On the job (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
The New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) is preparing to publish its latest annual workforce report, which details the demographics of the city government’s massive workforce and trends in employee turnover. But the report is already obsolete, given it is to cover the 2020 fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and will fail to shine a light on how the municipal workforce has changed in the last two years.
DCAS’ report, which was most recently published last year and covered the 2019 fiscal year, examines employee-level data from 72 city agencies and offices under the Mayor, various city boards, and even the offices of elected officials including in the City Council, the Public Advocate, the Comptroller, Borough Presidents, and District Attorneys. The report, which is usually published before the end of the next fiscal year, presents detailed demographic data – age, gender, race, ethnicity – as well as information on salaries, length of employment, and retirement eligibility. It looks at hiring, attrition, resignations, and transfers.
According to a DCAS spokesperson, the long-delayed report will be released in the coming months and is tardy in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected the lengthy process of collecting and reviewing data from city agencies and the pension system. The DCAS spokesperson made no mention of when the next two reports might be published to get the annual report up to date. The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
At a glance, the report provides a valuable look at the city’s workforce. It shows patterns of diversity, in race, age, and gender. It shows where the city’s workforce lives, across the five boroughs and its surrounding counties. And it provides comparisons with other major cities.
Since the report was last published, however, the municipal workforce has experienced a massive upheaval because of the pandemic and decisions by city leaders. The intervening period also covers the end of the eight-year Bill de Blasio administration and start of Eric Adams’ mayoral tenure. The city lost more than 19,000 full-time workers, and vacancies have soared amid unusually high attrition rates, controversial retention and hiring policies, and a tight labor market. An acute staffing crisis has threatened critical functions and services at several city agencies.
With the massive number of vacancies that the city will not be able to quickly fill and amid belt-tightening efforts, Mayor Eric Adams has ordered a 50% cut in budgeted vacancies across the board for all non-uniformed positions in advance of his preliminary budget for next fiscal year, which is due in February. But none of that, though the subject of intense ongoing debate and negotiation, is expected to be covered in the DCAS report on the city workforce of the 2020 fiscal year.
“I would say this report is more important now than ever because it gives us the ability to compare,” said City Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat. Brewer chairs the Committee on Oversight and Investigations and chaired a joint hearing in September with the Committee on Civil Service and Labor on maintaining the city’s workforce. At the hearing, Brewer and her colleagues pressed the administration on the municipal worker shortage, concerns that they have since reiterated repeatedly, including at a more recent hearing on the mayor’s November budget update.
[Read: At Hearing, City Council Criticizes Mayor Adams on Budget Decisions, Depleted Agencies]
While the report will contain important information, as Brewer pointed out, it will present an outdated picture since it covers the fiscal year from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020. “That’s a strange time, for lack of a better word,” Brewer said. “We don't know who's in the office, who's not.”
Brewer is also concerned about retirement trends. “New York City has an older workforce,” she said. “That's another whole challenge right now because…so many people are retiring. In addition to nobody wanting to work for the city, it's really creating a challenge to provide service.”
She also doesn’t buy the excuse that DCAS’ report was so delayed because of covid. “I think everybody blames everything on the pandemic. I assume some delay would be called for…but this is too long a delay,” she said.
Other electeds have also been sounding the alarm about the city’s staffing trends and have called for more transparency from the administration. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander released a report earlier this month warning that the high rate of vacancies at city agencies is affecting critical services, as he urged the mayor to accelerate hiring and improve retention. And while Mayor Adams has promised new recruitment and retention policies, he has yet to announce any so far.
A separate report released last month by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office examined how the pandemic has affected the city’s workforce. “The City experienced significant growth in its full- time workforce in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, much of which was driven by new or expanded services. The pandemic, and the City’s efforts to manage the budgetary implications of its impact, have led to a decline in staffing which has undone much of this growth,” the report states. “The decline did not occur evenly across the City’s agencies. Certain occupations also experienced a disproportionate decline, including those engaged in educational support as well as protective and enforcement services.”
But that report excluded full-time equivalent employees and certain public authorities like the massive New York City Housing Authority and Health+Hospitals, both of which are in the DCAS workforce profile report. It also did not analyze workforce demographics, which the DCAS report does.
In his report, DiNapoli encouraged DCAS to release its latest data. “The City would benefit from having an updated assessment of the changes to its workforce since the pandemic began,” it states.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Mayor Adams with NYPD officials (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
In his first nearly twelve months in office, Mayor Eric Adams has shown no signs of moving on a major campaign promise to publish a list of police officers the NYPD is watching for violent or otherwise unseemly behavior.
The promise was one of the more striking commitments the would-be mayor made to boost accountability within the ranks of the police force, a department of 34,000 uniformed officers. It was also one of the more tangible pledges Adams made to demonstrate his commitment to balancing police reform with his heavy focus on more aggressive law enforcement, part of Adams’ decades-long mix of pushing for fairer policing while remaining “conservative on crime,” as he has put it.
"As a former police officer who stood up against racism and corruption in the NYPD while simultaneously protecting our streets, I know how entrenched systemic bias is in the department," reads the police reform platform from Adams' 2021 campaign website, which has since been taken down (but preserved by Gotham Gazette). "The fastest way to true reform is to add as much diversity to the NYPD as fast as we can, while building trust through transparency."
"The NYPD keeps its own 'monitoring list' of cops with records of complaints and violent incidents. We will make those records more available to the public to be transparent and build trust," the platform reads.
But as of this month, the promise is still a work in progress, according to the mayor's office. As was a pledge the first-year Democratic mayor made in May to expedite the NYPD's often glacial disciplinary process.
"We're looking at the flowchart of how long it takes to remove someone who has violated their oath of office," Adams told CBS-2 TV’s Marcia Kramer in a May 25 interview. "We're making sure if an officer is doing something incorrect we right away rectify that behavior and at the same time, if it's something that is done that breaks the law or is not suitable to be [a] police officer, we are bringing them up on internal departmental charges," he said.
Fabien Levy, Adams' press secretary, said the administration was not ready to share more details on either the monitoring list or the expedited disciplinary system.
"Since day one, our public safety team has been focused on the NYPD disciplinary process with a particular focus on efficiency and transparency," Levy said in a statement when Gotham Gazette first inquired in October. "We have met, and continue to meet, with relevant stakeholders internally and externally, and our work, including with respect to the monitoring list and streamlining the disciplinary process, continues. We will share announcements when they are ready to be made."
At the time, Levy would not say which stakeholders the mayor has met with or what hurdles remain in place. On Thursday, December 15, he said by email that he had no progress updates to share.
But an hour later, Adams was asked about speeding up police discipline during an open question-and-answer session with reporters at City Hall.
The mayor said the disciplinary process was one of three focuses of an interagency working group, along with civilianizing parts of the NYPD and addressing failures of the department’s sex crimes unit. The group has presented its first set of recommendations and will come back with a second set, following feedback from the mayor, Adams said. The monitoring list was not mentioned in the question or answer.
"We're going to get it right and we're going to streamline the disciplinary process," he said. "It should not take this long, it's unfair to the person who's being charged and it's unfair to the city to keep an officer on the books who is not suitable to wear a uniform and understand the nobility of public safety."
Elected last year amid two years of pandemic-era crime increases, Adams has spent much of his first year in office focused on adding police patrols to the subways, enforcing low-level quality-of-life offenses, and cracking down on illegal guns. The mayor’s public remarks, in part spurred by the murder of two NYPD officers in his first month in office, have almost entirely consisted almost entirely of support for police and push-back against those who criticize them.
Adams' watchlist promise came amid an ongoing struggle over what police disciplinary records are accessible under the state's Freedom of Information Law. State lawmakers repealed Civil Rights Law 50-a, the statute used to shield those and other police personnel records from the public, in 2020. But police departments around the state, including the NYPD, have refused to publish many of them or sued to keep them under wraps.
The parameters of the mayor's promised watchlist are unclear. The NYPD's Early Intervention Program, which reviews officers for behavior that may lead to misconduct or negative public interactions, reports each quarter the number but not the names of officers under examination.
From April through June of this year (the second quarter), the department examined 208 uniformed officers for potential intervention, according to the last publicly available data. Of those, 156 were placed under review because prosecutors had declined to pursue their arrests, and 45 were due to allegations of biased policing. Only 14 officers, or about 7%, were recommended for non-punitive intervention after the review.
According to the department's Administrative Guide, intervention could entail training, mentoring, enhanced supervision, body-worn camera review, a conversation with leadership, or a change in assignment.
By comparison, the first quarter of 2022, from January to March, saw only 53 officers placed under review, and 26 of them – roughly half – were recommended for intervention.
But Dr. Keith Taylor, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who served in the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau from 1998 to 2001, said the department has been keeping watchlists long before the Early Intervention Program launched. Those lists could consist of substantiated and unsubstantiated complaints that go beyond the Early Intervention Program.
"I think it's appropriate to use a level of discretion and sensitivity in order to make certain that [officers'] ability to do their job is not negatively affected by allegations," Taylor told Gotham Gazette of Adams' proposal to publish a list of officers under internal watch. On the other hand, he said, "once an allegation has become an actual finding then it's important the agency has transparency to maintain the public's trust."
Civil rights advocates believe publishing a "monitoring list" would be the tip of the iceberg of true police accountability.
"What the public needs to know is not just the officers that the NYPD has flagged for monitoring but to know how many complaints are being filed against officers on the whole [and] what is happening with those complaints," said Michael Sisitzky, an assistant policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), in an interview. "From the outset, it was always an inadequate proposal but it did speak to the need to have more transparency.”
A lack of publicly available data also makes it hard to tell if there has been progress expediting the disciplinary process. One component of that is cases under the jurisdiction of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an agency responsible for investigating certain allegations of police misconduct, a fraction of all misconduct cases.
According to the Mayor's Management Report, the average time it took the CCRB to close cases grew in fiscal year 2022, which included the last six months of the de Blasio administration and first six months of Adams’ term. The time to complete a full investigation rose from an average of 378 days to 591 days, or 56%, "largely as an after-effect of the City’s COVID-19 precautions," the report states. For complaints against police officers that the CCRB substantiated, the average case length increased 42%, from 433 to 614 days. Substantiated CCRB cases then go to the NYPD with recommendations for discipline, in some cases to an administrative trial, in others directly to the police commissioner for a decision.
“Mayor Adams has consistently said that public safety and justice are the prerequisites to prosperity," Levy wrote in October. "As the FY22 MMR — which spans a period covering two mayoral administrations — notes, the increase in average times of investigation and substantiation largely stem from the city’s COVID-19 precautions. As we continue the reopening process, we remain committed to ensuring CCRB has the resources it needs to fulfill its mission under the Charter efficiently and effectively.”
In November, the administration released a plan to cut the CCRB's budget by 3%, part of a citywide plan to reduce budget gaps and after a previous 3% reduction earlier this year. The CCRB headcount is already below New York City Charter-mandated levels tied to the NYPD's uniformed headcount.
A CCRB spokesperson said the agency has improved the time it takes to complete investigations but could not say whether the NYPD has increased the speed with which it handles cases and metes out punishment – one of the biggest issues raised by families of people killed by police.
"The pandemic created significant roadblocks for the CCRB and other oversight entities to complete investigations on time, prompting a statewide executive order extending statute of limitations for CCRB cases, and other disciplinary investigations, through May 4, 2022," the CCRB spokesperson wrote in an email to Gotham Gazette. "Since closing those cases, the CCRB has already managed to reduce the time it takes to complete an investigation by 20% from Q1 to Q2 of this year."
According to the spokesperson, that is in part the result of new record-keeping methods and work between the CCRB and NYPD to improve the department's sharing of body-worn camera footage with CCRB investigators. The average time it takes the NYPD to fulfill a request for footage is now seven days, the spokesperson told Gotham Gazette, down from 42 business days in 2019. The agency's board members are also more frequently involved in case reviews, which further reduces completion time.
"Under Mayor Adams, disciplinary proceedings for NYPD officers remain inadequate in number and outcome and too far delayed, which harms the safety of our city and communities," said Loyda Colon, executive director of the Justice Committee, a group that advocates against police violence, and a member of the Communities United for Police Reform coalition.
"The mayor’s 'monitoring list' is a diversion attempt that promotes a false 'bad apples' narrative, when the whole policing system is rotten," Colon said in the statement.
The group has been pushing Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell and her predecessors to fire officers who killed Kawaski Trawick, a Black man with a history of mental health issues, in his home in 2019. In November, the department scheduled a disciplinary trial for Officers Brendan Thompson and Herbert Davis for April 24, 2023 – more than four years after Trawick was killed. Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark previously declined to charge the two with a crime.
This past week, Sewell issued an internal memo to the department saying she reduced or dismissed the penalty recommendations of departmental trial judges in dozens of cases and planned to soon change the NYPD's disciplinary matrix, The New York Post reported.
The New York City Council passed a law in 2020 requiring the matrix under her predecessor, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, after years of pressure from advocates. It was aimed at introducing the type of transparency and fairness into the disciplinary process that Adams' championed in his campaign promises and May interview. According to Sewell's memo, she believed many of the disciplinary recommendations were "manifestly unfair.”
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Tony Avella at City Hall (photo: NY City Council)
The 2023 City Council election is kicking off, as the New York City Campaign Finance Board approved its first public funds payment to a single campaign on Thursday and announced a series of completed campaign audits from the previous election cycle.
The upcoming elections are taking place just two years after all 51 City Council seats were on the ballot in 2021 because of the decennial redistricting process. Based on the 2020 Census, City Council districts were redrawn to accommodate an increase of 630,000 residents in the city since 2010. The New York City Districting Commission on Wednesday published the final new district map, which was approved by the City Council in October.
After the turn of the year, things are going to heat up ahead of June party primaries and the fall general election.
The first public funds payment by the Campaign Finance Board was based on the last campaign finance disclosure made by candidates on July 15 of this year. The next disclosure is due January 17, which will cover the fundraising period from July 12, 2022 till January 13, 2023. The next potential payment will occur on January 17 (based on the July disclosure report), followed by a payment on February 15, which will be based on the January disclosure report.
Thursday’s payment was the first of five that will be made before the primary ballot is set in May – the CFB has procedures for clawing back funds from candidates who either fail to petition or to qualify for the ballot – and will be followed by eight more payments through the 2023 cycle.
The CFB’s voluntary public matching funds program matches small dollar donations at a 8-to-1 ratio, to encourage campaigns to broaden their outreach to constituents and disincentivize reliance on wealthy donors. For City Council candidates, the first $175 of a contribution from a resident within the relevant district is matched with public funds.
The only candidate that qualified for the CFB’s first public funds payment was Tony Avella, a Democrat from Northeast Queens, who is running again for Council District 19, currently represented by Republican Council Member Vickie Paladino. Avella previously served as a state Senator from 2011 to 2019 and was a City Council member from 2002 till 2010. He ran for the District 19 seat last year and lost to Paladino.
Avella’s campaign has already raised $14,480 for the June primary and, on Thursday, was awarded $83,106 in public funds. To receive the funds, the campaign had to meet a dual threshold of raising at least $5,000 and had to have at least 75 contributors from within the district. Paladino has only raised about $615 so far for reelection. Besides Avella, two other candidates are running in the Democratic primary – Paul Graziano and Richard Lee.
There were only minor changes made to City Council District 19 in Queens, while other districts saw drastically new lines and significant controversy during the process that was full of debate and drama.
Under recent changes made to campaign finance law, through a voter-approved charter amendment in 2018 and legislation in 2019, the public funds program was significantly expanded while contribution limits were reduced for participants. Council candidates who opt in to the program can raise a maximum of $1,050 from an individual donor, while nonparticipants can raise $1,600. Candidates are also limited to spending $207,000 on each of the primary and general legs of the election, for a total limit of $414,000. (The spending limit in the non-election years of the cycle is $55,000 and counts towards the spending limit.)
Besides the public funds payment, the CFB also announced a list of 39 campaigns from the 2021 cycle that have been audited and were in compliance with CFB rules and regulations. The board still has more than 260 audits left to complete from the cycle and faced criticism at a City Council hearing earlier this week about its slow audit processes.
Most of the current class of 51 Council members are serving their first terms and many are set to face competitive reelection races, with challengers already declaring their campaigns. There are already 78 candidates registered with the Campaign Finance Board.
A particularly crowded contest seems to be shaping up in District 9 in Manhattan, where Council Member Kristin Richardson Jordan, a first-term Democrat, is facing a slew of primary opponents. There are already five other candidates registered with the CFB in the race including sitting Assemblymembers Inez Dickens and Al Taylor, and criminal justice advocate Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five.
Some candidates have begun fundraising in earnest for the 2023 cycle. The top fundraiser so far is City Council Member Rafael Salamanca Jr., a Bronx Democrat, who had raised more than $393,000 as of July (most of which was left over from his previous campaign) and had about $378,000 in cash on hand. In second place was City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who had raised nearly $128,000 and had about $105,000 on hand.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette