Problem - Some communities felt that the enormous crime reductions that had occurred in New York since 1993 had happened less for their benefit than at their expense. This resulted in barriers, both to cooperation and to recruitment, among these same populations.
Solution - In May 2015, under the leadership of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, the NYPD began implementing Neighborhood Policing--putting the same cops into the same neighborhoods every day, to build relationships between the police and the public they serve. Two years later, Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill, chief architect of Neighborhood Policing, launched a public engagement campaign to involve the broader public in the transformation of the NYPD.
The campaign, branded as Build the Block, invited community members to have a voice in the safety of their neighborhoods, and to encourage attendance at regular sector meetings with the police officers assigned to their neighborhoods. While the campaign attempted to reach most people in NY, the center of the target was younger people of color. The campaign unfolded in two phases, May-July 2017 and January-June 2018.
Result - A full report of the documented results is available upon request, but after a three-month television campaign, a sentiment meter which was interviewing about 10,000 people a month throughout NYC found that the proportion of African Americans who said NYPD officers treated neighborhood residents with respect went up 19% (11 pt. rise, 58-69%). By the end of the second phase of the campaign, more than 1,000 neighborhood meetings had been conducted, which were attended by more than 23,000 people. The Build the Block campaign was created as a necessary prelude to an NYPD recruiting campaign, designed to target all segments, but especially African-American men, the most underrepresented group serving in the NYPD.