lights reduced nighttime outdoor index crimes by 36 percent over a six-month period; an updated study drawing on three years of data from 80 sites estimated a 45 percent reduction. But residents reported the lights shining into their bedrooms and described the constant generator noise as a sleep disruption. One resident told Vice that the lights made it hard to sleep. The American Medical Association has issued guidelines linking high-intensity LED lighting in residential areas to reduced sleep, impaired functioning, and obesity. The executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association called the program "weaponizing light," and the program's eventual formalization under Mayor Bill de Blasio's Mayor Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety came with a $140 million budget targeting 15 New York City Housing Authority developments.

  A 2019 report by the Brennan Center for Justice catalogued 15 categories of surveillance technology the NYPD had acquired, many without public disclosure or City Council oversight. These included cell site simulators used in more than 1,000 investigations, a DNA database containing over 82,000 genetic profiles, automatic license plate readers with access to more than 2.2 billion reads, and video analytics developed with IBM that could search footage by perceived skin tone. A 2021 Amnesty International investigation found the department had used facial recognition in approximately 22,000 cases since 2017, running images from over 15,000 cameras through its software. The Brennan Center noted that the NYPD's Facial Identification Section searches databases that include arrest photos of children as young as 11.

  In June 2023, the NYPD partnered with Fusus, a camera integration platform owned by Axon, launching a proof-of-concept program in the 109th Precinct in Flushing, Queens. Within 60 days the department used that intelligence to close a citywide burglary pattern spanning 15 incidents. The NYPD then signed a one-year, $1.5 million contract to expand the program to nine additional precincts across all five boroughs, while also exploring expansion to include residential cameras. Civil liberties organizations have raised concerns that the extent to which the NYPD shares surveillance data with federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, remains unknown.

• 7. Technology on the Beat

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  The NYPD's Domain Awareness System draws on a network of 9,000 publicly and privately owned license plate readers and surveillance cameras, supplemented by chemical and radiation sensors and ShotSpotter audio data. The system was developed in partnership with Microsoft through the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative and gives officers access to at least 2 billion license plate readings, 100 million summonses, 54 million 911 calls, 15 million complaints, 12 million detective reports, 11 million arrests, and 2 million warrants. Video records from the 9,000 CCTV cameras are retained for 30 days.

  In 2020, the NYPD deployed a robotic dog manufactured by Boston Dynamics, marketed internally as Digidog. The robot carries cameras with real-time transmission, lights, and two-way communication, and it moves autonomously using onboard software. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and the American Civil Liberties Union condemned the deployment on privacy grounds. Facing sustained criticism and objections to its $94,000 lease cost, the NYPD announced on the 28th of April 2021 that it was terminating the contract. In April 2023, Mayor Eric Adams reversed that decision, describing the revival with the phrase "Digidog is out of the pound." Two robots were purchased at that point for a combined $750,000, funded through asset forfeiture proceeds.

  On the 24th of April 2021, U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres introduced federal legislation that would require police departments receiving federal funding to report their use of surveillance technology to the Department of Homeland Security and Congress, a proposal that arose directly from the Digidog controversy and that the NYPD's expanding surveillance infrastructure had helped bring into focus.