steven sarao: Vice President

Lieutenant Steven Sarao is a 19-year veteran of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and was appointed in July 2003.  Sarao was promoted to sergeant in 2008, promoted to lieutenant in 2015, and promoted to Lieutenant Detective Commander in April 2022.  Lieutenant Sarao has held a variety of positions in the NYPD, including Patrol Services, Street Narcotics Enforcement, Detectives Bureau, Internal Affairs Bureau, and the Office of Management Analysis and Planning, where he oversaw public policy initiatives including the NYPD’s overall opioid epidemic strategy and drug policy.  Sarao previously provided oversight and program evaluation for the NYPD’s Haitian Stabilization Initiative, a program that provided NYPD officers within Port-Au-Prince, Haiti mentoring officers for the Haitian Police Department.  

Lieutenant Sarao has been assigned to the Intelligence Bureau (IB) since 2018 and is the Unit Commander of the NYPD IB’s Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism Unit (REME), a multi-agency task force comprised of investigators and analysts tasked with investigating a broad and complex spectrum of domestic terrorism threat actors and groups. These groups include but are not limited to, white supremacist violent extremism, anti-government and anti-authority violent extremism, and other ideological strains that drive terrorist violence.  Hate crimes and non-ideologically motivated large-scale or disproportionately lethal acts of mass violence, including mass attacks, round out the picture of terrorism and targeted violence afflicting the City of New York that the unit seeks to interdict. The unit is both proactive and responsive to significant incidents citywide, as well as in the surrounding areas via robust confidential investigations in partnership with other law enforcement agencies.

Lieutenant Sarao is a previous recipient of the New York City Public Service Fellowship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (HKS). Upon completion of his graduate studies at Harvard, Lieutenant Sarao was selected as a Program Fellow, at HKS’s Program in Criminal Justice and Management, concentrating his scholarship on the relationship between counterterrorism and police reform in Sub-Saharan Africa.  At Harvard, Lieutenant Sarao led training projects involving Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Ethiopia to improve the working relationships between police departments and prosecutors in the counter-terrorism space.

Lieutenant Sarao is a subject matter expert and instructor for a Major Cities Chiefs Association training initiative in partnership with the Institute for Intergovernmental Research (IIR) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs (OJP), State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT).  In this role, Lieutenant Sarao instructs officers, analysts, and executives at agencies across the United States on a multitude of topics in the intelligence and counter-terrorism space.

Sarao’s published works have appeared in the Harvard Kennedy School Review, Harvard Africa Policy Journal, Harvard Business Review, American Police Beat, Jewish Week, and the Newark Star-Ledger.

Lieutenant Sarao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in Negotiations, Leadership, and International Affairs from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  Lieutenant Sarao resides in New York City and has three children.

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