The Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit has long handled many assignments requiring special weapons and tactics, but after the Sept. 11 attacks, the department also created heavily armed units known as Hercules teams.

Plans for the new unit drew immediate criticism from some police reform advocates.

It is “the opposite of progress,” Priscilla Gonzalez, organizing director of Communities United for Police Reform, said in a statement, to have “a more militarized police force that would use counterterrorism tactics against protesters.”

In his speech, Mr. Bratton also said the department would test out a “highly localized neighborhood policing plan” in four precincts — two in Manhattan, two in Queens — in which officers focus on small sections of neighborhoods and are given more time to do so, without having to worry about responding to emergency calls.

Mr. Bratton said he would reduce the number of patrol officers who currently find themselves either in specialty roles or “running from call to call” in a department that, he said, “does not have enough police officers.” Instead, he said, officers would have about a third of their day mostly free from the “tyranny” of the radio to focus on local crime concerns.

A new challenge for the department will be tracking what officers do during that time.

“There needs to be a way to measure effective community policing practices,” said Susan Shah of the Vera Institute of Justice, who has studied community policing policies nationally.

As an example of what the new patrol model might look like on the street, Mr. Bratton drew from his own experience the day before: As he was getting his shoes shined, he observed a group of men, with “their booze stuffed in the two phone booths,” who were harassing people outside the shop, he told reporters after the speech.