With New York City experiencing a spike in violent crime over the past year, the police department’s new Neighborhood Safety Teams will take to the streets this week. Even before their shoes hit the pavement, debate has been raging over the effectiveness of the effort. 

While some say Mayor Adams’s strategy is designed to avoid repeating past mistakes, critics on the left fear a return to the problems associated with plainclothes anti-crime units and the stop, question, and frisk policy. 

The mayor’s “Blueprint to End Gun Violence,” released earlier this year, describes the teams as “additional support” to regular police officers across the five boroughs, “with a special focus on the 30 precincts where 80 percent of violence occurs.” 

As Mr. Adams often says, this is part of his push to dam the “many rivers” that feed the “sea of crime.”

There will be 168 new officers taking to the streets this week and 300 more will join after a weeklong training session. The new teams are made up of highly trained and specialized officers with a focus on removing illegal guns from the streets, according to the police department.

“They are extensively trained in minimal force techniques,” the NYPD’s chief of department, Kenneth Corey, said. 

“Communication skills is a big part of it, courtroom testimony training, and as the commissioner indicated, constitutional policing,” he added.

The nature of these teams has given rise to comparisons to the plainclothes anti-crime units, which were disbanded in 2020, and accusations of “over policing” from activists who believe that they will be ineffective at stopping crime.

“The re-emergence as part of this plan of the NYPD’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, whose members have historically harassed and killed New Yorkers, such as Amadou Diallo and Eric Garner, is deeply troubling,” the NAACP legal defense fund’s president, Sherrilyn Ifill, said.

The new teams will be wearing a modified police uniform consisting of a NYPD polo shirt and baseball cap or knit hat. Both their shirts and hats will clearly identify them as police. They will patrol in undercover cars.

“The political will to address gun violence in our communities seems to only gain traction when the solutions being offered are more policing, more prosecuting, and more imprisonment,” a criminal justice activist, Carl Hamad-Lipscombe, said in February after Mr. Adams met with President Biden to discuss crime-fighting strategies. 

Critics of the mayor’s new safety teams have also drawn comparisons to the NYPD’s stop, question, and frisk tactics, which were the subject of a federal lawsuit in 2013. 

Judge Shira Scheindlin found the policy violated the Constitution’s 4th and 14th Amendments by unfairly targeting minorities, emphasizing the “human toll” of the policy.

The police commissioner at the time, Raymond Kelley, defended the policy in his memoir “Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City.”

“Was it really plausible that the most diverse police department on earth, with officers hailing from 106 different countries and representing every imaginable race, would engage in a massive conspiracy to conduct street stops to deny minorities their Constitutional rights?” Mr. Kelly wrote.

Upon taking office in 2014, Mayor de Blasio dropped the city’s appeal in the stop, question, and frisk case. His predecessor, Mayor Bloomberg, apologized for the policy in the lead-up to his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in 2019.

Ms. Ifill, for one, says that Mr. Adams’s approach “will only lead to the over-policing that New Yorkers who experienced stop-and-frisk know all too well.” 

Mr. Adams was at one point a vocal advocate for making some use of stop, question, and frisk policies — going so far as to write an op-ed on the subject  last year — but has since excluded mentioning the policy while discussing policing.

It is clear that the mayor is aware of the comparisons to the older policies.

“We have to get this right.” Mr. Adams told Fox5’s “Good Day New York.” “If you expeditiously have people in specialized units hit the streets without a very thorough, well-organized training, you’re really going to exaggerate the problem, and I’m not going to do that.” 

Others support the mayor’s new policies, believing they are substantially different from those of his predecessors.

“I don’t think these new teams are the same as the old anti-crime teams,” policing analyst Richard Aborn told The New York Sun. “One of the reasons the old anti-crime teams got into trouble is because there wasn’t any specialized selection process or training.”

He added: “Stop and frisk is always used but it has to be done properly — properly meaning within the confines of the Constitution.”

If nothing else, the police department is aware of the concerns regarding the new policies and have indicated that this time will be different.

“We actually had to take a look at the mistakes of the past and what we needed to change,” the NYPD commissioner, Keechant Sewell, said. “The officers are being trained in the Constitution, in community interaction, car stops, use of force.”