[7] The NYPD is headquartered at 1 Police Plaza, located on Park Row in Lower Manhattan near City Hall.

[12] The NYPD has a history of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct, which critics argue persists till the present day.

[citation needed] During Richard Enright's tenure as commissioner, the country's first Shomrim Society, a fraternal organization of Jewish police officers, was founded in the NYPD in 1924.

[19][20][21] In the mid-1980s, the NYPD began to police street-level drug markets much more intensively, leading to a sharp increase in incarceration.

[23] In 1994, the NYPD developed the CompStat computer system for tracking crime geographically, which is now in use by other police departments in the United States and Canada.

In 1998, the New York City Department of Education's School Safety Division became part of the NYPD's Community Affairs Bureau.

Officers graduate from the Police Academy after five and a half to six months (or sometimes more) of training in various academic, physical, and tactical fields.

Civilian employees of the NYPD have their ID card photos taken against a blue background, signifying that they are not commissioned to carry a firearm.

[more detail needed] Of 21,603 officers on patrol: Of 5,164 detectives: Of 4,376 sergeants: Of 1,635 lieutenants: Of 360 captains: Of 101 police chiefs: As a rule, NYPD officers can reside in New York City as well as Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, Suffolk and Nassau counties and approximately half of them live outside the city (51% in 2020, up from 42% in 2016).

[51] The NYPD has a broad array of specialized services, including the Emergency Service Unit, K9, harbor patrol, air support, bomb squad, counter-terrorism, criminal intelligence, anti-gang, anti-organized crime, narcotics, public transportation, and public housing units.

[10] There were 95,606 major felonies reported in 2019, compared to over half a million per year when crime in New York City peaked during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.

[57] In 2017, the Quinnipiac poll found that New York City voters approve of the way NYPD, in general, does its job by a margin of 67–25%.

[59] The NYPD has a long history of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct as well as discrimination based on gender, race, and religion.

He filed a federal suit against the department, which the city settled before trial in 2015, also giving him back pay for the period when he was suspended.

[70] New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the police reforms into law on June 12, 2020, which he described as "long overdue".

[71][70] In 2020 during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, many NYPD officers refused to wear face masks while policing protests related to racial injustice, contrary to the recommendations of health experts and authorities.

The owner said that associate director Ray Martin of the mayor's Office of Entertainment and Nightlife told him that he could pay Commissioner Caban's brother for better treatment from police.

[82] Three days before resigning, Caban watered down the NYPD's misconduct rules, reducing penalties for officers "guilty of abusing authority, using offensive language, failing to take a civilian complaint, and conducting an unlawful search.

[87] According to a 2021 FiveThirtyEight analysis, New York City spent at least an average of US$170 million annually in settlements related to police misconduct over ten years.

[90] NYPD also maintains the Domain Awareness System, a network that provides information and analytics to police, drawn from a variety of sources, including a network of 9,000 publicly and privately owned license plate readers, surveillance cameras, shotspotter data, NYPD databases, radiation, and chemical sensors.

[92] The Domain Awareness System of surveillance was developed as part of Lower Manhattan Security Initiative in a partnership between the NYPD and Microsoft.

[95] The robotic dog has cameras which send back real-time footage along with lights and two-way communication, and it is able to navigate on its own using artificial intelligence.

[100] Deployment of Digidog led to condemnation from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and the American Civil Liberties Union due to privacy concerns.

[99] The NYPD states that the robot is meant for hostage, terrorism, bomb threat, and hazardous material situations, and that it was properly disclosed to the public under current law.

[99] Following continued pushback against Digidog, including opposition to the system's $94,000 price tag, the NYPD announced on April 28, 2021, that its lease would be terminated.

[104] The Smith & Wesson 5946 semi-automatic 9mm with a double action only (DAO) trigger, was issued to recruits in the past;[105] however, the pistol has been discontinued.

Officers and detectives belonging to the NYPD's Emergency Service Unit, Counter-terrorism Bureau and Strategic Response Group are armed with a range of select-fire weapons and long guns, such as the Colt M4A1 carbine and similar-pattern Colt AR-15 rifles, Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, and the Remington Model 700 bolt-action rifle.

From 1926 until 1986 the standard weapons of the department were the Smith & Wesson Model 10 and the Colt Official Police .38 Special revolvers with four-inch barrels.

Female officers had the option to choose to carry a three-inch barrel revolver instead of the normal four-inch model due to its lighter weight.

After the switch in 1994 to semi-automatic pistols, officers who privately purchased revolvers before January 1, 1994, were allowed to use them for duty use until August 31, 2018.