It’s the ‘finest’ Washington Square Park has looked in a long time.
The NYPD flooded the Greenwich Village landmark with 68 additional cops Friday — in a 24/7 crackdown aimed at vanquishing junkies from the beleaguered space, which dealers and addicts alike turned into a veritable narcotics supercenter.
“My goal is to kick them out of the Sixth Precinct entirely,” the new commanding officer, Capt. Nicholas D. Minor, told a cheering crowd of Village residents. “Let’s get them out of there.”
Thirty police officers will now be patrolling the park on foot by day, during a first shift from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with another 30 coming in for an evening shift from 4pm to midnight. An additional eight cover a night shift from midnight to 8 a.m. — all drawn from other precincts.
Officers from at least eight different precincts were seen Friday in the park, with some from as far as the 84th precinct in Brooklyn Heights. The officers were told they would be assigned to Washington Square Park for the next month – for now.
A NYPD mobile command center was set up by the park’s iconic arch on Washington Square North, and officers were posted at every park corner, entrance and fountain.
In addition to the 68 rank and file officers, nine commanders have been assigned to the operation — a lieutenant and three sergeants for each of the morning and afternoon shifts, and a sergeant for the night shift, Minor said.
The scene in the famously liberal park went off the rails, even by its standards, during the pandemic, when the combined effect of criminal-friendly legislation and the worsening opioid crisis gripping the nation descended the space into a depraved drug den, with addicts openly shooting up and dealers brazenly plying their trade in broad daylight.
Residents rejoiced at Friday’s sea of blue, which follows years of community outcry and reporting on the issue by The Post.
“It’s about damn time!” said Washington Square Association President Trevor Sumner. “For the first time in years, I’ve seen optimism among the residents.”
“I think it’s wonderful news,” Lilian Migliorini, a Village resident, told The Post. “It’s a great, right step. But I think people need to be tempered with ‘okay, so how long do we have them for before they get pulled for something else.’”
Cops made a record 575 narcotics arrests in the Sixth Precinct, which includes the park, in the first nine months of the year — an average of as many as two a day and a more than 50% increase from 2024, according to NYPD data. Many of the busts came in and around the park,
But there’s only so much the NYPD can do, critics noted. Soft on crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg routinely sends dealers back onto the streets, frustrated residents have said. Bragg made an appearance in the park this summer, painting a tree in watercolor, in what he said was an attempt to heal the drug-fueled space.
The round the clock crackdown is meant to circumvent that, sending a clear message to drug peddlers that even if they get back out after being busted, the park is off limits.
“With all this enforcement and everything else going on, I hope they’re going to go somewhere else,” said Minor at a community meeting Wednesday, hours before the arrest of a network of gang affiliated drug dealers in a multiagency takedown.
“You know what? Tompkins Square Park doesn’t have this – let’s go there,” he quipped. “I’m not trying to kick the can anywhere, but that’s just the reality of the situation.”
Cops will also cover the surrounding perimeter that includes 6th Avenue from West 4th to West 8th Streets and Waverly and Washington places, Minor said.
The beefed-up presence follows what Lt. Lazar called “the largest takedown in Washington Square Park history.”
The nearly 20 dealers were hit with federal charges for allegedly running a brazen, open air drug market in Washington Square Park and flooding the popular haven with “millions of doses” of fentanyl, heroin and crack cocaine — the result of a year-long investigation by Lazar’s team spying on dealers from Village rooftops.
“The reason why the chief of the department and the police commissioner gave us all these cops, is that we want to keep them out of the park,” Lazar said.
“So all these police officers in the park are going to keep the narcotics from flowing in and they’re going to keep all the users from hanging out in the park,” he added. “I’m hoping for the first time in 50 years, we have this park back.”
Those busted this week had already been nabbed by cops more than 80 times, collectively, for a spate of drug-related offenses within the past five years, alleged the indictment, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan Thursday.
“It’s just astounding,” said Sumner. “We just kept on putting them back in the streets of no consequence and of course, they had free reign to run a criminal conspiracy right in front of us like this with reckless abandon.”
The feds said the dealers caused as many as 65 overdoses in the Washington Square Park area over the past five years — two of them fatal. Overdose deaths in Gotham fell almost 30% last year.
“It’s great that we’re apprehending these narcotics traffickers, but we want to make sure that they stay out of this area – out of the park – indefinitely,” said Minor Wednesday night, as officers were getting ready to close in on the dealers.
“We’re going to rock and roll – I promise you that.”
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