A Poster from VietAct
It took 12 years for Martina Okeke to break free. After moving from Nigeria to New York in 1988, she cooked, cleaned and took care of a Staten Island couple's children on the promise of a $300 monthly wage and tuition help for her kids back home. She never received a penny.
Friends from Okeke's church finally convinced her to leave the family, but she refused to report them to the authorities. "I did not want to have a bad name," she told a reporter from the New York Times.
In June 2001, two Indonesian women, who paid $3,000 each for a falsified visa, airline tickets from Jakarta and the promise of a well-paying restaurant job in New York, escaped from a Brooklyn brothel. They had arrived in New York only to find that their "debt" had increased to $30,000. The men waiting for them at the airport also threatened to kill them if they refused to work as prostitutes, according to the Brooklyn Rail.
Human trafficking for labor or sex would seem to be something from another century — or at least another place. Stories like these, however, make clear that the practice exists in modern-day New York. Galvanized by such shocking anecdotes, an unlikely coalition of Bush administration officials, Christian conservatives and liberal activists have focused attention and money on human trafficking, passing landmark federal legislation and committing over $150 million to find and help domestic trafficking victims.
This June, New York joined the effort, becoming one of 29 states to pass state-specific human trafficking legislation. The law, designed to address some of the perceived gaps and shortcomings of the federal law, gives local law enforcement agencies new tools to prosecute traffickers and new services for victims. Scheduled to take effect on November 1, it was immediately hailed by a broad group of supporters, including victim and immigrant rights organizations as well as the editorial board of the New York Times.
Having set the legislative framework for anti-trafficking legislation, New York turns to the difficult task of implementation. Fighting trafficking is difficult, and the problem is complicated by the fact that no one can even agree on how many victims are currently in the United States.
By its very nature, human trafficking is a shadowy enterprise. Traffickers commonly say they will harm victims or their families if they attempt to leave. Language barriers and a suspicion of government rooted in their home countries often prevent victims from going to law enforcement or others who might help them. Traffickers may confiscate passports or warn victims that they will be deported if they approach authorities, according to Juhu Thikral, a lawyer who leads the Urban Justice Center's Sex Workers Project.
At the same time, the media, government officials and some advocates appear to inflate the number of people affected by human trafficking. For example, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protections Act in 2000 on the basis of a State Department report that put the number of foreign-born victims entering the United States at 50,000 a year. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, the estimate was reached by a CIA analyst who relied on overseas news clippings. After the Government Accountability Office issued a report criticizing the methodology, a new estimate was created, essentially by using a more sophisticated version of the same methodology. A later calculation cut the figure by two thirds, resulting in an estimate of between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign-born trafficked victims per year. In 2006 former attorney general Alberto Gonzales told Congress that even that might have been overstated.
Determining the number of trafficked victims in New York presents even more problems. With its international airports and ethnic neighborhoods, New York is believed to be a major hub in the trafficking business, but no reliable data exists on the nature or extent of the problem.
A final complicating factor relates to how trafficking is defined. Under New York law, a trafficking victim does not have to be foreign-born. The definition includes anyone who is forced into sex work or other types of work, such as domestic labor. That means, for example, that a young woman born and brought up in New York City who is recruited as a sex worker under false pretenses can be counted as a victim of sex trafficking. The New York State Office of Children and Family Services estimates that over 2,500 children are forced into sex work every year in New York.
Perhaps wary of these problems, advocates and government officials would not offer an estimate of the total number of trafficking victims working in New York City. They all couched their answer in terms of broad ranges and were careful to note the unreliability of “official” totals. Whatever the numbers, though, experts believe that only a small number of human trafficking victims ever come to the attention of victim support agencies. For example, Crystal Deboise, the coordinator of Human Trafficking Programs at the New York Association of New Americans estimates only between 100 and 150 human trafficking victims are currently being served by the main victim support organizations in New York City, including the Association of New Americans and Safe Horizon.
Whatever the numbers of victims, most need help. To encourage more victims to come forward and seek assistance, the New York State law seeks to fill gaps in victim services authorized by federal law.
Under the federal trafficking prevention, passed by Congress in 2000, victims can receive services if they are certified as victims by the Department of Health and Human Services. They are also eligible for so-called T-Visas, which allow foreign-born victims to stay in the United States while they help law enforcement agencies prosecute the case. Advocates say, though, that the benefits offered by federal law are often slow in coming. It can take 18 months for the federal government to issue a T-Visa. According to humantrafficking.org, in the first six years since their creation, only 500 T-Visas were issued.
To address this, the New York law will make “pre-certification” assistance available to victims. It authorizes the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance to enter into contracts with social service agencies to provide services immediately to victims who come forward. The goal is help address what Deboise calls the “first week problem”: meeting the immediate needs of trafficking victims for food and shelter. “People don’t (always) know they’re a victim of trafficking,” said Deboise. “They want to know, â€am I allowed to leave?’ We’ll send a cab to pick them up, do a quick assessment and try to find them a place to sleep for the night.”
Even under the new law, victims, especially illegal immigrants, face a difficult choice: co-operate or face deportation. “We make it clear to people that if they’re over 18, in order to pursue services or legal status, they have to cooperate with law enforcement” said Thikral of the Urban Justice. For many individuals, that can be a difficult choice: Despite being beaten by her boss at a Suffolk County brothel, one Long Island immigrant who initially agreed to cooperate with police recanted, according to the New York Times. Now in federal custody, she is awaiting deportation.
A second goal of the New York law is to crack down on the practice of trafficking itself. Three new felonies have been added to state law, including laws that specifically target the methods used in sex and labor trafficking, such as withholding passports and threatening deportation. A third felony targets New York businesses that knowingly promote “sex tourism” in other countries. Finally, a number of misdemeanor crimes were also added to the New York law, including increased penalties for patronizing a prostitute (the so-called “Johns” law).
Advocates hail most of these changes. “This is a strong definition of trafficking,” said Thikral. Under the law, prosecutors can now target specific techniques used by traffickers rather having to pursue trafficking cases on rape and kidnapping charges, which may be harder to prove.
The advocates do have some concerns however. Because the law makes sex trafficking a higher-level felony (punishable by up to 25 years in jail) than labor trafficking (up to 7 years), some fear labor trafficking will not be taken as seriously. Thikral disagreed with the legislature’s decision to increase the penalties for Johns because she worries it might keep the Johns from bringing trafficking cases to the attention of law enforcement.
Whatever their qualms about specific aspects of the law, most experts believe the most important change is that it will encourage local law enforcement to be more aggressive in prosecuting trafficking. “If you don’t have state penalties, you have to go outside the state system,” said Mary B. Kavaney, the deputy commissioner of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, said. “With three new felonies, you can bring [trafficking] to the forefront” of law enforcement efforts in New York.
This could result in increased prosecution of relatively small-scale traffickers. Federal law enforcement agencies tend to be more interested in cases with major traffickers and large numbers of victims. Under the new state law, local police can help pick up the slack by pursuing cases that involve a smaller number of victims.
For Kenneth Franzblau, the director of human trafficking at the New York State Office of Criminal Justice Services, the key to successful implementation of the new law is training: getting police officers to adopt a different perspective when they confront a potential trafficking situation. He cites the examples of raiding a brothel or investigating a domestic dispute between a nanny and her employer. In those examples, he would encourage the police to ask questions about the living situation of the people they find, whether they are free to leave or if they were forced to surrender passports or other identification to their employer.
Still, breaking up trafficking rings is difficult at any level of law enforcement. According to the Washington Post, 148 federal cases have been brought nationwide since 2000, despite the creation of 42 Justice Department task forces designed to bring representatives of law enforcement and social service agencies together.
While experts dispute the number, no one doubts that there are traffickers in the New York area. But more than a year after a Long Island Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force was organized, not one trafficker operating on Long Island has been arrested, and just one victim, a Chinese woman forced to work in a Wantagh brothel that was disguised as a massage parlor, has been freed from traffickers, according to a May 2006 New York Times report. Convincing the woman to cooperate was a painstaking process -- she had been arrested twice in four months, but it took the intervention of a prosecutor and a police detective to convince her that she wouldn’t be deported. Notwithstanding her testimony, the owner of the brothel has yet to be arrested, in large part because the police still need testimony.
After New York’s law takes effect on November 1, the Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking will have the most responsibility for its implementation. Composed of multiple state agencies, the task force will coordinate training efforts for law enforcement agencies and evaluate the state’s progress in targeting trafficking efforts. It will tackle the issue of data collection in hopes of getting a more reliable handle on the problem. (The Vera Institute for Justice is also embarking on a similar research effort with funding from the federal government, using New York City as a test case.)
This is not a purely academic question. Officials at the state Division of Criminal Justice Services say it is key to their mission. “No one knows the numbers,” Kavaney said. “If we knew the numbers of victims, the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators and the types of businesses being used (by traffickers) as cover, we’d go a long way.”
Aubrey Fox is project director of Bronx Community Solutions, aimed at changing the Bronx court system’s approach to low-level crime.
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In the almost six years since terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center, much has changed for New Yorkers. They have learned to always carry a photo ID, to be sure to take their keys out of their pockets when going through metal detectors and to react calmly to being frisked at a Mets game. But will they accept being subjected to routine surveillance as they go about their business on the streets of lower Manhattan?
The New York City Police Department will soon launch a new counter-terrorism surveillance program named the "Lower Manhattan Security Initiative." It will include some 3,000 cameras – both public and private – below Canal Street to monitor people and cars moving through Lower Manhattan, along with license plate readers, a command center and movable roadblocks. The program is generally seen as having been modeled on London’s so-called ring of steel, a security and surveillance system that keeps many eyes on London’s financial district and historic sites. Some counts estimate that with this system the average London resident is photographed 300 times a day
The planned system for New York City represents a "commonsense approach to protecting what is arguably one of the most sensitive 1.7 square miles on the planet," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said on the News Hour earlier this summer. "It’s a wise use of public funds in protecting certainly a tremendous revenue generator for the city and for the country."
The cordon of cameras and other technology has, however, attracted opposition from critics on both sides of the political spectrum who variously attack it for threatening privacy rights, being ineffective and costing too much money.
The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative is certainly sweeping. Although surveillance programs have been used in other cities such as Washington to help prevent security threats, New York’s new initiative is a significantly larger undertaking than any other previously attempted, or perhaps even envisioned, in the United States, according to Tim Connors, director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Policing Terrorism.
The thousands of cameras represent a dramatic increase from the 250 cameras already in use for crime prevention. It also represents a major change in technology. The existing cameras can capture moving images, but to be reviewed and analyzed the data first needs to be downloaded. With the new system, images from the cameras would go directly to a surveillance center. The system would include methods to quickly block roads and restrict traffic. The new cameras would have the capability to transmit data in real time to agencies in Washington including the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The program seems ambitious even for a city that has expended so much money and effort to avert another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. As of last year, New York was reportedly spending some $200 million a year on counterterrorism efforts. Every day more than 1,000 police officers focus on that task – from collecting intelligence to watching cars and trucks entering the Lincoln Tunnel. Experts agree that the city – not the federal government – has put together the most extensive urban counterterrorism operation in the world. Much of that, Kelly said, focuses on prevention – trying to keep terrorists from coming together and even thinking about an attack let alone actually staging one.
This security initiative takes a different approach. For one, it relies on technology more than human intelligence.
So does this high technology initiative indicate a shift in policy? According to Connors, nothing he has heard so far indicates that it does. "Part of the overall strategy here is to complement—as opposed to eliminate—the city’s present reliance upon a large, well-funded police force and, particularly important, one that has received state-of-the-art training in counter-terrorism," he said.
The police use a number of tactics to fight terror, and the surveillance initiative, Connors said, represents a new resource in the city’s tool belt for protecting itself. It is definitely not "an either-or proposition in play here," he said.
By the end of next year, thousands of security cameras will be recording, unfiltered, in real time and without a warrant or the need to demonstrate probable cause, millions of ordinary New Yorkers going about their lives in one of the busiest areas in the world. Civil liberties groups are, not surprisingly, concerned about what they fear is the erosion of privacy rights of U.S. citizens. "[This] plan is a major step towards blanket police monitoring of law-abiding New Yorkers, and it could lead us down a path toward a total surveillance society, " the New York Civil Liberties Union said in a statement on July 9.
The system would not seem to violate any laws. Supporters of the surveillance, including Kelly, argue no one has a right to privacy on a public street. "It’s long been settled in the law that there is no expectation of privacy in the public place," Kelly has said. "It’s simply not a legal issue. It’s not a violation of the Constitution. It’s not a violation of statute."
Skeptics raise a number of concerns:
Racial profiling: The first challenge, according to P.J. Crowley, director of homeland security at the Center for American Progress is the difficulty in determining what constitutes "suspicious" activity. The answer, he believes, is truly in the "eye of the beholder." Already, he notes, people have been detained for taking pictures of bridges or landmarks. It is not unreasonable to think that an amateur photographer who looks Middle Eastern would be subject to more intense scrutiny – and to having his photo sent on to Washington – than a person with Northern European features.
Compiling personal information: It is likely and foreseeable, said Jim Harper, director of information planning studies at the Cato Institute, that the information gathered through the security initiative could be used to develop a database that will include "profiles" on the schedules and movements of civilians—personal information that an individual would normally regard as being private. This might alarm some New Yorkers. "When law abiding citizens go out in public and move around," he explains, "they don’t expect people to use new high-tech surveillance technology in order to track us and monitor us, extracting untold information in the process."
Kelly has said that the police have no interest in holding on to extraneous information.
Invasions of Privacy: For the cameras to be effective, someone has to review the images and that human intervention can create its own difficulties. In a television interview, George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen recalled sitting in a camera control room one night. When boredom set in after midnight, the workers focused not on miscreants but on attractive women and people making out in the park. During the 2004 Republican convention in New York, Rosen recalled, "surveillance cameras on airplanes took pictures of a couple making love on a roof garden, followed them, watched this whole thing and then actually trailed the woman as she left."
Unrelated Uses: Interestingly enough the cameras will be installed in Manhattan as Mayor Michael Bloomberg seeks cameras and other technology for another program – his plan to charge cars and trucks to be in parts of Manhattan during the workweek. In London, surveillance cameras enforce that city’s congestion pricing plan, according to Rosen. "There’s really a form of mission creep, and cameras that are accepted for one purpose are used for another," he said.
According to Kelly, the administration has no plans to use the cameras ringing lower Manhattan for "revenue generation." And he has noted that planning for the surveillance program began long before the city embarked on its congestion pricing proposal.
Even many who themselves have reservations about the security initiative concede that many New Yorkers are willing to accept cameras if they think surveillance will make the city safer. "Most people like cameras," Rosen said. Photos from England, showing suspects in July’s attempted bombings in London and Glasgow and their role in the capture of suspects in the July 2005 bombings of the transit system have bolstered their appeal.
That said, Crowley believes there are steps the city can take to balance citizens’ civil liberties with the need to protect millions of lives. The first, he said, is for the administration to communicate with civil liberties groups who can help ensure that law enforcement and intelligence agencies are doing what is necessary from a security standpoint without stepping over the line and infringing on the legitimate privacy rights of average citizens.
The second step, he said, is developing a robust public review process. Several different agencies are already involved in overseeing issues associated with security and privacy in other cities. "If New York is indeed going to move in this direction," Crowley argued, "they have to make sure there is adequate oversight, and offer an opportunity for those who believe they have been unfairly targeted as a result of this [to] challenge the way the surveillance is being implemented."
Estimates are that the initiative could cost $90 million. Of that, Kelly said, the police department has received $25 million—a significant down payment. Out of this, $15 million was allocated by grants from the Department of Homeland Security; the other $10 million came from the city’s budget. The funding for it this year represents something of a turnaround. In 2006, the plan seemed largely doomed as the federal government cut homeland security funds for New York City. This year, though, Washington increased its allocation of anti-terror funding for New York.
The price tag for the 3,000 surveillance cameras alone could reach about $8 million to implement in the first year. The police department press office declined to provide further details on cost estimates. According to Connors, Bloomberg has indicated that he will do whatever is necessary to secure the city, without being influenced by budgetary constraints.
Even if the city has the money, is the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative the best use of it? While the city’s strategy in the last six years has focused on preventing terrorist attacks in their earliest stages, the "ring of steel" technology would be most useful in the event of a failed terrorist plot, such as this summer’s thwarted car bombings in London, Harper said. Thousands of surveillance cameras could provide police with unedited video of the individuals involved and a precise timeline of how the event unfolded. The material recorded on camera has the potential to be an unparalleled resource for the city to learn what mistakes both sides made and help the city better prevent a future attack.
"Cameras are good at figuring out, after the fact, what happened," Harper said. "Their limitation is that they provide law enforcement with essentially no capability to actually stop an attack before it happens."
Kelly believes the security system can act as a deterrent. "It is not a panacea," he said, "but it is a valuable additional layer to put in place."
By its very nature, of course, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative focuses on Lower Manhattan. Other parts of the city also represent obvious targets for a future terrorist attack. Midtown, for example, is home to the United Nations, Grand Central and Penn Station, the Empire State Building as well as the headquarters of many financial service firms.
Connors thinks the decision to focus on Lower Manhattan boiled down intelligence estimates of the area’s threat level. He notes that al Qaeda and other affiliated terror groups have broadcast to America that its most coveted target for a large-scale attack remains Lower Manhattan. And, of course, it has already attacked that area twice.
Crowley similarly believes that the decision to focus on Lower Manhattan, as opposed to the entire city, makes sense. He argues that it is Lower Manhattan that is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the financial capital of the world. "There are other attractive targets elsewhere, but I cannot dispute making the protection of Lower Manhattan a security priority," he said.
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When Andrew Alexander turned 17 on January 3, 2006, the Queens high school senior did not expect that he would be arrested later that day. And he definitely did not expect that his arrest would ultimately bring about a change in New York's procedures for making information about convictions public. But a policy change resulting from Andrew Alexander's birthday arrest, conviction and subsequent lawsuit will affect thousands of defendants in New York City Criminal Court every year.
Alexander was charged with criminal mischief, creating graffiti and possessing graffiti instruments (paint), all misdemeanors. After negotiations, he pled guilty in Queens Criminal Court to disorderly conduct. This was a typical "plea bargain," where a defendant, who has committed a simple misdemeanor and has had little or no prior contact with the criminal justice system, admits guilt and does not go to trial. Alexander’s sentence, a conditional discharge, required him to do community service and avoid being arrested for at least one year.
Disorderly conduct, or "discon," which is used to cover a multitude of acts, is a violation, or an offense, rather than a crime and does not result in a criminal record.
One year later, Alexander applied for a job as a cashier at Sears. The application asked, "Have you been convicted of a crime within the last seven (7) years?"
Alexander answered, "No." He believed that was truthful. When he pled guilty to disorderly conduct, he was advised that the offense was a violation, not a crime, and that he would not have a record of a criminal conviction.
Sears retained USIS, a private screening and background search company, to investigate applicants. As part of its investigation of Alexander, USIS contacted the New York State Office of Court Administration and, providing Alexander's name and date of birth, requested his criminal history, if any.
The next day, for a fee of $52.00, the office emailed USIS "Criminal History Search Results," and disclosed that Alexander had been charged with the three graffiti-related misdemeanors and pled guilty to the violation of disorderly conduct.
Based upon this information, Sears rejected Alexander's job application.
Alexander sued the Office of Court Administration and Jonathan Lippman, who was then chief administrative judge, claiming that his rights had been violated since findings or pleas of guilt to violations are supposed to remain sealed. The lawsuit was brought by Stuart Lichten of the Manhattan firm of Schwartz, Lichten and Bright. The suit was based on criminal procedure law, which provides that, when someone is convicted of disorderly conduct or another violation, no statewide search by the Office of Court Administration of electronic records can be disseminated to the public. A person who is convicted, by plea or trial, of a violation is entitled to have the record sealed and fingerprints and any photographs returned. Disorderly conduct is a "non-printable" charge for which fingerprints are not required.
The state took the position that, while Alexander was entitled to the return of fingerprints and "mug shots," sealing did not apply. The counsel for the Office of Court Administration, Michael Colodner, argued that the sealing does not apply to court records, but only to records of arrest and prosecution in the files of the Division of Criminal Justice, police agencies and prosecutors' offices. He further argued that paper (i.e. non-electronic) records kept in the courts also did not have to be sealed.
The dispute arose at least partly because the original charges against Alexander were misdemeanors. As a result, the records of the violation also went along into the state system. But according to Lichten, the release of the information violated his client's rights to sealing. That is, the search made available to USIS should not have included anything about the violation; any reference should have been deleted.
Under the Criminal Procedure Law that governs the confidentiality of records, where the criminal action ends in a violation conviction, the Office of Court Administration is not permitted to disseminate to the public, statewide records kept electronically. A person who is convicted is entitled to have that statewide record kept confidential. However, the actual paper records kept in New York City Criminal Court are not sealed, and the public does have access to the physical record in the clerk's office. The intended balance is that there is a public record in the office of the Clerk of the Criminal Court, but not in the statewide database made available to investigators for a fee.
As a result of the suit, the Office of Court Administration agreed to change its policy on disseminating information. If that agreement -- which is not formally written -- is violated, the lawsuit can be reopened. Justice Joan A. Madden of New York State Supreme Court issued an order discontinuing the lawsuit "based on the office’s agreement to change its policy."
A separate lawsuit brought against Sears has also been settled, but due to a confidentiality agreement the terms are not known.
Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court JusticeÂ