Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice Strategic Plan: Fiscal Years 2019-2021
“The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as the police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
When it comes to crime, incarceration and inequality, our city is at a reckoning point. New York is safer than it has been in decades, and with the number of people in our jails dropping as well, we have learned how to have more safety with less jail.
However, a fundamental inequality overhangs these successes: who is safe and where it is safe is distributed unevenly across the city. The urgent question now is how we create more safety with more equality.
This plan offers an answer, rooted in building safety from the neighborhood up and understanding safety as more than the absence of crime. This strategy is undergirded by four priority areas:
- Improving public safety
- Safely reducing unnecessary incarceration
- Promoting fairness
- Strengthening justice system coordination
Read our report to learn more about these priorities, related action items, and highlights to date.
