NYPD's Ben Tucker with a body camera (photo: @NYPDnews)
After many months of waiting, the New York City Police Department recently announced its proposed rules for the use of body worn cameras. The NYPD developed the policy in response to a mandate by the federal court in the Floyd v. City of New York “stop and frisk” case. To their credit, the NYPD, with the help of the Policing Project at NYU Law School, undertook an extensive public comment process to solicit input from experts, interest groups, members of the public, and police officers. Twenty thousand members of the public and 5,000 police officers sent in survey responses.
Unfortunately, many of the suggestions that emerged during that process were not included in the final NYPD policy, leading the lawyers in the Floyd case to pledge that they would move to block approval of the new rules by the court.
The main objections are that officers would have access to footage before making statements about what happened in an incident, the lack of privacy protections for those captured on video, and too much officer discretion as to when the cameras should be turned on. In addition, unions representing police sergeants, detectives, and lieutenants have threatened to fight the new rules in court because they were not consulted about their new roles in overseeing the process. Only patrol officers will wear the cameras.
Perhaps it’s time then to hit the reset button on our approach to this new technology. Body cameras produce a profound tension between our desire to enhance officer accountability and our concerns about the growing surveillance powers of the police.
The killings by police of Michael Brown and Eric Garner ushered in a wave of popular support for body worn cameras as a singular tool for improving police accountability. The hope is that the existence of video evidence will act as a deterrent to police misconduct and allow for easier prosecution of officers who abuse their authority. Expanded use of such cameras was a central recommendation of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and has been embraced by police accountability activists and civil rights organizations across the U.S.
Despite this strong support, there remain significant privacy concerns. In New York City alone there will soon be over 20,000 officers on patrol with cameras. These cameras will likely record millions of mundane interactions with the public as well as capture the activities of people merely going about their daily lives. Some of these people may be engaged in lawful activities that they would prefer their neighbors, employers, or the government were not aware of, such as visiting an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, attending a political event, or entering an adult book store.
In addition, extensive use of the cameras could contribute to an expansion of police surveillance capacity. By geocoding camera data, new databases could be established that allow police to review all footage from a designated area before or after a crime, potentially subjecting thousands of people to unwarranted intrusions into their lives merely because of where they live or work. Law professor Elizabeth Joh refers to this as an increase in “surveillance discretion” in which police have dramatically more potential reasons for looking into someone’s personal life based on suspicion rather than concrete evidence of wrongdoing.
Such “big data” endeavors turn innocent behavior into suspicious behavior because of correlations on a grand scale that may have absolutely no relevance to a specific individual now brought under investigation. For example, if there is a belief or evidence that drug dealers are more likely to frequent a particular park or corner and I happen to also regularly walk that way while going to work, then I can easily end up under suspicion.
Police would also be in a position to populate gang databases and political dossiers using camera footage in high crime areas or at political demonstrations. This effort could be aided by emerging facial recognition software. There is a long history of police misusing such databases. Gang databases are notoriously easy to end up in and near impossible to get out of. They have been used to target people for gang injunctions resulting in enhanced penalties. There have even been cases where they have been shared with current or prospective employers. There is a long history of local police maintaining political intelligence files with the names and images of individuals engaged in totally lawful political activity. These databases have also been shared with employers and resulted in politically motivated harassment.
Camera footage of people walking down a particular street or lawfully interacting with friends or neighbors could also be used to populate databases of people considered at high risk for committing violence. Several major cities including Chicago and New York use these databases to produce “heat lists,” based on complex algorithms of potential risk factors such as prior arrests or involvement with child welfare systems. Being on such a list can trigger intensive surveillance or enhanced prosecutions.
Raw footage and databases that rely on the footage could also be shared with other law enforcement agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or the FBI. These agencies then might feed this data into their own algorithms triggering yet more surveillance, suspicion, and investigations based entirely on probabilities rather than individualized probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
So what is to be done?
One way to reduce concerns about this enhanced police surveillance would be to take control of the footage away from police and hand it over to an independent civilian agency. From the moment officers download the data it would be under the control of such an agency and could not be reviewed, released, or altered by the police without probable cause.
If police feel there is something relevant to a legitimate investigation they can request a warrant to access it. Since the officer was present at filming, meeting the standard of probable cause should be easy in cases where criminal behavior is alleged. Similarly, police misconduct oversight bodies would need to have a sworn complaint in hand before they could review footage.
Following the guidance of the ACLU and the Constitution Project, there should also be tight restrictions on public access to the video. Footage should only be made available to the public with the consent of those seen in the video (or family members of someone deceased) or if there are no privacy issues at stake, which might be accomplished with extensive redaction. Individuals who are the subject of police action captured by body cameras should have the right to review it.
These tight privacy controls would help reassure the public that their non-criminal interactions with police will not be reviewed by police or the public. This is especially important for people who are victims of or witnesses to a crime or who may want to informally or anonymously provide police with information (these groups are not supposed to be recorded by the NYPD under the new rules).
Such a policy would also help overcome the legitimate concern of police officers that cameras should not be used to monitor them for administrative violations or be used for vendettas by supervisors. By taking control of the footage away from police, the chances of such personally or politically motivated reviews would be greatly diminished.
Placing the footage under the control of an independent agency would also ensure that defense attorneys and prosecutors have equal access to it. Currently, district attorneys are at an advantage as they receive evidence directly from the police and make their own determinations about whether something is relevant to the case and if so, when to give it to defense counsel. According to representatives of the public defender services here in New York, such evidence often only materializes the day before or the day of a trial, forcing many to take plea deals or be unprepared for trial.
We must keep in mind that the primary basis for public support of body cameras is the need for increased police accountability. In the words of Michael Sisitzky of the New York Civil Liberties Union, “Public support for body cameras will not last if the technology becomes just another gadget to help police and prosecutors, instead of a tool for meaningful reform of police practices.”
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Alex S. Vitale is Associate Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and the forthcoming The End of Policing.
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Mayor de Blasio & Commissioner Banks (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
This is part one of a three-part series.
Part One: The Challenge of Homeless Policy
During the course of his overwhelmingly successful campaign for mayor, Bill de Blasio made poverty and income inequality his main issues. As the liberal journalist and fervent de Blasio supporter Eric Alterman put the matter, “De Blasio made economic inequality the central issue in his campaign and attempted to tie nearly every issue he addressed to that problem.” Homelessness was obviously such an issue, and so when de Blasio took office in January 2014, expectations were high that he would address that problem effectively.
The Way Things Are Now
Unfortunately, as of April 2017, under the mayor, the homelessness problem had, by some important measures, gotten worse. The month de Blasio assumed office there were 53,615 people in the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter system. That number has hovered around 60,000 people since December 2014. The annual enumeration of street dwellers—the HOPE count—is down from 3,537 people in 2014 to about 2,794 in 2016, which is a positive trend but not a dramatic improvement. And the DHS budget remains high: $1.29 billion for the current 2017 fiscal year.
De Blasio himself recently admitted that the city has not made nearly enough progress, while announcing another new homelessness-fighting plan and creating new, unambitious goals for reducing the homeless population. Voters and other observers are not impressed. Surprisingly, given the emphasis de Blasio put on poverty and homelessness in his campaign, a March 2017 Quinnipiac University poll found that voters rated this the weakest aspect of the mayor’s performance, with 55 percent disapproving. And The New York Times editorial board, which supported de Blasio’s mayoral run, recently concluded, “The rise in homelessness is arguably the mayor's biggest failure in that goal to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
How did the mayor end up in this position, and what is he doing about it?
How We Got Here
To put de Blasio’s situation in context, we have to go back to 2004, when Mayor Bloomberg developed a five-year plan to “make the condition of chronic homelessness effectively extinct in New York.” Preventing homelessness would be emphasized through a “Home Base” program that would intervene with at-risk families to keep them housed. Analysis would show that Home Base did lower homelessness and even paid for itself.
More supportive housing—that is, apartments with services for the mentally ill and other disabled street dwellers—was to be developed. This goal was accomplished in 2005, when the city and state signed the third in a series of “New York/New York” agreements, which produced 9,000 such units. Under the “Housing First” philosophy, street dwellers would be moved into supportive housing as quickly as possible, an approach that both reduced street homelessness and encouraged enrollment in rehabilitative services. Shelter use was to be cut by rehousing long-term shelter stayers. And, very importantly, shelter clients were to be moved out through rent subsidies, which, a key document noted, “must continue to be available in shelter to re-house chronically homeless individuals and families.”
Bloomberg pledged to reduce the shelter census—36,399 people in June of 2004—by two-thirds in five years, to about 12,000 persons by 2009.
On October 19, 2004, DHS abandoned its long-term policy of giving shelter residents priority for entering public housing and for federal Section 8 rent vouchers, which were forms of housing subsidies. Commissioner of DHS Linda Gibbs believed that policy attracted poor families into the shelters to receive the subsidies and so drove up the census. But moving one family out of the system with a subsidy meant the census would go up only if subsidies also drew in more than one new family. But economists found that to draw one family into the system requires placing seven families into subsidized housing. Perverse incentives are real but too weak to drive up the shelter census. Nonetheless, shelter families lost preferential access to public housing and Section 8 vouchers; instead, they were eligible for a temporary five-year rent subsidy, Housing Stability Plus. This system was then replaced in 2007 by Advantage, a two-year-maximum rent-subsidy program funded jointly by the state and the city.
By Bloomberg’s deadline of June 2009, the shelter census had not dropped appreciably. Then, as a result of a falling out between the city and the state over funding amid the unraveling financial crisis, Advantage ended. At that point no subsidies of any kind were offered to move families out of the shelter system. The number of people in the DHS shelter system began going up, and in January 2014 de Blasio inherited a record high shelter census.
De Blasio’s challenge was to create a new rent subsidy, implement it effectively, do nothing to encourage shelter entries, and hope for a decline in the census. How well did he meet that challenge?
De Blasio’s First Steps
First, the new administration made striking changes in personnel as well as policy. Steven Banks, the Legal Aid lawyer who since 1983 had litigated against the city for the right to shelter for homeless families, became commissioner of HRA, which runs public-benefit programs including rent subsidies. Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a former Catholic nun who served in the city’s social service bureaucracy under Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg, became deputy mayor for Health and Human Services. And Gilbert Taylor, formerly executive deputy commissioner for the Administration for Children’s Services, was appointed commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services.
The new administration’s biggest initiative in homeless policy is the Living in Communities (LINC) programs, which are a batch of rental-subsidy programs designed to help various sorts of shelter clients move out of the system. But the new programs had implementation problems. Getting LINC started required cooperation from New York State and thus between de Blasio and Governor Cuomo. The necessary small adjustments were not accomplished in a timely manner. LINC did not get fully up to speed until December 2014, and the nonpartisan Independent Budget Office concluded that “the homeless shelter population has remained stubbornly high this year. This is largely due to a slower than anticipated start to the LINC rental assistance programs.”
The ongoing Cuomo-de Blasio turbulence also delayed the development of more supportive housing. Supportive housing provided through the New York/New York agreements is one of the great successes in homeless policy and has been demonstrated to keep the disabled off the streets and reduce the cost of their care. The last of these agreements was signed in November 2005, and by 2014 most of its units were occupied. Thus, many homeless people remained on the streets, where they attracted the attention of unsympathetic media and the general public and fostered the perception of a homeless crisis. In fact, despite the declining street homeless population documented by the HOPE count, the March 2017 Quinnipiac poll reported that 54 percent of city voters believed that they were seeing more homeless people on the streets and in parks and subways than they did a few years ago.
The de Blasio team made a big misstep when in 2015 it decided to halt development of new shelters for eight months due to community opposition. When the delayed LINC program did not reduce the shelter census, the city was forced to rely on various unsatisfactory stopgaps to put up homeless clients.
Cluster Sites
One such stopgap is the cluster site program, which was initiated by the Bloomberg administration and harshly criticized by de Blasio before he became mayor. Under this program, DHS rents out a “cluster” of private apartments to shelter homeless families. Private landlords own the apartments while nonprofit providers under contract with DHS provide the families with services, and the buildings have a mix of homeless families and private rent-paying tenants.
The cluster site program is a policy disaster. It is premised on putting shelter families in apartments that would otherwise have gone to still-independent families, thus making an already tight low-income housing market even worse. And cluster site apartments are of poor quality. In March 2015, the Department of Investigation (DOI), which is a non-mayoral agency, released a scathing, 180-page report on family shelters that focused mostly on cluster site apartments.
The DOI report found DHS’ cluster sites to be “poorly monitored” and said that they “provide the least adequate social services to families.” Among the issues were rodent infestations, fire safety code violations, defective window guards, a lack of furniture, and units in need of major repair. Landlords can charge three times the market rent for such low-quality apartments.
Moreover, as the buildings are privately owned, DHS is unable to monitor who is using the apartment, security guards cannot screen guests, and there are many unauthorized visitors. Assaults, prostitution, gang activity, and other crimes are frequent. DHS is even renting from landlords who are on the Public Advocate’s list of the city’s 100 worst landlords. Well before he became mayor, de Blasio was aware of these problems and pledged to end the use of cluster sites. But his moratorium on building new shelters and continuing high demand left him unable to do so. Given the vastness of the cluster site program—3,000 families—improvement will take years.
Commercial Hotels
De Blasio inherited the cluster site program from Bloomberg, but is himself responsible for reviving the old and unfortunate practice of placing shelter system clients in commercial hotels. In the late 1980s, the common practice was to place homeless families in private, for-profit “welfare hotels” where conditions were infamously bad. Eventually the federal government refused to fund these hotels, and the practice was curbed.
But because of increased demand, de Blasio has had to return to using commercial hotels. Unlike with traditional, “Tier II” shelters, use of commercial hotels does not require community board notification, for the city is able to claim that it is not actually opening up a “facility,” but merely renting out hotel rooms. DHS has to make sure its clients maintain a low profile in these hotels to avoid protests from other guests.
Further, providing social services in a private facility is difficult. DHS clients in commercial hotels, although they may like the relative independence hotels offer compared to Tier IIs, are thus less likely to receive the necessary assistance to obtain permanent housing. Also, security at the hotels is poor. Visitors are not monitored and only recently have security guards been stationed at hotels. In February of 2016, there was a triple homicide at the Staten Island Ramada Inn. A man murdered his girlfriend and her two children, one of whom was his own. Had this hotel had the same security and monitoring that is provided in Tier II shelters, it is unlikely that this tragedy would have occurred.
This is part one of a three-part series.
Read Part Two: Setbacks and Responses
Skip to Part Three: Can de Blasio Turn the Tide on Homelessness
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by Peter Nasaw and Thomas J. Main. Nasaw, MPA, LMSW, is an expert on homeless policy who has worked in the social services for several years. Main is a professor at the School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York and author of Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio.
Mayor de Blasio & aides visit a shelter (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
This is part two of a three-part series, De Blasio and Homelessness: A New Progressive Mayor Wrestles with an Old Social Problem, by Peter Nasaw and Thomas J. Main. [Jump to Part One: The Challenge of Homeless Policy]
Part Two: Setbacks and Responses
The new administration was set back when Barrios-Paoli, a seasoned administrator and voice of moderation, left just 20 months after she had joined with much fanfare. Moreover, Gilbert Taylor did not work out as DHS commissioner and stepped down on December 15, 2015. Thus, for about the first two years of his administration, while he was being battered in the press and in public opinion over the issue of homelessness , de Blasio tolerated the presence of an ineffective point person on this crucial issue. With Taylor’s departure, HRA Commissioner Banks took temporary charge of DHS.
Thus, by mid-December 2015, city homelessness policy was perhaps not in crisis but certainly less than optimal.
Responsibility was widespread. Bloomberg failed to follow up on promising beginnings, eliminated housing subsidies, and drove up the shelter census. Candidate de Blasio underestimated how difficult a reversal would be. The conflict between de Blasio and Cuomo delayed the renewal of rent subsidies and kept the shelter census higher than it would have been. The feud also put off a fourth New York/New York agreement, leaving the city with few supportive housing units for unsheltered mentally ill people, who remained on the streets to be seen by all. The mayor responded slowly to the resulting media flap. Putting off building or opening new shelters forced the city to rely on cluster sites and commercial hotels. Turmoil and turnover in city leadership hurt. If de Blasio was to prove that a progressive could govern New York City, he would have to pick up his game, and he tried to do so.
Street Homelessness and Supportive Housing
To deal with the perception that street homelessness was out of control, the administration introduced the Home-Stat program. Sixty workers from the Mayor’s Office of Operations now patrol Manhattan streets and call in sightings of homeless people to the city’s nonemergency phone number, 311. Funding to private outreach nonprofits will be increased so that they can expand their street outreach teams from 175 to 312 workers and thus be able to respond to 311 calls within one hour. The Police Department will redeploy 40 officers to its Homeless Outreach Unit. Two extra mini-counts of homeless people living on the street will be done each year for a total of four yearly counts. The idea is to identify street homeless individuals quickly and bring them to shelter rapidly. It may also be that the administration finally realized that more frequent and more accurate enumerations of street homelessness will be likely to rebut the belief that this population has exploded.
Further, it seems that a way around the Cuomo-de Blasio impasse, as it concerns supportive housing, may have developed. There is still no New York/New York IV agreement, but there is what might be called a New York/New York IV disagreement. In his State of the State speech of January 13, 2016, Governor Cuomo announced plans for the state to develop 20,000 supportive housing units over 15 years. Earlier, de Blasio had announced the city was moving forward without the state and pledged that the city would develop 15,000 supportive units over the same period.
In other words, since the mayor and governor cannot get along well enough to sign a formal agreement, each will undertake part of the job on his own. Supporters of a New York/New York IV had been calling for 30,000 more units and are pleased that in sum the city and state plan to create 35,000 units. The New York/New York agreements were strikingly successful ventures in intergovernmental cooperation, so it is a pity that that process has apparently been abandoned for largely personal reasons. No one knows yet whether the lack of a formal agreement will prove to be a problem.
HRA/DHS Integration
A key part of the effort to get on top of the homelessness issue was the partial re-merger of DHS with HRA. Homeless services were spun off from HRA in 1994. In April of 2016, a 90-day review authored by City Hall with the help of outside management consultants PriceWaterhouseCooper argued that having two different agencies provide services to largely overlapping populations was inefficient. The mayor’s solution was to have both HRA, which runs subsidies, and DHS, which runs the shelters, report to Banks, who was now dubbed commissioner of social services. The review projected $38 million in savings from the combined management structure.
But this partial merger may not be a good idea. As an independent agency, DHS was able to communicate and bargain with other city entities. Most homeless services are performed not directly by DHS, but by contracted providers, who are generally not enthusiastic about the new arrangement. Most providers prefer to deal with a small agency focused on their specific issue rather than a very large but possibly more powerful super-agency. Bureaucratic coordination via consolidation is rarely achieved in America’s fragmented administrative system. Agency effectiveness is more likely to be achieved by smaller, mission-driven organizations. But if the new, better-integrated structure is to work, the mayor needs to get serious about it: so far, no new head of DHS has been appointed.
Housing Subsidies and Their Limitations
Another problem for the de Blasio administration is that the LINC subsidies did not have as much of an effect as was hoped, at least through 2015. According to a report from the Independent Budget Office, as of December 2015, the program was unlikely to meet its targeted goals. Although new data are yet to be made available, there remain concerns about whether enough landlords will accept city-funded housing vouchers.
Analysts believe that since the end of Advantage, housing prices have risen, and so LINC vouchers are too paltry (between about $1,200 and $1,550 depending on household size). Also, many of the very apartments that would be assigned to LINC voucher-holders are still being used as cluster site units.
De Blasio’s other housing voucher program is CITYFEPS. FEPS stands for Family Eviction Prevention Services, and is designed for families that have experienced eviction. The program guarantees four months of rent upfront to incentivize landlords to rent to homeless families. The CITYFEPS vouchers provide the same support as LINC vouchers.
But the FEPS program has serious problems. Apartments that participate in housing subsidy programs—including Section 8, NYCHA, and LINC—are inspected by the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) in order to meet federal standards for habitation. However, CITYFEPS units are not inspected by HPD. According to an HRA spokesperson, “For CITYFEPS, not-for-profit service providers generally do an assessment of the units, including a walk-through of the units.” But providers are judged by DHS partly by the number of families they place in independent apartments. Underperforming providers are at risk of losing their contract. So providers have an interest in approving apartments that can undermine their objectivity.
The HPD inspection process is time tested; their inspectors are trained and regulated, and there are rules in place to prevent conflicts of interest. CITYFEPS apartments need to be inspected by HPD in order to protect vulnerable families from being exploited by unscrupulous landlords. Allowing potentially self-interested shelter providers to inspect FEPS units is incautious and likely to provoke criticism when it comes to light.
The Eligibility Process
A major factor that has driven demand, but has rarely been spoken about in public, is the eligibility process for families that apply to shelters. The city must direct scarce housing resources to those who are most in need, and the eligibility process is designed to keep out all but the most needy families.
The city shelter system is regulated by the state welfare department, the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA). In December of 2015, OTDA issued a new regulation that drastically loosened eligibility rules. Very often, families applying for shelter had previously been living in an apartment leased to a family member or friend. Essentially, the new administrative directive made it much easier for the primary tenant of an apartment to refuse to let a family applying for shelter return to the apartment where it had been staying.
Often, prior housing history, public assistance records, and close family ties would show that despite the primary tenant’s refusal, the applicant was in fact lawfully permitted to reside at the address of origin. With the new rules, any applicant who told eligibility specialists that they were not allowed to return to their former apartment would more likely be found eligible for shelter. In effect, the primary tenant now had a greater power to evict family members than did the city marshal.
According to the Coalition for the Homeless, “the 2015 change in policy resulted in a decrease of the percentage of families denied shelter.” No doubt many needy families now received shelter, but the census was also driven up. Whether this was on balance a good deal may be doubted. In any case, almost one year later, in December 2016, a new OTDA regulation allowed the city to re-tighten eligibility standards.
In effect, eligibility standards were loosened, more families were found eligible, the shelter census went up, and then the standards were tightened again. Fiddling with the eligibility standards at the very time when the new rent-subsidy programs were supposed to drive the shelter census down was probably not a good idea.
This is part two of a three-part series.
Read Part Three: Can de Blasio Turn the Tide on Homelessness?
Jump to Part One: The Challenge of Homeless Policy
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by Peter Nasaw and Thomas J. Main. Nasaw, MPA, LMSW, is an expert on homeless policy who has worked in the social services for several years. Main is a professor at the School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York and author of Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio.