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New York City Police Department

municipal police force in the United States

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ328473
Source-derived summary

The City of New York Police Department, also known as the New York City Police Department (NYPD), is the primary law enforcement agency within New York City as per the NYC Charter. Established on May 23, 1845, the NYPD is the largest, and one of the oldest, municipal police departments in the United States.

The NYPD is headquartered at 1 Police Plaza, located on Park Row in Lower Manhattan near City Hall. The NYPD's regulations are compiled in title 38 of the New York City Rules. Dedicated units of the NYPD include the Emergency Service Unit, K-9, harbor patrol, highway patrol, air support, bomb squad, counterterrorism, criminal intelligence, anti-organized crime, narcotics, mounted patrol, public transportation, and public housing units. Unlike in other towns and cities, it is not the fire department but the NYPD that has responsibility for emergency water rescue.

The NYPD employs more than 40,000 people, including more than 30,000 police officers as of September 2023. According to the official CompStat database, the NYPD responded to nearly 500,000 reports of crime and made more than 200,000 arrests during 2019. In 2020, it had a budget of US$6 billion. However, the NYPD's actual spending often exceeds its budget.

Editorial summary

“New York City Police Department” enters the record as municipal police force in the United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what York, City and Police can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1845, 2023, 2019, 2020—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1845-05-23. Its strongest next move is a source search built around York, City and Police.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“New York City Police Department” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, York, City and Police provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q328473. VIAF identifies the subject as 152463958. The Library of Congress control number is n79078131. Authority coordinates are 40.712, -74.002. 3 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1845, 2023, 2019 and 2020.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “New York City Police Department”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow New York City Police Department primary sources, New York City Police Department archive and York research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from New York City Police Department” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.