More NYPD officers are coming to the Bronx. Not everyone is happy.

Angel Bermudez is 63 and says police officers still stop and question him as he sits on his stoop in Mott Haven smoking marijuana and playing music from a small, portable speaker.

“I could be sitting here, and they'll come up to me like, ‘What you doing? Do you live here?’ and whatnot," Bermudez said. “And I tell him, ‘My name is Jose Angel Bermudez. Have a good day, officer. See you later. Bye.’"

For years, Bronx residents have complained about being stopped and questioned by police even when they are not breaking the law. Some precincts in the borough have registered civilian complaints against officers at among the highest rates in the city.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch have announced a plan to add nearly 200 new officers to the borough. Tisch said the reinforcements are necessary because of a high volume of emergency calls in the area. She said the department will also expand specialized units, including homicide squads, narcotics teams and units that focus on illegal guns.

Two public safety scholars who spoke to Gothamist had mixed opinions about the new deployment. One said the plan risks worsening tensions between police and residents and diverges from Mamdani’s campaign promise to bolster alternatives to policing through community-based groups. Another said there’s potential to strengthen the relationship between police and residents.

Bronx residents who spoke to Gothamist were also mixed, with some skeptical of the plan and others open to more police — if they do not needlessly harass residents.

Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College professor who advised Mamdani’s transition team, said he’s especially concerned about bolstering specialty policing teams like narcotics and those tasked with confiscating illegal guns. Similar units in the past have earned a reputation for abuse and violence.

“ It is going to result in a lot more harassment, low-level arrests, and ticketing of folks in the Bronx who may have nothing to do with the violence problems there,” Vitale said.

Two police zones

When she announced that additional officers would be deployed to the Bronx, Tisch also said the borough would be divided into two new policing zones, one in the North Bronx and the other in the South Bronx. Creating the two zones will match what the department already does in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, and will allow police to better deploy their resources and strategies in the Bronx, Tisch said.

In an appearance on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show earlier this week, Mamdani said the additional officers will be added to the Bronx as part of that new split.

Building relationships

During his campaign, Mamdani said he would reduce overall NYPD overtime spending and keep the NYPD's head count stable.

But since Mamdani took office, he’s approved 12-hour shifts for officers during some of the World Cup and backed Tisch's expansion of the police force.

City Hall spokesperson Sam Raskin said the NYPD’s head count will naturally fluctuate as large groups of officers are hired and retire. As a result, there will be times when the department grows above authorized head count, he added.

In March, Mamdani announced the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety, a scaled-down version of the standalone city agency he hoped to create to limit the number of emergency calls that police officers respond to. The administration has said the office will scale up and noted other current city agencies began in this manner.

Jeffrey Butts, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said there’s a potential benefit to adding more officers to the Bronx if they’re able to build relationships with residents.

“The main benefit of doing that, in my view, would be increasing the familiarity of officers that work that territory and the people who live there,” he said. On the other hand, he said, “ If the increase is just more patrol cars rolling through neighborhoods and watching for crimes that are being committed, that's just more police presence.”

Butts said he’s hopeful Mamdani is still doing work in the background to build out a more comprehensive public safety network. But he acknowledged it’s risky for mayors to not listen to law enforcement.

“If you're an elected official, especially in an executive position like that, you have to pay attention to law enforcement because they will come after you,” he said.

But Mamdani’s actions have drawn criticism from police reform advocates, who say the mayor is not governing the way he campaigned.

Vitale said he’s disappointed the mayor is leaning into policing, rather than prioritizing a community safety approach he put forward during the campaign.

“I really hope that, going forward, that the mayor goes back to his pledge to shifting more resources into community-based strategies,” he said. “There's a lot of evidence emerging nationally that intensive policing actually directly undermines the work of community-based violence interventionists.”

Samy Feliz, a police reform advocate whose brother Allan Feliz was killed by a police officer in the Bronx in 2019, agreed with Vitale.

“In your campaign, you ran on these public safety promises that you are currently backsliding on,” Feliz said of Mamdani. “That you haven't been able to fulfill for us.”

Raskin, the City Hall spokesperson, said the administration is investing in violence prevention and alternatives to police-only responses. He noted Mamdani has repeatedly advocated for police officers to focus on serious crimes, while the city expands community-based interventions for other issues.

Double-edged sword

On a recent afternoon in Mott Haven, tension between police and residents was visible. As a number of NYPD officers handcuffed a man and ushered him to a police car outside the J.P. Mitchel Houses on Willis Avenue, several men outside of a deli across the street heckled the officers and shouted at them to let him go.

Most crime in the neighborhood is down compared to the same period last year, but the 40th Precinct has still had five murders and 13 shootings since the start of the year, according to the most recent NYPD crime statistics.

While Mott Haven has historically had one of the city's highest poverty rates, an influx of new high-rise housing developments has brought new residents to the neighborhood, which is just across the Harlem River from Manhattan. New bars and restaurants have opened in recent years, including one offering a signature cocktail for $20.

Bronx residents had a variety of opinions on the city’s plan to station more officers in the borough.

Carlos Serrano, 48, said he was shot in the leg in the 1990s in the borough and backed adding more officers to the streets. He spoke to Gothamist outside of his mother’s apartment on Alexander Avenue, down the block from a mural memorializing Ramarley Graham, an 18-year-old shot and killed by an NYPD officer in the Bronx in 2012.

“They need to patrol more. If they patrol the streets, it'll keep the crime down,” Serrano told Gothamist.

Jamieson Davids, an attorney who has lived in the neighborhood for three years, was skeptical.

“I think there's way too many police in the Bronx right now,” Davids said while waiting for a city bus. “I think there's a lot of other things the city could be doing with their money.”

Bronx resident Fiji Swanson said he moved to the borough about a year ago from southern Virginia, where he said he faced more harassment from police than in New York.

Swanson said he understands police can keep residents safe from criminals, but said an influx of officers could be a “double-edged sword” because the officers themselves could harass residents if they police aggressively.

“People shouldn't be bothered for no reason by gangsters or police,” he said. “ But in the reality of how the ghetto is, in any ghetto in the United States, you can be bothered, if you are a person of color, you can be bothered by gangsters or police for no reason.”