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Gun Control Debate Intensifies Following Conn. School Massacre


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ALBANY, N.Y. — As the country struggles to make sense of the latest school shooting, the debate over gun control is gathering momentum in the nation’s public discourse and among policymakers.

Measures aimed at strengthening gun control laws in New York State — from microstamping to requiring a judge determine whether to take away a person’s gun license after being found mentally ill — have in recent years made it through the state Assembly only to be bottled up in committee in the Senate.

There are signs it may be no easier to move gun control legislation forward during the next session in early 2013.

Jackie Hill, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, said she was concerned that the racial makeup of the coalition in power in the Senate would shape their views on gun control legislation adversely. Senate Republicans and a breakaway group of Democrats, known as the Independent Democratic Conference, have agreed to share power; only one of their members is a person of color, Democrat Malcolm Smith, of Queens.  

“This is diminishing the racial impact of minority populations that traditionally have had problems with gun violence," Hill said of the power-sharing agreement.

She urged the coalition to take up the issue of gun violence as a way to fulfill their promise to working across party lines. "If they truly are bipartisan I think these issues should get a fair hearing," she said.

The Rev. Al Sharpton led a rally Dec. 8 with black lawmakers to protest the power-sharing agreement, saying it could disenfranchise voters, especially people of color. Before the power-sharing agreement came together, political observers thought the Senate Democrats would eke out a majority in their chamber and take control. The caucus includes 15 black and Hispanic members.

Eric Soufer, a spokesman for the IDC, said state Sen. Jeffrey Klein, the leader of the conference, and Diane J. Savino, a senator from Staten Island, supported the microstamping legislation in the last session and "will continue to support it. He declined to comment on specific anti-gun violence legislation that might come up for vote next year.

While at least three members of the IDC have publicly supported gun control initiative including microstamping, the issue could be a sore subject between them and their Republican partners.

Representatives for the state Senate Republicans did not respond to requests for comment for this article on Thursday and Friday.

In recent years, groups like the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation have been pouring tens of thousands into state Senate Republicans’ campaigns in an attempt to stem the rising push for legislation that would alter the process of buyng or,  owning  guns in the state.

Republican Sen. Marty Golden of Brooklyn was forced to talk gun policy while successfully defending his seat this year. Golden told Gotham Gazette at the time that he felt New York’s gun laws were “the strongest in the nation,” though he advocated legislation that would increase penalties for those who use guns in the commission of a crime.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, seemed to strike a tone of urgency in dealing with the issue. “While we don’t have all the facts and our focus must be on the victims, this is yet another senseless and horrific act of violence involving guns," he said in a statement Friday. "We as a society must unify and once and for all crack down on the guns that have cost the lives of far too many innocent Americans. Let this terrible tragedy finally be the wake-up call for aggressive action."

Cuomo, while a Democrat, has allied himself with State Republicans in the past.

On Friday morning, a previously scheduled interview with state Sen. Mike Gianaris, a backer of key gun control legislation, took place even as the news broke of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., where police say a 20-year-old man gunned down 20 children and six adults.

One of the Legislature’s most passionate proponents and sponsors of gun control legislation, Gianaris heads the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. He took over the job from Klein, who will share the Senate presidency with Republican Sen. Dean Skelos. It is likely Klein will have a wide influence over which bills come to the floor and who votes for them.

“Unfortunately, these incidents are an all too common problem. People have been crying out for a solution for years,” Gianaris said. The damage of gun violence has become an all too familiar sight for Gianaris whose district has seen more than its fair share of shootings as of late. On Tuesday two 21 year-old men were shot near Ravenswood Houses in Gianaris’ district—one in the head, one in the stomach.

Authorities said the gunman in Newton, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, committed suicide after opening fire on two classrooms. Lanza's mother was also found dead by gunshot wound at her Newton home; authorities say she was the first victim of the shooter's rampage that began Friday. It is considered the second most deadly school shooting in U.S. history.

It joins a handful of other deadly rampages this year that have led public officials to call for increased gun control. The other incidents include the killing of 12 at a movie theater in Colorado during a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises"; six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin; and two in a mall shooting in Portland, Ore.  

State Sen. Jose Serrano, a Democrat who remains a member of his conference, said he thinks the issue of “common sense gun legislation” is becoming bigger than party affiliation.

“This has become so much bigger than party affiliation. You are basically on the fringe of any party now if you are against common sense gun legislation," he said. "We have all these communities clamoring for it.”

Gianaris said gun violence was one of the major issues that Democrats and voters support that will be subverted by the power sharing agreement in the Senate. “This is the exact problem with this arraignment,” he continued. “Republicans have opposed common sense gun laws since time immemorial. The people who won on Election Day believe in these laws. We shouldn’t deny them to the people.”

But Democrats wouldn’t likely be able to pass a number of these measures on their own; upstate Democrats have been reticent to pass gun control laws. Hill said she has some hope that the new power sharing arrangement t in the Senate might allow some Republicans to vote more freely and support the bills. “I do think some Republicans could be freed up,” she said.

One member of the new coalition could play the wild card on the issue: Smith.

The senator from Queens stood with his colleague, Sen. Jose Peralta  on the steps of City Hall in late July, advocating for legislation that would allow a judge to take away a person’s gun license after being found mentally ill. The bill, S.670, was Peralta’s. Meanwhile, Smith touted a piece of legislation that would restrict the sale of high caliber magazines. Smith also spoke up about his continued support of microstamping.

“The blood stain of gun of violence will only grow larger until we resolve at every level of government — federal, state and local ‚— to bring common sense and sanity to our laws governing firearms availability, sales and possession,” Peralta said in a statement Saturday.

"Now is the time and gun violence is the issue for Republicans and Democrats to do everything possible to find common ground," he continued.

Peralta wants bipartisan action on S.670, S.725 (a bill that would extend the exception that exists in New York City to the gun laws that permits be renewed every five years) and S.7829 (which would require background checks for sale of ammunition of any amount.

"I propose these bills as a first step toward bipartisan action on this matter of life and death," Peralta said in a statement.  "I urge that we take this up in the Senate as soon as possible and debate and consider other ways to end the gun violence and bloodshed."

Some of those bills Democrats are proposing include one that would limit gun sales to one gun a month per customer, a bill that would force background checks on gun store employees and microstamping — a technology that puts identifying marks on bullets fired from guns with the technology. “The gun lobby is unreasonably opposed to these ideas,” Gianaris said.

These sort of bills have traditionally passed the heavily Democratic Assembly only to be bottled up in committee in the Senate. Microstamping legislation did finally make it to a vote in the chamber, only to fail. A number of state law enforcement groups support microstamping while that and other measures are opposed by the NRA and other state gun groups.

Serrano said he thinks the shooting in Newton will make gun laws a priority in the next session. “In many peoples' minds this is at near the top”,he said. “What happened today hit so close to home. It was so near by, it wasn't something in Arizona but right here in the tri-state area. I think this is going to make people say, “we can’t put this off.”

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Image courtesy Patrick Feller, used under Creative Commons license.

Some Question Whether Police Watchdog Has Enough Muscle


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NEW YORK — Even with new rules governing how it will prosecute officers in some misconduct cases, advocates and law experts question whether the city's police watchdog agency will have sufficient oversight authority over one of the country's largest police forces.

The rules set forth guidelines for how the Civilian Complaint Review Board will handle prosecutions according to the landmark memorandum of understanding between the agency and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly that was signed in April.

They were adopted at the CCRB’s public meeting yesterday, and will become law in 30 days after being published in the City Record.

The agreement emerged after the police department faced increasing criticism over its tactics aimed at containing the Occupy Wall Street protests and its “stop-and-frisk” anti-crime measures, which critics say unfairly target blacks and Latinos.  

"Stop-and-frisk" has brought a rash of complaints before the board over the past few years, though the number of such complaints actually dropped 10 percent between 2010 and 2011, according to the CCRB.

Nevertheless, the agreement between the NYPD and the CCRB has not been embraced as the final panacea to solve all the concerns about oversight of the more than 34,000-member police force.

Christopher Dunn, associate legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in an email yesterday that the rules adopted at yesterday's meeting were "just a cut-and-paste" of the memorandum of understanding.

In testimony at a public hearing on the rules held in Brooklyn on Nov. 28, Dunn reiterated his organization's position that the agreement does not go far enough in granting the CCRB, charged with investigating New Yorkers’ complaints about police misconduct, the powers it needs to hold police officers accountable for proven misconduct.

Like other critics, he said the NYCLU was particularly dissatisfied  that the police commissioner would still be able to block some CCRB prosecutions. "This authority subverts the whole point of authorizing the CCRB to prosecute substantiated cases and should be removed," he said in his testimony.

Editor's Note: This version corrects the timeline on the development of the CCRB's prosecutorial powers, which were upheld by an Appellate Court in 2003, not struck down by a lower court as was previously reported. It also corrects that the CCRB has subpeona powers and that the NYCLU was concerned about the removal of a provision regarding the agency's public reporting requirements. All updates are in bold. (3:51 p.m., Dec. 13)

Dunn also called for the removal of a provision in the rules that require the board to adhere to “[police] department disciplinary policies and standards.”

He said the NYCLU believes this provision will limit the CCRB’s ability to independently prosecute cases.

The NYCLU also despaired that the rule changes took out a provision regarding the CCRB’s public reporting policies. There are no rules explicitly requiring the CCRB to regularly report the status of complaints to those who first brought them to the board. The NYCLU requested a provision that would mandate the agency to periodically report to the general public about the statuses of their prosecutions.

Citizens Union, the sister organization of Gotham Gazette, also called for more public reporting of the prosecutions in its recommendations on Nov. 28.

Alex Camarda, public policy director at Citizens Union, said he was disappointed the agency chose not to amend the rules according to the recommendations aired at the public hearing.

"What is the point of holding a hearing and going through the process?" he said in an email. "It certainly doesn't provide an incentive for the public to participate."

The agency regularly issues performance and status reports on its website that include statistics on complaints, case closures and disposition of allegations.

Linda Sachs, a spokeswoman for the CCRB, declined to respond specific criticisms of the agency. "We have a track record of accountability and extensive public reporting on the agency's actions," she said.

The CCRB investigates complaints involving excessive force, abuse of authority, discourtesy and use of offensive language.

The "seed" for the agency's new powers to prosecute police misconduct grew out of pilot programs that began in 2008.

Daniel Chu, the chair of the CCRB, said in the agency's annual report for 2011 that "benefits derived from these programs emerged quickly."

"Public confidence in the fairness and transparency of the NYPD’s disciplinary process has been advanced," he wrote.

The Evolution of the CCRB

“My father tried to put in an independent police review board. It was shot down in court.  The CCRB is a compromise,” said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., chair of the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety. “It’s working.”

The conservative Democrat, known for his tough stance on crime and ardent defense of the NYPD, said the ability of the CCRB to use their own prosecutors was “a great start.” Vallone’s father, Peter Vallone Sr., was the long-time speaker of the City Council. The current incarnation of the CCRB was established during Vallone Sr.’s tenure as speaker in 1993, when David Dinkins was mayor.

Versions of a police review board have existed since the 1950s. Violent clashes between civilians and police officers at Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park in 1988 triggered public outcry over the heavy-handed tactics of the NYPD. The police commissioner at the time, Benjamin Ward, admitted that police had in essence incited a riot by charging protesters and even clubbing bystanders.

The riots of Tompkins Square Park provided the impetus for the creation of today’s mayoral-appointed CCRB, composed of 13 members who are, as the name of the board implies, civilians and not police officers. The City Council nominates five members and one must be selected from each borough. Three are nominated by the police commissioner and can be former law enforcement officials; five are nominated by the mayor.

The March agreement to amend the CCRB is actually a proposal left over from the Giuliani administration. Former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and the CCRB agreed to give the board the ability to prosecute officers in April of 2001. But it took several years of legal wrangling before a 2003 decision by a state Appellate Court upheld the agreement granting the CCRB "the revocable authority to administratively prosecute police officers for certain enumerated offenses."

It wasn't until the beginning of the 2008 pilot project that a CCRB attorney was allowed observer status at administrative trials; in 2011, the CCRB attorney took the lead and began conducting trials for some Board cases.

Whether today’s CCRB is “working,” as Vallone asserts, is a hotly debated issue. Even less clear is whether having prosecutors from the CCRB work on cases where the CCRB has substantiated wrongdoing is enough to lend credibility to a board that, as one law professor and criminal defense attorney put it, could sometimes “have no life.”

For its part, the police officers’ union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, has criticized the memorandum of agreement and called into question — as they often do — the CCRB’s impartiality.

The PBA issued the following statement from President Patrick Lynch:

Our problem with CCRB has always been first, their predisposition that police officers are always wrong, second, their inexperienced investigators who conduct faulty investigations that arrive at improper conclusions, and now those wrong conclusions will be prosecuted at these kangaroo trials.

Questioning the Change

From 2007 through 2011, the board substantiated an average of 200 cases annually that it referred to the police.  It received almost 6,000 complaints in 2011. Its current budget, a relatively modest $12,048,652, is billions of dollars less than the department it is tasked with policing.

Police officers can be put on trial by departmental lawyers before an administrative judge who also was a police department employee. This will still be the case even after changes to the CCRB become law. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly will also still be able to unilaterally block all prosecutions.

Jennifer Blasser, a clinical assistant professor of law and criminal defense attorney at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, said the agreement was "significant" because the CCRB previously lacked sufficient powers.

“The board would go through the whole process of fact-finding and interviewing and then it felt like it sort of died there,” she said. “If the Police Department didn’t want to pursue it, they didn’t. The accountability which the Civilian Complaint Review Board was supposed to impose on the police department in some ways was lacking because it didn’t have the power.”

One concern from a perspective of accountability, Blasser said, is that the administrative judge will still be from the NYPD.

But a seismic change in the outcomes of cases does not appear likely.

“It’s hard at this moment to say this one element [CCRB having its own prosecutors work on cases] is going to create substantive change in a culture of a police practice,” Blasser added.

Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organization Project of the Urban Justice Center, was far more pessimistic than Blasser about the degree to which the rule changes would embolden the oversight agency.

“We’re very cynical about the value and effectiveness of the CCRB,” Gangi said. “An agency can’t be an effective monitor of the NYPD unless it’s outside the executive branch of government.”

The CCRB is an independent agency and has the power to issue subpeonas.

Some groups and elected officials have also called for the creation of an office of inspector general to oversee the NYPD and make policy recommendations.

Martha Rayner, a clinical associate professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, would like the CCRB to be armed with the type of data that the NYPD possesses with CompStat, the comprehensive crime reduction system that compiles a bevy of localized crime data. A CompStat-like system that instead helps the public understand policing practices could be beneficial, Rayner said.

Rayner does not foresee the current rule changes significantly altering the CCRB.

“This could end up just being an organizational restructuring, change without meaning,” she said. “The same systematic pressures that led to problems when the NYPD prosecutes a case may cause the same thing to happen when CCRB prosecutors pursue cases.”

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Image of police badge courtesy of GerritsenBeach.Net, used under Creative Commons license. Additional reporting by Cristian Salazar.

Council's Police Reforms Could Alter NYPD Tactics, But Face Hurdles


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NEW YORK — A set of bills that could dramatically alter the New York City Police Department’s tactics, including how officers conduct street stops, will likely undergo significant revisions before it can be brought to the City Council for a vote.

The bills, known collectively as the Community Safety Act, are the subject of a public hearing today before the City Council’s public safety committee. The Council has also scheduled public hearings on the bills in Brooklyn and Queens for later this month.

The bills would enable residents who believe they’ve been unlawfully stopped to sue the NYPD; prohibit officers from considering race, age, sex and other factors when deciding to stop someone; create an office of inspector general to oversee the department; and require officers to obtain proof that subjects consented to being searched after they were stopped.

The bills’ critics argue the departmental changes could have a chilling effect on police officers,  because they would be less likely to stop people for fear of being sued.

In June, City Council members proposed the bills in response to the drumbeat of criticism from civil rights groups over policing methods, including an increase in the practice of stopping, questioning and frisking civilians and the monitoring of Muslims by the NYPD’s intelligence unit.

Police “stop-and-frisk” practices have come under increased scrutiny over the past year, as reports in the New York Times showed a 600 percent increase in stops between 2002 and 2011. Critics argue that data shows the police tactic disproportionately targets blacks and Latinos, who make up 90 percent of the stops.

While the practice is legal because of a 1968 Supreme Court decision that held police can stop citizens if they believe they are armed and about to commit a crime, very few of those stopped under the city’s policy are actually armed — roughly one in 1,000 stops yields recoveries of weapons. Critics also question the legality of other policing methods, such as the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims.  

Crime rates have been brought down to unprecedented low levels over the past decade under the Bloomberg administration’s police department, led by Commissioner Ray Kelly. Both Kelly and the mayor have cited the low crime rate as a reason for continuing the practice of stopping, questioning and frisking civilians, even as they have acknowledged it may need to be reformed.

In recent months, all of the presumed mayoral candidates to replace Michael Bloomberg in 2013, including City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, have called for reforms to the city’s stop-and-frisk practices.

But Quinn has not signed on as a sponsor of any of the CSA bills and is reserving her opinion until after today’s hearing.

“I’ll be going and participating in that hearing and will have more to say about this version [of the bills] and potential other versions in the future,” she said yesterday.

And the bills won’t budge from the public safety committee without the approval of committee chairman Peter Vallone, Jr., who is skeptical of the proposed laws.  

“It will change police work as we know it,” Vallone said of the suite of bills.

Over the last few weeks, Vallone has been openly critical of one bill in particular that would allow individual lawsuits against the NYPD. He cited potential costs to the city of more than $1 billion from a projected half-million lawsuits.

Bill sponsors say they will consider an amendment that would remove monetary damages from the remedies courts could award.

“I’m sure the mayor would take this bill to court, because he’s an adult and he understands what this bill would do to the city,” Vallone said, warning that the costs could bankrupt the city. “The city doesn’t have a billion dollars extra to pay,” he said.

Vallone said he thought many of the bill’s current sponsors had signed on without knowing the potential consequences. Vallone also noted the conspicuous absence of Quinn’s imprimatur on the bill. “She’s not on the bill and she has not come out in support of this,” Vallone said. “That’s going to be an important consideration.”

But police reform advocates expressed optimism that the speaker would support the bill package, and said the bill could become law even without the mayor’s stamp.

“I’m pretty confident that a supermajority of councilmembers support these bills,” said Udi Ofer, advocacy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

If the mayor vetoes the bills after the Council passes them, 34 members will be required to override his veto. Even the inspector general bill, which has the broadest level of support, has just 30 co-sponsors — less than the minimum necessary to thwart a mayoral veto.

Ofer said advocacy groups would be willing to consider supporting even an amended version of the current bill package, citing Council members’ concerns over possible lawsuits. The important thing was to reform the practice, he said.

“The mayor has also recognized that stop and frisk needs to be mended. Those were his words,” Ofer said. “And Commissioner [Ray] Kelly has complained that communities are not offering solutions,” he said, adding, “Well, here it is. The community safety act is promising solutions.”

The bill to create an inspector general for the NYPD has the most council support, with 30 cosponsors, but at a news conference held yesterday before the Columbus Day parade, Mayor Michael Bloomberg cautioned against it.

“I think if you want to bring crime back, let’s go politicize control of the police department,” Bloomberg said in response to reporters’ questions on the bill, which would create an office of inspector general to independently oversee the police department and submit reports on police practices to the mayor, police commissioner, City Council and public.

Currently, the NYPD oversight is handled by the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau and the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates complaints made against city police officers. Some critics claim the department’s current oversight has not been independent enough to stem incidences of police abuses.  

“If people aren’t happy with this Police Department and what Commissioner Kelly has created, and all the 55,000 people that work in the PD, I don’t know what would make you happy,” Bloomberg said, adding, “I think this Police Department is well-supervised, it’s well-led and the last thing we need is to have some politician or judge getting involved with setting policy, because you won’t be safe anymore. But today you are.”

The Council’s public safety committee hearing on the police reform bills is scheduled for 10 a.m. today, at 250 Broadway, 16th floor, in Manhattan. Hearings will be held before the civil rights committee in Brooklyn on Oct. 23 and in Queens on Oct. 24.

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Laura Nahmias is a freelance political reporter. She can be found here on Twitter.

Image of police officers by cons.maximus, used under Creative Commons license.

An earlier version misspelled Udi Ofer's name.



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