Ride along with the NYPD team cracking down on illegal fireworks

NEW YORK -- The New York City Police Department is cracking down on illegal fireworks , and CBS New York's Derick Waller joined officers for an exclusive ride-along.

As Waller learned, it's not just fireworks police are after.

NYPD's Community Response Team watching out for illegal fireworks across city

On a Friday night in the Bronx, officers with the NYPD's Community Response Team were on duty, watching out for illegal fireworks.

"This block had complaints last night and tonight. They've been lighting fireworks off all night," Sgt. Jimmy Seder said.

Seder and his partner, Officer Edgar Guerrero, patrol the 46th and 48th precincts.

They stopped one group on Grand Avenue.

"One of the guys tried discarding a box, these little M-80s," Seder said.

The box was confiscated and a summons issued, but with more explosions in the distance, Seder and Guerrero got back in the car.

Around 11:30 p.m. on Davidson Avenue, they found leftover remnants of fireworks in the street. Police say they came from a minivan parked nearby, so they planned to tow it away. The van had no license plates, and inside on the dashboard, what appeared to be unlicensed cannabis products seemed to be on display.

"So our main goal is to get as many fireworks off the streets as we can prior to the Fourth of July events happening. Safety concerns because people, consistently every year, you have people losing appendages, fires begin from fireworks. It's all about safety," Seder said.

Every summer, thousands of New Yorkers call 311 to report illegal fireworks. There were more than 7,000 complaints in June and July of 2022, and even more last summer.

NYPD's Community Response Team enforces "quality-of-life" offenses

The Community Response Team are charged with enforcing so-called "quality-of-life" offenses, monitoring those 311 reports in real time while also taking direction from dispatchers.

"Honestly, any quality-of-life in the city, this unit addresses," Seder said.

At one point, Seder and his partner responded to a report of shots fired on Bathgate. Once at the scene, they found no evidence of shots fired, but they did find a man smoking a joint in his car.

"Marijuana is legal now [but] you can't smoke in the car. It's almost like drinking an open container of alcohol," Seder said.

Later, they spotted an unlicensed scooter. The driver refused to stop and the officers gave chase, but the driver eventually got lost in traffic.

The increased enforcement of low-level offenses under Mayor Eric Adams' administration has critics, however.

The New York Civil Liberties Union said in part, "We have consistently seen how 'specialized units' within the NYPD engage in failed broken windows policing."

"It's easy for somebody to criticize when it doesn't affect them," NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry said.