Residents on the street rarely return the greetings of the precinct commander. Officers complain that their overtures are usually rebuffed, but they travel even short distances by car and drive down pedestrian paths in housing developments, cruising past staring faces. Many leave the Queens precinct for their meals, some crossing into Nassau County, where a Starbucks is a frequent stop for those starting their shift.

On the other side are young men who say they remain the targets of police harassment and detect no new effort by officers to connect with them.

These are snapshots of the halting progress and enduring hurdles facing the New York Police Department, the country’s largest force, as it embarks on an ambitious effort to reshape everyday interactions between its patrol officers and residents of the city following a period of searing tension.

The 101st Precinct in Far Rockaway, an overgrown former beach resort dotted with Robert Moses-era public housing at the city’s eastern edge, is an early testing ground of a model of so-called community policing that fell out of favor in the 1990s as crime levels hit all-time highs. The idea is as simple as it is old-fashioned: Rather than chase 911 calls, certain officers patrol only a small area. They are meant to solve problems, not simply enforce the law.

There have been some minor achievements. But breaking through walls of silence and suspicion that often keep officers and residents at a distance is no simple task. The fact that most residents are black or Hispanic and most officers white adds an undeniable hint of distrust.

“People are still hesitant to be seen talking to us in uniform,” said Officer Matthew Ruoff, who came from a unit tasked with rooting out low-level crime and is now a kind of emissary for a different mode of policing. “But it’s been a few months and they are starting to open up. My goal is for people to view us as more than just, Oh, those two cops.”

Neither Officer Ruoff or his partner, Gregory Lomangino, had made an arrest in weeks. Instead, on a recent Thursday, they crisscrossed their corner of the precinct, stopping to chat with a deli worker, a kebab seller and a security guard. At each stop, they radioed to report a “community visit.”

The theory, in part, is that if officers are given ample time and steady beats, they can learn about local concerns, address percolating problems of crime and disorder before they boil over and, in doing so, improve frayed relations with skeptical communities. It has been endorsed on the national level by President Obama’s task force on 21st-century policing.

“There’s a lot riding on it,” the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, said recently of the concept, which will soon be expanded from four test precincts to more than a dozen others across the city, made possible by the addition of 1,300 new officers.

Other departments around the country, from Boston to Los Angeles, have tried versions of community policing over the years with varying levels of success. Now, as pressure builds for the police to ensure public safety in ways other than simple enforcement, law enforcement leaders are watching to see if New York’s return to an old idea will bring new and lasting change.

“It will send a message across the country,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based research group. “It’s a major shift nationally — to have the biggest department in the country talking about problem solving.”

Examples of the early challenges facing the program are clear to anyone who spends time with the officers.

On a recent afternoon, for example, six officers left the station house to attend a community meeting two and a half blocks away. They could have walked through the bustle of Mott Avenue. Instead they drove in a marked police van, parked and went inside.

When it was over, the officers, known as neighborhood coordination officers or N.C.O.s, piled back into the van, made a U-turn and drove back.

The meeting itself left some involved feeling disheartened. “They didn’t seem interested in finding out how we could work together,” said Jazmine Outlaw, 20, a resident and the president of the 101st Precinct Community Council, who was at the meeting.

Signs of Progress

But there have been some successes, too. Officers Andrew Hayes, 30, and Glenn Ziminski, 32, neighborhood officers who were formerly assigned to chasing drug dealers in local housing developments, gathered information on shootings in a new way: a local mother who came to an event for children to meet officers.

“It was a shock to even him and me,” said Officer Hayes, comparing it to his experiences in narcotics enforcement. “The only way we knew about getting a confidential informant is to flip a guy because he bought drugs,” he said. The recent breakthrough was different. “That was all based off being an N.C.O., going to a meeting, conversing with people.”

For Officers Ruoff, 31, and Lomangino, 34, a demonstration of what their new jobs could entail came in June when they learned of a woman in the Arverne View apartments who had a FedEx package — lotion and a cellphone case — stolen from the hallway in front of her apartment.

The theft was assigned to the precinct’s detective squad, Officer Ruoff said, but as a minor crime it was a low priority. So the officers followed up with the building’s security, found video of the thief, and learned that she was known to stand in front of a nearby deli most mornings with a beer. They found her two days later and made an arrest.

Critics of the department remain skeptical that the promise of better police-community relations will be realized through patrol officers. “It’s old wine in a new bottle,” said Robert Gangi, the director of the Police Reform Organizing Project. “Most people do not become police officers to do social work.”

In a tacit acknowledgment of that reality, the Police Department is considering how to change its recruitment strategies. The department wants more applicants who can incorporate a measure of social work into a job that has long been defined almost exclusively by a willingness to face difficult situations and confront dangerous people.

A Difficult Testing Ground

Mr. Bratton’s connection to community policing has its roots in Boston in 1977, when as an ambitious young officer with the Boston Police Department, he was tapped to help implement a consultant’s vision of neighborhood policing, one with similarities to the one rolling out in New York: Sectors with dedicated patrol cars and officers learning local issues.

“We lost that,” said the consultant, Robert Wasserman, who has remained close to Mr. Bratton over the years and now has an office steps from the commissioner’s on the 14th floor of Police Headquarters. “We have to sit down and engage with people on an equal basis.”

Inside the 101st Precinct in Far Rockaway, the change was sudden. On Monday, May 18, officers who had been assigned to specialized units were put back on patrol and sent to four newly designed zones — Adam, Boy, Charlie and David — that more or less correspond to existing neighborhoods.

“We kind of flipped on a dime,” said Deputy Inspector Justin Lenz, the precinct commander, sitting in his first-floor office in the aging precinct station house, where, in heavy rain, water pours in from a leaky roof. A 1979 map of the area still hangs on one wall, used to highlight gang territories in what some officers call “Brownsville by the sea,” a reference to the notoriously violent Brooklyn neighborhood.

The precinct, in southeastern Queens, is one of the four — including the adjacent 100th Precinct and the 33rd and 34th Precincts in Upper Manhattan — selected as the first to test the approach.

For residents battered by Hurricane Sandy and a history of high crime, change has been felt more slowly on the street.

Many complain of a crushing boredom — not a single movie theater or sit-down restaurant — punctuated by occasional violence on the one hand, and police intrusion on the other.

“This is still what we’re experiencing,” said Milan R. Taylor, 26, who heads the Rockaway Youth Task Force, a neighborhood group with a community garden near the Ocean Bay Apartments, historically one of the area’s more violent housing developments. He said he had been stopped a half-dozen times at vehicle checkpoints so far this year by officers from outside the precinct who did not seem aware of the new initiative.

“It’s not trickling down,” Mr. Taylor said.

Other young residents said plainclothes officers have mocked them on the street, pumping rap music and throwing gang signs when driving past groups gathered outside. “We could be just like this and they stop,” said Keyshawn Chean, 18, standing with friends near Beach 26th Street. “There’s no new program.”

The policing of Far Rockaway is complicated by entrenched challenges — high poverty and a location more than an hour by train from Manhattan — that have been a part of the neighborhood’s fabric since Robert Moses and the city cleared the beachfront bungalows and set down big brick blocks of public housing.

Drainage is nonexistent on some residential streets, with huge puddles in the summer and small ice rinks in the winter; the area is dotted with nursing homes and shelters; the only hospital, St. John’s, is the biggest employer.

At night, a neighborhood watch team patrols the middle-class houses in an Orthodox Jewish enclave to the east. In some of the housing projects, a group of so-called violence interrupters from a local nonprofit, Sheltering Arms, is getting off the ground with money from the mayor’s office.

The downtown, along Mott Avenue, is marked by a commercial plaza with few occupied shops; businesses elsewhere in the neighborhood close early. “This should be a jewel,” Councilman Donovan Richards Jr., who represents the neighborhood, said as he stood at the open mouth of the large U-shaped shopping center. “We’ve turned the tide, but we’re not out of the dark yet.”

Roughly a mile away, at the far end of an alley without a name by an overgrown lot near the beach, Joanne Rebollo, 29, watched her three of her four children and two nephews play in a kiddie pool in front of her rented white bungalow, one of the few remaining, on a sweltering afternoon.

“There’s nothing to do with the kids,” she said of the area, where she moved in February to escape rising rents in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

The neighborhood where she lives is ringed in purple on the precinct’s aging map as the territory of the G.O.A., the Gang of Apes, one of at least nine active gangs in the precinct. Some divide up single housing developments: the front side of Redfern Houses, for example, clashes with the back.

On a recent patrol, Officer Ziminski stopped in the small red-floored foyer of 14-60 Beach Channel Drive in the Redfern Houses where, as a rookie eight years ago, he found Rayquan Elliot, a local rapper who performed as Stack Bundles, dead on the ground, a bullet through his skull.

The murder reverberated through the community at the time, sowing despair among those who had seen the young star as a beacon, and his death another sign of the impossibility of making it out. It remains unsolved.

Despite the area’s reputation for violence, crime has diminished here recently, and shootings are sharply down so far this year. Among residents, the most well-known murder this year — the killing of the rapper Chinx, a child of Redfern and a friend of Mr. Elliot’s who was fatally shot as he sat in his Porsche at a stoplight — occurred miles away in Woodhaven, Queens.

In part, the community policing model can be tried again in New York because officers have less crime to deal with. “I think it’s a luxury of manageable crime,” Mr. Wexler said. “If Bratton were to have attempted this in the 1990s with 2,200 homicides, it would not have been successful.” Roughly a third of the major crime in the 101st Precinct, where about 200 uniformed officers now work, occurs among people who know each other, Inspector Lenz said, including robberies and felony assaults.

“It’s not your moms walking on the boardwalk and gets beat down and we’re trying to find some crazed guy — it’s people that know each other and then they attack and there’s weapons involved,” he said. “It is what it is.”

Some officers have complained that the dismantling of most of the specialized precinct units took away what had been a steppingstone to the detective squad or other advanced positions. But the neighborhood officers are given time to make home visits, seen as a way to develop skills needed for detective work.

Indeed, the new approach is rooted in conversations with people in the community. But that has forced officers into interactions that some have found awkward or uncomfortable.

“Their version is somebody wasn’t too friendly to them,” Inspector Lenz said. “I go, So what? Obviously I don’t want you to arrest them. Just let it go.”

At the upper echelons of the Police Department, leaders have yet to settle on a method for gauging the effectiveness of officers who, in the past, were evaluated on their quantifiable activity: arrests, summonses, stops. Many of the new officers come from so-called conditions units, which focused on enforcement and are being disbanded under the program.

“They are looking at ‘soft activity’ now,” Officer Hayes said, riding in the passenger seat of an unmarked squad car, with Officer Ziminski behind the wheel. The radio chirped with calls: a reported break-in, a missing 17-year-old, gun shots that turned out to be, on inspection, just fireworks. At one point, they drove past a young man on a street corner, his face partially covered by a mask from what the officers said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, flashing a middle finger at the car.

“Between the two of us, Glenn and I had at least a hundred collars last year,” said Officer Hayes, who has since joined the precinct’s anti-crime unit, a pathway to the detective squad. For a month, neither of the officers recorded any arrests.

‘Enforcement Will Always Be There’

On a recent afternoon in Far Rockaway, the six officers sat on couches in the second-floor office of the Rockaway Youth Task Force for a conversation that roamed from the “black lives matter” movement to strategies for backyard composting to the bureaucracy of the Police Department.

Mr. Taylor and Ms. Outlaw, the precinct community council president, described their concerns about low-level arrests that appeared to be a form of petty harassment to young minorities: tickets for bicycling, for spitting on the sidewalk, for jaywalking.

“We already got the message — we’re not doing that petty stuff anymore,” Officer Lomangino said. “We have stopped.”

Mr. Taylor expressed frustration that the new approach seemed limited to a small number of local officers. “What do we do?” he asked. “The great work that you guys are doing is being undone by all these other things.”

“I’m with you,” Officer Lomangino said. “But enforcement will always be there. We’re the police.”