The Central Park Precinct Is New York’s Strangest

The officers of the NYPD may be “New York’s Finest,” but the precinct inside Central Park is definitely New York’s Weirdest.

Though it occupies just 843 acres, Central Park comprises its own NYPD precinct. The Central Park Precinct, formerly the 22nd Precinct, is housed in a landmarked former stable and is staffed by a surprisingly large group of officers and detectives who do … not much in the way of crime-fighting.

Yes, the precinct is the second-smallest in the city, but its weekly arrest and major crime reports are far lower than any other precinct — indeed far lower than even the next lowest precinct. The park precinct has around 80 officers, five detectives and 20 sergeant and other supervisors, a sizable number, given that officers in this bucolic precinct make around half the annual arrests of their peers in other precincts, according to an analysis of NYPD data.

Part of that, obviously, makes sense for officers patrolling what is ostensibly a big garden, rather than an urban precinct with 50,000 people, like the slightly smaller Seventh Precinct on the Lower East Side.

It wasn’t always thus: In the 1990s, the Central Park Precinct routinely reported more than 350 major crimes every year — 200 robberies and 170 grand larcenies were committed in the park in 1993, for instance.

But the ghosts of the 1990s have been banished, and “Central Park” is no longer a synonym for urban crime. Last year, the precinct logged just 11 robberies and 45 grand larcenies, an 85-percent drop from 1993. Overall, the seven major crimes are down 82 percent in the park between 1993 and 2025 — a sharper reduction than the 72-percent drop in major crimes citywide over the same period.

This year, the precinct has experienced one murder, four rapes and zero shootings. There has been a slight increase in overall crime — thanks to 69 robberies and grand larcenies through Oct. 11 this year, up from 49 in the same period last year — but the overall numbers of incidents (88) is tiny compared to other precincts.

So far this year in the Seventh Precinct, for example, there have been 756 total incidents though the same period, including 440 robberies and grand larcenies.

That lack of crime means fewer arrests: Central Park officers average 4.1 arrests per year compared to about nine per year for the average cop outside the greensward.

Officers who make few arrests don’t get promoted as quickly. As such, the patrol officers currently assigned to the Central Park Precinct are older, having spent 14 years in the NYPD, on average, compared with the city-wide average of 8.9 years of service among precinct officers.

And the Central Park Precinct’s staff is small: our analysis of different open data sets shows that allotment of the Central Park Precinct is around 30-percent smaller than the average precinct (you could fit six Central Park Precincts inside the 45th Precinct in the Bronx).

On the plus side, fewer of the precinct’s patrol officers — 34 percent — have faced complaints of misconduct than peer officers city-wide, 62 percent of whom have at least one complaint before the Civilian Complaint Review Board. CCRB records suggest that it has been years since a Central Park Precinct officer faced a complaint of misconduct for action taken in the park.

But it’s a different story for the precinct’s supervisors: Around half the sergeants and lieutenants in the precinct have CCRB complaints — and almost all those complaints are from before the supervisors worked in Central Park, suggesting that Central Park is a dumping ground. City records show that almost half those misconduct complaints were substantiated.

The head of the precinct, Deputy Inspector Timothy Magliente, faced one unsubstantiated complaint of wrongful use of physical force in 2016, long before he worked in Central Park.

Magliente was also named in a lawsuit later setttled by the city: He was one of two sergeants on the scene in 2014 when a man standing outside NYCHA housing was arrested for not providing his ID. The lawsuit said that the man told the officers the ID was in his apartment, but the officers arrested him without allowing him to retrieve it. The city settled the suit for $8,150.

One former NYPD officer, who asked not to be identified because they never worked in the precinct, offered a simple explanation to Streetsblog for the complaint trends among the cops of the Central Park Precinct.

“It’s a plumb post for a patrol cop,” the officer said, “but for a sergeant or lieutenant, you’ll never get the numbers to get you promoted further up the chain.”

The precinct’s social media suggests that the Central Park cops do a lot of public outreach with little need to engage in targeted enforcement operations. The officers are also deployed to big events inside the park, such as the annual Marathon and the Met Gala, where the only crime, typically, is that against good taste.

One expert, a former CCRB investigator, noted that the Central Park Precinct has no residents (well, at least officially, so it has no need for the specialized domestic violence and sex crime teams staffed by other precincts and commands. In fact, the Central Park Precinct has the fewest detectives of any precinct in the city with less than one-third of the average detective headcount.

The precinct house, located along the 86th Street transverse, was once a horse stable designed by Calvert Vaux and built in 1871. The building, which became a precinct house in 1936, is famous for its exterior High Victorian Gothic polychromic masonry, which is a thing.

The building is the oldest precinct house in the city, and lives on, thanks to a $50-million renovation completed in 2013 that added a large glass atrium to the station and centralized air-conditioning, a rarity among some police precincts.

In 2022, the precinct unveiled a memorial wall to celebrate the precinct’s eight officers that have been killed in the line of duty. The last line-of-duty death for an officer assigned to the Central Park Precinct was Det. Steven McDonald, who died in 2017 due to complications from a 1986 shooting that led to his paralysis. McDonald was shot by a teenager, one of a group of teens that he was questioning about bicycle thefts in Central Park. The new training academy was named for McDonald earlier this year.

Despite their leafy setting, officers posted in Central Park outdo themselves for seizing public space to park their cars — something Streetsblog has written about since the very beginning of our humble blog.

Most recently, in 2018, Streetsblog reported that the Bridle Path and the 86th Street Transverse were littered with cops’ personal vehicles, less than a year after then-Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to rid the park of cars. The anonymous social media account Placard Abuse found the same — and it uploaded a video that year of an officer intimidating a member of the public who was photographing officers’ personal cars.

We reached out to NYPD to discuss the quirks of the Central Park Precinct, and got only a statement from an NYPD spokesperson who, as is the practice at 1 Police Plaza, did not provide their name.

“Precinct officers and Community Affairs officers, especially during the summer months, go into the park on foot to remind park visitors to secure their valuables and to never hand anyone your phone,” the spokesperson wrote. “Protecting park visitors and addressing the crime conditions involving robberies and larcenies remains a priority.”

Good to know.