Advertisement
Despairing police officers in one of New York’s most crime ridden districts have started telling storekeepers to call them directly rather than waste their time on 911. Morale among NYPD officers has plunged amid a tsunami of retail crime that has seen shoplifters routinely released after re-offending.
Thousands of officers have handed in their badges over the last three years leaving nearly every precinct in the city understaffed and suffering from spiraling response times. Now some cops in New York’s 46th precinct are telling storekeepers to call them directly if they want them to make a difference.
‘One of my colleagues caught a guy shoplifting and instead of calling 911 he called the crime prevention team and they were there in five minutes,’ said Bronx grocer Eddie Vargas told the NYP . Police in the city now take an average of 16 minutes and 12 seconds to respond to a crime in progress after a 911 call is received, the latest figures reveal. That is up by nearly two minutes on the figure for 2023.
But the response time for a ‘non-critical’ crime, such as shoplifting, has reached a glacial 31 minutes and 54 seconds, a full six minutes longer than in the fall of 2022. That is unlikely to improve any time soon after the city council insisted on imposing new anti-racism measures that critics say will leave police drowning in bureaucracy.
The ‘How Many Stops Act’ will require officers to record the age, race, and gender of anyone they stop, even during low-level encounters. ‘This is one more step toward the city council goal: destroy the world’s best police department,’ said Paul DiGiacomo, the NYPD Detectives Endowment Association president. ‘Thanks to the politicians the divide between the police and citizens will grow. And so will the retirements of our best most experienced detectives. Heartbreaking.’
Angry storekeepers marched on the 46th precinct HQ last month to vent their frustrations at local inspector Jeremy Scheublin. He ‘understood our frustration about not seeing any results after calling 911 and the system not considering (retail crime) a priority,’ said Bronx Fine Fare owner Carlos Collado.
Detectives at the base have now set up a WhatsApp chat group allowing retailers to upload pictures and details of their tormentors in real time. ‘The idea is to aggregate these crimes so we know when someone has exceeded the misdemeanor threshold,’ Collado explained. Shoplifting is treated as a misdemeanor rather than a felony in New York unless the value stolen tops $1,000 in a single theft.
That and the city’s 2019 bail reforms which eliminated cash bail requirements for shoplifters facing theft charges have left storekeepers repeatedly seeing the same offenders in their stores. But they hope that police across New York will follow the lead of their colleagues in the Bronx. ‘We are trying to visit every precinct in the city to make them aware of this program,’ said Vargas. City Hall played down the latest attempts to bypass the bureaucracy, urging people to keep their faith in 911.
Want more stories like this from the Daily Mail? Visit our profile page and hit the follow button above for more of the news you need.
