With murders having reached a low point in Manhattan, the district attorney and police department have begun an unusually close collaboration aimed at driving down other crimes, including grand larceny, domestic violence and cybercrime, reports the New York Times. District Attorney Cyrus Vance and Police Commissioner William Bratton have teamed up senior prosecutors and police commanders to devise strategies for targeting the main offenders believed to be driving crime in these arenas, using the same intelligence-gathering techniques Vance has employed to dismantle street gangs.
The latest example was yesterday, when hundreds of police officers swept into two housing projects and arrested scores of people suspected of belonging to three warring street gangs. As part of a template for relations between the two agencies, the district attorney will provide the police with more than $20 million from drug forfeiture cases to pay for new technology. That money will go for security cameras, fiber-optic information systems and hand-held tablets that will feed police officers data about suspects. Police will provide the district attorney's Crime Strategies Unit access to more of the data it collects not only on reported crimes but also on suspects. Bratton called the new approach “extreme collaboration” and illustrated it by clasping his hands together. The number of murders in Manhattan fell to 39 last year, down from 70 in 2010.