No, the NYPD is not practicing Critical Race Theory when talking about CRT over social media. The department is actually referring to the Community Response Team, but any confusion is warranted — almost no information on what the specialized unit actually does is publicly available.
On Nov. 26, the NYC Department of Investigation’s Office of the Inspector General issued a report on the lack of transparency for CRT’s written policies. In fact, the NYPD website does not mention the unit at all. Yet CRT is regularly featured by the department’s social media pages, including in a reality TV-esque video series in 2022 titled “True Blue: NYPD’s Finest.” Investigators say the NYPD confirmed to them the absence of official or written policies for the unit.
“The lack of transparency regarding NYPD’s Community Response Team risks non-compliance with the law, ethical breaches, and negative policing outcomes,” said NYPD Inspector General (OIG-NYPD) Jeanene L. Barrett in her statement. “Since its inception more than two years ago, CRT has expanded significantly, with a team in every patrol borough, without a corresponding expansion of publicly available information about the work of this unit.”
Little is known about the unit’s selection process, although the ranks ballooned from 16 officers in 2022 to 165 this past May. Notably, Jonathan Diller, the slain officer whose funeral was attended by President-elect Donald Trump earlier this year, was a member, revealed by Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry’s X post describing CRT as “a specialized team of highly trained officers whose mission it is to restore order.”
From interviewing unit members and based on official statements, the OIG-NYPD gleaned the unwritten mission statement centered around responding to “quality-of-life” concerns which the department describes as enforcement ranging from addressing campus protests and homeless encampments to removing illegal motorbikes and ghost cars from the streets. It is unclear how much role the unit played in this spring’s pro-Palestinian student demonstrations or the recent padlocking of illicit smokeshops, which fall under such jurisdiction.
To be clear, CRT is not under investigation for misconduct as a unit and there are no rules mandating transparency. But divulging information on policies and procedures is good practice, says Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber. The probe is largely preemptive as knowledge of mission statements and access to disciplinary records would provide a better understanding of potential concerns the unit poses.
“The goal is to address any issues, policies, procedures or the lack thereof that might lead to a situation where there is misconduct or negative outcome either for an officer or for the public,” said Strauber over the phone. “A lot of the work that we do here is to try to get ahead of those outcomes, and where we see an absence of policies and procedures, I would say [it’s] a red flag, an area where the department could do better and hopefully prevent a potential problem in the future.
“We want to look at disciplinary history, both outside of before officers come to CRT and while they’re in CRT, and I’m not aware of specific problematic conduct [of] either, but we also haven’t studied those records.”
The report points to the contentious relationship between previous specialized units and Black and Brown New Yorkers as a concern for CRT. These teams are often characterized by aggressive policing far beyond typical patrol cop duties. The Street Crime Unit notoriously killed unarmed Guinean student Amadou Diallo in 1999 before disbanding three years later. The still active Strategic Response Unit faced a deluge of misconduct complaints during the 2020 George Floyd protests and more recently drew criticism for a militarized response against Columbia University and City College student protests this year.
In fact, the OIG-NYPD notes community concern on CRT, particularly from Black and Brown youth who are skeptical due to the NYPD’s history with specialized units; this is why transparency is particularly important when addressing those anxieties.
“You want to have clear policies and procedures [by having] guard rails around what they can do,” said Strauber. “You want them to have specialized training so that they can do the things that they’re being tasked with. You also want to track their success in ways that are kind of concrete and measurable. So those were the sorts of fundamental things we wanted to know about the unit.
“What we found, in many cases, was an absence of those kinds of basic procedural safeguards. So there’s no mission statement. There are no policies and procedures specifically applicable to this specialized unit. And again, that is in contrast with some of the other specialized units within the police department.”
An NYPD spokesperson responded to the report by thanking the Department of Investigation for reviewing CRT and says the department looks forward to considering the recommendations.
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.