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Exclusive: Police Commissioner James O'Neill Discusses Fighting Crime With Maurice DuBois

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - With nearly two years under his belt and the lowest crime rates in the city since 1993, New York's top cop James O'Neill is riding high.

But is this truly a new day in the in the city or will a potential overhaul in the marijuana arrest policy set us back again?

Maurice DuBois sat for an exclusive interview with the police commissioner to hash it all out.

"How do you enforce the new rules on marijuana? It sounds tricky to me," DuBois asked.

"There's been a lot of comparisons to marijuana smoking and public consumption of alcohol. People get penalized for public consumption of alcohol," O'Neill said.

Last month Mayor de Blasio told the commissioner to stop arresting people caught smoking marijuana in public.

WATCH: Extended One-On-One With Commissioner O'Neill 

"Do you want to be living in a housing development and having people smoke on your floor, on the stairways and have to walk through that with your children each and every day?" O'Neill said.

Marijuana arrests are on the decline, according to the most recent statistics. Still critics argue that marijuana use is about the same among blacks and whites, arrests rates don't reflect that. Now the city is in the process of reviewing the new policy for 30 days.

"The current argument is people of color are getting arrested for something white folks do, it's out of whack," DuBois said.

"I acknowledged that... and there is a disparity. This is part of the thirty day process of why that is," O'Neill said. "Not sure how it's going to look at at the end of the process, it's going to change... There's got to be a balance between people's quality of life, individual choices, public safety and what people want to do."

"Have you ever tried it?" DuBois asked.

"I am not going to talk about my personal life," O'Neill said.

"With major crimes down, mostly across the board, sex crimes have a rise. We've seen a rise over the last chunk of time. Why do you think that is?" DuBois asked.

"I think a lot of it has to do with outreach," O'Neill said. "The Weinstein effect of people coming forward from prior years reporting crimes."

"You think it's reporting versus incidents?" DuBois asked.

"No, I think it's a matter of people finding the courage to come forward to report that they were the victim of a sex crime," O'Neill replied. "It's important that we do that outreach and we have an outreach program right now to make sure that people feel comfortable to come to us and report sex crimes."

In recent months, the NYPD has been criticized for understaffing its Special Victims Division which has resulted in a backlog of cases, according to the Department of Investigations.

"Was it staffed enough?" DuBois asked.

"[Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea] is doing an overview of Special Victims to see where we need to be. We put an additional 20 investigators in there in the interim," O'Neill said. "So there is a lot of work being done. It requires constant evaluation."

"We are the safest big city in America," Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference to discuss crime statistics Tuesday.

According to the most recent crime statistics, the total number of major felony crimes fell below 100,000. That's no small feat for a city now home to more than 8.5 million people.

The city also set a record for fewest murders in the modern data-tracking era. None of this happened by accident says O'Neill, who gives a lot of credit to the neighborhood policing program.

"We're finally giving our police officers the opportunity to establish relationships with the community," he said.

The program makes sure the same officers work in the same neighborhoods on the same shifts, increasing their familiarity with local residents and local problems.

"It's hard to hate up close, you talk to a cop and you see how much they really care. Or what he or she is doing each and every day, and how they put themselves out there," O'Neill said.

DuBois and the commissioner got a chance to talk about much more, not only about the state of the city but also about who he is, where he's from and how his upbringing impacts the way he does his job.

Unlike his predecessors, O'Neill is much more private, preferring to ride his bike anonymously through Central Park in the early morning. He's an avid cyclist and you can see more of his conversation with DuBois this weekend on CBS 2 Sunday Morning starting at 6 a.m.

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