Can’t ‘Beat’ This: Thousands of Cops Will Be Out Of Cars And On Foot Patrol This Summer

The NYPD will double the number of officers on foot posts this summer — 3,800 car-free beat cops across 40 precincts — evidence that NYPD leadership increasingly sees that putting cops on the beat is more effective than having them driving around.

The strategy began last summer with a smaller “violence reduction plan” that put 1,500 officers on the street — and resulted in a 47-percent decrease in shootings as the NYPD upped the number of foot cops to 2,300 (that number since dipped back to 1,800 officers).

Experts have long called for departments to increase their pedestrianized policing, writing that cops on foot “significantly reduce violent crime levels.”

At a press conference on Monday, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said her beefed-up foot patrols will strictly focus on combating violence and shootings tied to gangs.

Getting cops out of their squad cars and onto the streets is not merely a crime-prevention strategy, but can deliver other benefits. For instance, vehicle crashes involving cops cost taxpayers over $48 million in 2022, the last year for which data was readily available, Streetsblog reported.

Since then, total personal injury claims from crashes involving city vehicles have increased by around 25 percent. And the city spent a staggering $171 million on vehicle injury settlements involving its employees in 2025.

Foot posts might also save the city money on gas: In 2021, the NYPD spent more than $21 million on gasoline alone, leaving out repairs, vehicle replacement, retrofitting and other costs well known to car owners everywhere. Fuel costs have dropped since then, as the agency has added costly hybrid and electric vehicles to its fleet.

Despite the many reasons to wean officers from their vehicles, Tisch isn’t taking every cop’s foot off the gas.

The 3,800 officers on foot posts — over one-10th of the total badges in the department — will only patrol in specific neighborhoods to focus on curbing gun violence. The department is using its controversial criminal gang database to place them.

“We can predict where the retaliation will happen a few hours later or the next day,” Tisch boast at the press conference Monday.

Civil rights groups have criticized the NYPD for its use of the database, noting its seemingly inherent racial profiling. A report in October found that 98 percent of the individuals in the database are Black and Latino.

“Tisch is using digitized stop-and-frisk tactics as pretext to place more officers on the streets in Black and Latino neighborhoods,” said Jason Tapper, a legal fellow at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “Built entirely on bias, NYPD’s so-called gang database can’t possibly predict crime. NYPD labels people who haven’t committed any crime as ‘gang members’ based on stereotypes like where they live or what they wear.”

A spokesperson for the NYPD directed Streetsblog to the NYPD’s previous defense of the criminal group database.

“This information helps the Department interrupt cycles of violence and prevent acts of violent retaliation,” Michael Gerber, the department’s deputy commissioner of legal matters, testified last year. “This intelligence assists the investigators working to solve the crime, and even more important, helps us prevent retaliatory violence.”

It’s worth noting that the NYPD’s focus on shootings is disproportionate to the attention the agency pays towards other forms of violence. For example, shootings were down 24 percent last year to 668, but in the same calendar year, 47,557 people were injured and 205 people died in traffic crashes. Critics say the NYPD does not devote enough manpower to driving down that number.