On April 10 2025, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced the formation of the Quality of Life Division, a citywide police initiative to target low-level crime such as aggressive panhandling, “homelessness-related issues”, illegal parking, open drug use, and noise complaints.

The division comes in response to a citywide increase in non-emergency 311 reports over the last six years, according to the NYPD.

Adams noted “Since day one, this administration has been clear: We will not tolerate an atmosphere where anything goes, and today we are taking public safety to the next level,”  with Tisch adding that while the city had seen a historic decline in major crime, there was a need to face the issues “that don’t always make headlines, but deeply impact how people live.”

Bob Gangi of Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP) warned that the intensification of prosecuting quality-of-life crimes, also known as Broken Windows policing, will lead to further increased arrests of low-income New Yorkers of color. Since the NYPD’s founding, its essential function has been “to control and restrain and target marginalized groups in the city,” Gangi added, saying that resources could be better used to meet people’s material needs amidst the city’s cost-of-living crisis.

‘Q-Teams’ made up of officers from various community-focused divisions, such as neighborhood coordination, youth coordination, and traffic safety, will lead the division. The officers will undergo training to handle specific quality-of-life concerns, including encampments, abandoned vehicles, and reckless driving.

The Broken Windows theory proposes that allowing minor signs of disorder (such as a broken window) to go unchecked will lead to increased disorder and an eventual eruption of serious crime. It was first applied to the NYPD in 1993 under Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton (Tisch’s former mentor), and the increased enforcement of quality of life offenses is widely cited by proponents as the factor behind the steep decline in crime in the 1990s.

However, it has long been criticized. A 2016 report by the New York City Department of Investigations found no evidence of a link between increased quality-of-life-related criminal summonses and decreased felony crime, with former DOI Commissioner Mark Peters saying the study's results challenged deep-rooted assumptions about the systemic impact of certain police tactics.

While the department’s focus on quality of life offenses has been alive and well since the 90s, “the motivations for what the NYPD will focus on or make claims to is often driven by the political moment,” Gangi stated. He added that he felt the initiative came in part to make NYC, long misconstrued as dangerous, more attractive to outsiders.

Sofia Canonge, a resident of Woodside, Queens, spoke about the relationship between the targeting of quality-of-life issues and gentrification. She had witnessed an influx of younger white residents, many of them students, moving into Woodside. These new neighbors, some intolerant of existing community norms, would then call 311 for issues such as noise complaints, leading to increased criminalization and disappearance of a neighborhood’s culture. “I’m pretty sure these young people are okay with the Mayor’s administration doing that,” she said. “The Mayor’s administration is, on behalf of them, doing this.”

In 2011-2016, while the number of 311 quality of life complaints increased citywide, the rate of increase was higher in lower-income communities of color with the largest influx of white residents, such as Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Upper Manhattan, and pockets of southwest Brooklyn, a 2019 study by Community Service Society of New York found. 311 complaints about quality-of-life issues in these rapidly gentrifying communities were three times more likely to end in a summons or arrest.

Canonge also reported feeling that policing of minor offenses is aimed at the wrong target, and resources would be better spent on community services. She points to the criminalization of minor issues, such as food vending, while major crimes, such as human trafficking occurring on Roosevelt Avenue go largely unchecked.

Imani Henry of Equality for Flatbush, an organization resisting police violence and gentrification in Brooklyn, spoke about policing’s historic role in protecting private property. Henry described residents in the historically Caribbean communities of Flatbush and Crown Heights as having always been occupied by the police. When the rate of gentrification increased dramatically in 2010, this occupation tightened as police acted to solely protect the gentrifiers, noting that this protection of privileged interests was the reason the neighborhoods had seen so much police violence.

“Police have always been terror against black people and brown people. That's their only role, to provide a sense of unsafety and terror and violence and the fear of losing your life,” Henry added. “I think that's the piece of it, is sort of like, okay, what newfangled name are you going to call your terror? Is it massacre? Is it genocide? What is it? Name your new terror. Go ahead.”