NYPD will disband its plainclothes anti-crime officers

Around 600 New York City Police Department officers are going to have to start putting on their uniforms.

The NYPD's plainclothes anti-crime unit, which patrols neighborhoods across the city, will be disbanded and reassigned, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea announced Monday. The move comes in direct response to ongoing protests against police brutality in the city, and widespread calls for reforming and rethinking policing across the U.S.

About 600 officers work in the anti-crime unit, and will be reassigned to detective work and "community policing," among other departments, Shea said in a Monday press conference. The move "will be felt immediately throughout the five district attorney's offices, it will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect," Shea said, calling it a "seismic shift in the culture of how the NYPD polices this great city."

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Members of the unit, which civil rights attorney described to ABC 7 New York as "just a legacy of street crime from the days of [former Mayor Rudy] Giuliani," are tasked with tracking and fighting violent crime in the city. But several "have been involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings," The New York Times notes, with an analysis from The Intercept reporting plainclothes officers are disproportionately tied to officer-involved shootings "despite being only a small fraction of the force."

Both Shea and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio have been pressured to cut the NYPD's budget amid the protests, but de Blasio has so far only introduced a series of reforms for the department. The New York City Council has proposed cutting $1 billion of the department's $6 billion budget.