Feliz and Gerber on felony assault causes and prevention challenges

What policing strategies are in place to help bring these numbers down?

And also, what are factors that have led to this increase and have also kept these numbers increasing over these past six years?

So with the felony assaults, like I said, we're driven, this department is data driven, and we're looking to

We're looking to make arrests on these felony assaults as quickly as possible, and we are doing that at an 80% rate.

That's an all-time high.

This is, like I said, a direct result of working with the detectives, the police officers on patrol, and identifying the perpetrators and bringing them to custody as soon as we can.

And what would you say has led to this increase, though, and has also allowed these numbers to keep climbing over the years?

No, I think, Chair, I think it's a hard question to answer, right?

I mean, the PD, as Inspector Howe was describing the data and the arrest data, right, we're doing our part.

We're arresting 80% of felony assault cases.

It's an incredibly high number.

We do have a recidivism issue, as the inspector discussed.

And that does present a real challenge for us, right?

I mean, you can imagine the frustration.

We go and arrest someone for felony assault.

They're back out.

They do it again, second time.

They do it a third time.

And there are other actors in the criminal justice system and a little broader whole of government perspective on this, right?

There's in terms of the prosecutors and the judges and the part that they play in this process, obviously a critical role.

There's a whole government question in terms of before that person goes and commits a felony assault, right?

You know, how did they get to that point?

You know, again, other city agencies and other offices that sort of address those types of issues.

You know, we, like I said, the PD is doing its part.

I also will point out that, you know, felony assault presents particular challenges from a prevention perspective, right?

So if you think about, think about shootings, think about murders, think about burglary or robbery patterns, think about GLA patterns through crew activity, right?

We identify those patterns, we put the cops in the right places, that can have a tremendous prevention effect.

Felony assaults often are quite different, right?

They're often one-offs.

It can be, you know, there's a dispute that escalates, right?

It starts as a verbal dispute, it gets physical, now there's a serious physical injury.

We're talking about an assault too.

someone's having an encounter with a police officer and all of a sudden, you know, that person is hitting a cop.

The person's, someone's on the train and for whatever reason they're getting hostility with an MTA worker and now they're assaulting an MTA worker, right?

So we investigate those very aggressively.

I've had a lot of success in solving those crimes, as the inspector said.

But from a prevention perspective,

That is much more challenging when it comes to felony assaults.