#NYPD Community Affairs chief wants ‘community buy-in’ to halt violence

Enlarge Image

Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, center, speaks with Brooklyn residents in 2019.
Gregory P. Mango

The new head of the NYPD’s Community Affairs Bureau said the city needs community “buy-in” to stop the shootings that have rattled Gotham for weeks.

“We have to have buy-in from the community,” Assistant Chief Jeffrey Maddrey said at police headquarters in One Police Plaza Tuesday.

“The community wants to us to go out there and do things a certain way. They want us to be respectful. They want us to be fair. They want us to show them empathy and compassion and show a little patience, and I understand that.”

But the community has to understand that if there’s not compliance “the community has to support us when we have to make an arrest,” he said.

Maddrey said he’s already talking to community members throughout the city to set up meetings about how to “re-imagine police” to try to stop the shootings and homicides. He said he also plans to sit down with young people to try to convince them to put down the guns.

“We saw a tremendous amount of violence,” he said.  “Violence that we haven’t seen in many years here over the weekend. And it’s really going to take a community police strategy to reduce this crime. And that’s what I’m looking forward to doing.”

Maddrey, who has been with the NYPD for 30 years, said he hopes to sit down with community leader to “build the police service that they desire,” he said.

“And I’ve been speaking to a lot of people who’ve been extremely supportive of the police, even during difficult times,” he said. “They just want to see the best of us as we want to see the best of them. We want to work together. So that’s my new role.”

But he acknowledged that the police have some “fractured relationships” in the city.

“And that’s going to be one of the challenges for myself for the Community Affairs Bureau and for this whole department,” he said. “And I see myself sort of in the middle, the one that’s going to help with the introduction, between the great people in this community who want to have a relationship with the cops and the cops who maybe a little disenfranchised and a little discouraged right now. Let them know there are a lot of people who support us.”

He also plans to make his new bureau more integral to crime fighting than ever, sending his officers to the scene of every shooting and homicide, he said.

“Our community affairs officers sometimes just have a way of connecting with people,” he said.

“We learned a lot of information over the years by using community affairs as a way to communicate with our families, our victims – people who are hurting. So it’s always been a part of this crime fighting strategy. My job is to make sure we’re doing it everywhere.”

Maddrey said he decided to become a police officer after a cop came to his Queens high school and encouraged him to fill out an application.

He had one of his toughest days on the new job when he met the heart-broken mother of murdered high school basketball player Brandon Hendricks, he said.

“This young man was destined for greatness,” he said. “And I had to look his mother in the eyes last week.”

Maddrey started in the 110 Precinct and has also served in the 60, 67, 70, 72, 73, 75 and 77 Precincts, the Brooklyn South Task Force, Patrol Borough Brooklyn South, and Patrol Borough Brooklyn North.