Opening of new Southeast Queens precinct delayed

A rendering of the 116th Precinct in Rosedale, which was originally scheduled to be completed early this year but is now scheduled to be completed in the spring. Rendering via New York City Department of Design and Construction

By Jacob Kaye and Ryan Schwach

It’s been nearly half a century since a group of residents in Southeast Queens first began to fight for a new police precinct in their neighborhood.

It was a necessity, they said – the neighborhoods of Rosedale, Springfield Gardens, Brookville and Laurelton, where they lived, were subject to some of the slowest response times in the city from officers stationed anywhere from five to six miles away in Queens Village.

After decades of organizing, several false starts and countless delays, officials put shovels in the ground to build the new 116th Precinct in Rosedale in 2021. The groundbreaking ceremony that year was met with great fanfare, as was a “topping off ceremony” held by Mayor Eric Adams in the summer of 2022 to mark the completion of the new building’s foundation.

But despite the project and around 50 years of anticipation, residents of the Southeast Queens neighborhoods will now have to wait a little bit longer for their precinct to open its doors.

The opening of the 116th Precinct is running behind schedule, the Eagle has learned. Though construction was initially scheduled to be completed in January of this year, the city’s Department of Design and Construction won’t complete work on the building until the spring. The delay will also mean officers in the future 116th won’t begin policing the Southeast Queens neighborhoods until at least the fall of 2024, according to the NYPD.

The culprit? “Unforeseen circumstances in the construction process,” according to the police department.

A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams – who said in 2021 that the precinct will help his administration deliver “a safe city and responsible policing" – did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the precinct’s delay.

According to a DDC spokesperson, the agency’s timeline got pushed back by around four months while they were waiting for a permit from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to remove groundwater at the Rosedale site.

The DDC now plans on turning the project over to the NYPD in the spring. At that point, the police department will take “some time to fit it out and open it as a working facility,” the spokesperson said.

The delay of the precinct’s opening has not previously been reported.

In November 2023, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban said in a social media post that the 116th was “almost complete.”

“Today I stopped by to see the progress and thank everyone who has been working so hard to complete this important project,” the commissioner said in the Nov. 27 post. “The residents of southeast Queens will…soon have New York’s Finest as neighbors!”

The delay came as no surprise – and of little concern – to Bess DeBetham, a resident and community board member who has been boosting the precinct for four decades.

“What is a couple more months?” she told the Eagle.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who helped to secure the funds for the precinct, was equally unconcerned by the delay in the 116th’s opening.

“I thank the Department of Design and Construction for its diligence and especially the workers constructing the precinct for their dedication to such a critical project, and I look forward to cutting the ribbon in a few months,” Richards said in a statement to the Eagle.

A history of delays

Delays to the precinct aren’t new. Community advocates and elected officials have been calling for a new precinct for the easternmost areas of South Queens for over four decades.

Though at times the project has gained steam, it has been put on ice nearly as many times.

The idea for the project was initially floated 40 years ago when Abraham Beame was the mayor of New York. His successor, Ed Koch, promised a satellite precinct for the community, but nothing came of the promise.

“We continued to ask each administration, including Dinkins, no one omitting, because safety is a priority,” DeBetham said.

“I was determined to continue, that's how I have a love for my community,” she added.

The project finally was approved by the city in 2017 but its funding was cut in 2020 as the city was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some of the funding originally earmarked for the precinct went toward the building of a new Roy Wilkins Recreation Center in Jamaica – the funding shift also came as the city, under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, grappled with racial justice protests and a renewed conversation about the city and country’s policing practices.

“We were going through a horrible situation because of COVID and the ability to invest in communities meant we had to make choices,” de Blasio said at the time “And we did take resources from the NYPD and put them into community needs, like youth centers, recreation centers, etc.”

“This 116th Precinct building was something that could not happen in that environment because of those trade-offs,” he added.

Funding was restored for the project in April 2021.

A ‘community’ approach

Officials have touted the 116th as a “modern” precinct that will be built for “community policing.”

When completed, the approximately 48,000-square-foot precinct at 244-40 North Conduit Ave. will feature a community meeting room and a food pantry on the first floor.

Along with the precinct, a public plaza leading from the station house to the nearby Long Island Railroad stop is under construction and will feature benches, a water filling station, bike racks and greenspace.

The community policing approach comes after decades of residents of the soon-to-be precinct’s footprint feeling neglected by the police at best, and victimized at worst.

Those living in the area the 116th will eventually patrol currently live within the boundaries of the 105th Precinct.

The 105th, which, as the fifth largest precinct in the city, covers nearly 12.5 square miles and 345 miles of roadway, logs some of the slowest response times in the city. The current precinct covers the easternmost portion of mainland Queens, from Glen Oaks and Floral Park in the north, to Springfield Gardens and Rosedale in the south.

Next door to the 105th is the 103rd Precinct, which covers Hollis Park Gardens, Hollis, Lakewood and Jamaica.

In 2020, the nearby 103rd accounted for the highest number of stop and frisks in Queens. That year, officers in the 103rd made around 1,700 stops – or nearly five per day – despite the practice being ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013.

Of those stops, nearly 90 percent were performed on Queens residents of color, and Black Queens residents accounted for nearly 46 percent of those stopped despite making up only around 20 percent of the borough’s population.

The 116th was pitched to residents as a way to correct both issues of the past by increasing response times and fostering a better relationship between the police and the community.

“Public safety and public trust in our police department are not mutually exclusive,” Richards said. “The new 116th Precinct…is going to be proof that we can, in fact, have both here in Southeast Queens — where families have been pushing for faster response times and a closer cops-community relationship for decades.”

DeBetham went on a tour of the new precinct over the summer and said that she walked away proud of the work that had been completed. Even with the pushbacked timeline, DeBetham said that she felt the speed at which construction on the precinct has progressed was impressive, especially after all the years in which no progress toward its completion occurred.

“It was beautiful,” she said.