The NYPD is policing without borders.
Crime in notorious hot spots is falling across the Big Apple, and the NYPD is touting its new strategy that directs cops into targeted zones, regardless of the precinct boundaries they cross, officials said this week.
“The idea is, quite literally, to flood the zone,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told a crowd at a business breakfast in Manhattan Wednesday. “In a world of limited resources, you can’t flood the zone across a four-square-mile precinct, and you don’t need to, but you can do that across 10 problematic blocks.”
The plan, developed last summer, has helped drive down major crimes across Gotham by 15%, police officials said.
Six new “Specialty Borough Zones” were created by 1 Police Plaza brass utilizing crime data to map areas around “crime clusters,” Michael Lipetri, the NYPD’s chief of Crime Control Strategies, told The Post.
The areas often stretch across multiple precinct boundaries.
“Perpetrators don’t know precinct boundaries,” Lipetri said. “The analysis shows us where we need to be. So, we have some zones that encompass three precincts.”
The zones — Times Square in Midtown, 125th Street in Harlem, Roosevelt Avenue, downtown Flushing and Jamaica in Queens, and White Plains Road in the Bronx — have all seen reduced major crime, according to NYPD data.
“It comes down to putting police officers in the right areas … at the right times,” Lipetri said.
The new method, a collaboration among various NYPD units, is intended to make cops more fluid to operate outside the boundaries of the precincts they typically report into, officials said.
The department has been regularly sending 650 additional officers into these specialty zones since last summer.
The zones themselves are also fluid and can be shifted across the city when crime surges in a particular neighborhood. That means, for instance, more cops will be stationed in areas where pickpockets flourish during the summer months and holidays, Lipetri said.
“This is a multi-bureau approach,” Lipetri said, noting that transit, narcotics and intelligence officers play roles.
In high foot traffic areas like Times Square and 125th Street, cops are looking closely for grab-and-go thefts, like pickpocketing, Lipetri said.
As a result, grand larceny is down 32% and 30% in Times Square and 125th Street, respectively, so far this year, according to cops.
On Roosevelt Avenue, which The Post exposed as the notorious “Market of Sweethearts” for its open air sex trade, cops have an eye out for prostitution, Lipetri said.
Last week cops busted two women for promoting prostitution and three men for patronizing a prostitute in a basement brothel at 88-22 Roosevelt Ave., police sources said.
Photos of the brothel obtained by The Post show a seedy scene of cots separated by curtains.
Six sex workers were offered assistance and released. Everyone else was charged, the sources confirmed.
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