In Queens, the small things haven’t felt small: a car with no plates that never moves but always eats a parking spot, mopeds slicing down the sidewalk as parents yank strollers to safety, music that doesn’t quit (even when the block is begging for sleep), sidewalks bottlenecked by encampments. Even as violent crime fell to record lows, day-to-day frictions mounted. City numbers tell the story: Since 2017, panhandling complaints soared nearly 2,800 percent, calls about homeless encampments rose more than 500 percent, noise complaints nearly doubled, illegal-parking complaints more than doubled. The unspoken feeling across the borough was that unless it was violent crime, help might not come.
This spring, the NYPD tried something different. Quality of Life Teams – Q-Teams – launched in six precincts with a simple mandate: Fix the problems people live with right outside their doors. The early returns were immediate. In the first 60 days, Q-Teams answered more than 7,500 complaints and cut response times for these calls by over 16 minutes. Hundreds of illegally parked vehicles and illegal mopeds/scooters were cleared off the streets. As the effort expanded to Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, the scale grew: Citywide, the teams answered more than 31,500 calls and trimmed average response times by about 47 minutes. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch broke out the muscle behind those results: over 700 abandoned vehicles towed and 300-plus illegal mopeds/scooters/e-bikes seized in the first months; then more than 14,000 additional calls handled with another 350+ abandoned vehicles towed, and nearly 250 illegal scooters/bikes seized during the expansion phase. Along the way, officers focused on nuisance conditions still spotted – and stopped – serious offenses, including armed offenders in transit and career criminals wanted for hundreds of prior arrests.
On Monday, August 11, Mayor Eric Adams announced that every Queens precinct will now have its own Q-Team, a move aimed squarely at restoring everyday order from Forest Hills and Kew Gardens Hills to Jamaica, Rego Park, and Far Rockaway.
For the Jewish communities of Queens, busy with school carpools, weekday minyanim, and packed Shabbos-prep corridors, this shift matters. It creates clearer lines between neighborhood concerns and the officers assigned to fix them. Illegal scooters cutting past shuls and yeshivos, chronic noise hotspots near community centers, derelict vehicles by schools – these are now squarely in Q-Team sights, with precinct accountability behind the follow-through.
The architecture behind the rollout is meant to stick. Q-Teams are built from the ground up inside each precinct: Neighborhood Coordination Officers, Youth Coordination Officers, and Traffic Safety Officers – cops who know the corners and the chronic calls – working in concert. Their progress runs through Q-Stat, a monthly data review modeled after CompStat, so commanders have to show where conditions are improving and where more attention is needed.
The timing fits a broader push the administration calls ending “the culture of anything goes.” Alongside Q-Teams, City Hall points to seven consecutive quarters of overall crime reduction, the removal of 23,000 illegal guns (more than 3,100 this year alone), the closure of roughly 1,500 illegal cannabis shops, and the seizure of about 108,000 illegal motorcycles, dirt bikes, scooters, and ghost cars. On the health side, the city is pairing expanded outreach with recent Albany wins to get more help to people in visible crisis – on subways and sidewalks alike.
What should Queens expect to actually see? Fewer abandoned cars, faster responses to 311 and 911 quality-of-life calls, illegal scooters and e-bikes being confiscated, sidewalks cleared where encampments have lingered, noisy corridors brought to heel – and, crucially, steady attention to the places that have felt ignored for too long: near synagogues and schools, along shopping strips, and inside dense residential blocks.