Nightclub Raids Are on the Rise in 2025, Report Says

At the end of 2023, Eric Adams stood in the nightclub Paragon alongside NYPD brass and Jeff Garcia, his newly appointed head of the Mayor's Office of Nightlife (ONL), to announce the end of the much-maligned Multi-Agency Response to Community Hotspot (MARCH) raids. Adams announced that the City was replacing the program with a new process that would allow ONL to work collaboratively with venues to preemptively address issues that in the past resulted in simply being raided and, at times, shut down. He deemed the process Coordinating a United Response with Establishments, or CURE, and said the goal was to move away from the practice of having the NYPD and other City agencies storm into nightclubs. 

"We must protect public safety, while ensuring businesses can remain open and New Yorkers can still dance in the dark," Mayor Adams said at the time, decrying "unannounced inspections that shutter businesses—for a night, a week, or permanently." Those inspections, he added, would moving forward be a last resort reserved for "those who intentionally ignore community concerns, and shun multiple opportunities to collaborate on solutions with the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office of Nightlife.”

Initially, it appeared the CURE process was working to limit the number of unannounced inspections—in all of 2024, there were only two CURE multi-agency raids in the entire city. 

But according to the most recent report by the Office of Nightlife on these inspections, the number of unannounced multi-agency nightclub raids increased sharply in the first half of 2025, raising questions about whether the CURE process has now become simply MARCH by another name.