The NYPD is making nearly twice as many narcotics arrests per month since Mayor Eric Adams took office — a strategy police officials say is key to reducing community violence, but that has alarmed public defenders and advocates.
According to a Gothamist analysis of police data, police made 740 drug arrests citywide in January 2022 when Adams was inaugurated. Since then, there’s been a steady uptick in drug arrests, and in June, the most recent month for which data is available, there were 1,360. That’s an 84% increase.
Adams and police officials say they’ve upped the enforcement of drug crimes largely in response to emergency and non-emergency calls from residents — and that clamping down on those crimes is key to improving safety and quality of life in the city.
But critics say cracking down on street-level drug crimes harks back to a 1990s policing mindset that does little to address larger drug trafficking patterns and unfairly targets Black and Latino New Yorkers in poor neighborhoods.
Last month, an NYPD sergeant threw a picnic cooler at 30-year-old Eric Duprey from close range, knocking him off his moped and killing him. Police say the Duprey was fleeing from officers. Police say the incident happened while officers were trying to arrest someone for a $20 sale of crack cocaine, though an NYPD spokesperson would not say whether the person they were trying to arrest was Duprey or someone else.
Video footage shows Sgt. Erik Duran — a detective in the specialized Bronx Narcotics Unit — knocking Duprey off his bike. It does not show the events leading up to the incident. Duran has been suspended without pay. A spokesperson for the NYPD would not say whether officers made any arrests in connection with the incident.
The uptick in drug arrests is part of what Adams has said is a push by his office to use police to rein in a pandemic-era spike in crime.
In New York, possessing a small quantity of drugs is typically charged as a misdemeanor. Sales, on the…
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