Metro

Commissioner James O’Neill stepping down from NYPD

NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill is resigning his position on Monday, according to City Hall.

The top cop will make it official in an afternoon press briefing, confirming the long-swirling rumors of his resignation.

“On behalf of all New Yorkers, I want to express deep gratitude to Jimmy O’Neill for dedicating his entire career to keeping our city safe. Jimmy transformed the relationship between New Yorkers and police, and helped to make the Department the most sophisticated and advanced in the country,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.

O’Neill’s resignation comes a little over three years after he was appointed as the city’s 43rd top cop — and on the heels of firing chokehold cop Daniel Pantaleo amid mounting pressure.





Raised in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, O’Neill’s lengthy career in law enforcement began in New York in 1983, when he joined the Transit Police at age 25. He was a lieutenant when the department merged with the NYPD in 1995.

O’Neill, 61, rose through the ranks, serving as the commanding officer in three precincts — Central Park, the 25th in Harlem and the busy 44th in the Bronx — before becoming chief of patrol in 2014.

Two years later, Mayor Bill de Blasio named him commissioner when then-commissioner Bill Bratton stepped down.

Since then, O’Neill has embraced neighborhood policing — a method credited with driving down crime that’s aimed at strengthening the relationship between cops and the community by having officers on patrol in the same neighborhoods on the same shifts.





Under O’Neill’s watch, murders in the city hit an all-time low for the first half of 2019 — though hate crimes and shootings have spiked.

Pantaleo’s fate rested in O’Neill’s hands following NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonado’s recommendation that he be fired for the 2014 death of Eric Garner. O’Neill said he agreed with Maldonado’s scathing ruling in announcing his much-anticipated decision on Aug. 19 to terminate the 14-year veteran — a move that received swift blowback from rank-and-file.

The final year of O’Neill’s tenure was also rocked by an epidemic of police suicides, which prompted the department to roll out new initiatives in hopes of curbing the disturbing trend.

“It takes a lot to knock me down,” O’Neill told The Post in July, after the seventh member of service took his own life. “But, I gotta tell you, it knocked me down. It did.”





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