Street Crimes Unit

The New York Police Department's Street Crime Unit (motto: "We Own The Night") was a plain clothes anti-crime unit. The SCU was formed in 1971 as the "City Wide Anti-Crime Unit" and operated for decades tasked with the apprehension of armed felons from the streets of New York City, however it was disbanded in 2002, following the controversial killing of Amadou Diallo.

On January 14th 1999^[1] shortly before the Diallo incident, two officers from the Street Crimes Unit fired eight shots at Russell Jones, a rapper with The Wu-Tang Clan better known as Ol' Dirty Bastard, and accused him of firing at them after they stopped his car in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Mr. Jones was cleared by a grand jury and insists that the officers had been scared by his cellular phone. No weapons or shell casings besides those of the officers were found in the vehicle or near the scene.^[2]

Methods

From 1971-99, the unit was made up of 60 to 100 members. In 2000 it expanded to 300 members. It employed innovative methods, including possibly the earliest coordinated sting operations to elicit potential muggers. According to Criminal Justice Today: "The SCU disguised officers as potential mugging victims and put them in areas where they were most likely to be attacked."^[3]

The SCU would go into high-crime neighborhoods and make a much larger number of firearms-related arrests in comparison to regular police departments. In 1973, the SCU won recognition as an Exemplary Project from the U.S. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The LEAA was the United States' leading crime-reduction and crime-prevention funding agency. "In its first year, the SCU made nearly 4,000 arrests and averaged a successful conviction rate of around 80%. Perhaps the most telling statistic was the 'average officer day per arrest'." The SCU invested 8.2 days in each arrest, whereas the department average for all uniformed officers was 167 days."^[4]

References