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Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice

Questioning Police Statistics For Crime and Cases Of Misconduct


City officials seem more skeptical than concerned over charges that some police commanders may have downgraded or simply not reported crimes in order to meet numerical targets set by top police department officials for reducing crime. The suspicions were brought forward last month by Newsday for one precinct and repeated forcefully by a major police union alleging a department-wide problem.

But the allegations -- along with the silence over another set of numbers, the substantial increase in documented and substantiated complaints about police misconduct -- show how numbers can add up to more, or less, than one might expect when trying to size up the quality of policing in New York.

A Case Study?

Though long whispered about among skeptics with little faith in the police department to begin with, the most recent allegations about underreporting crime surfaced with a report by Newsday examining the 50th precinct, in the Bronx.

That storynoted that while crime had decreased nearly 26 percent during the three-year leadership of Deputy Inspector Thomas DiRusso, there was an 11 percent increase in crime since the January departure of DiRusso to head one of two the narcotics divisions in Brooklyn.

Newsday pointed to several incidents that occurred on DiRusso’s watch to suggest an underreporting of crimes: an officer disciplined for allegedly forging a complainant’s name in order to downgrade a grand larceny to a petit larceny (the complainant later disputedthis characterization) ; interviews with two people who said police responded to their complaints in person but did not write a report; and, after a rash of reports from delivery drivers that they were targets for robbery led to a stationhouse meeting, the way DiRusso threatened the delivery drivers with summonses for riding their bicycles on the sidewalk.

Two days after the story was published, leaders for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association called a press conference. Union president Patrick Lynch asserted that the problem was endemic to the department, and called on Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to conduct a thorough investigation.

“It is a truth that is widely known by members of the department," Lynch reportedly said, "and now we have to see if the police commissioner has the courage to face the truth and do what is right for the City of New York."

Police regularly subject crime reports to an internal audit, and last June admitted that 203 crimes had been improperly downgraded in Manhattan’s 10th precinct. But in this case, police officials have sharply denied the accusations, pointing to audits that showed no wrongdoing. Police officials instead have accused Lynch of targeting DiRusso because the deputy inspector had transferred a union delegate. Meanwhile, the union claims that that officer was transferred after taking a stand against the underreporting of crime in the precinct.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg also scoffed at the comments by Lynch, calling them outrageous. “You can’t have it both ways,” said Bloomberg reportedly. “You can’t have a billboardin Times Square claiming you’re doing such a great job and therefore need a raise, and then…claim that the success of the NYPD is inflated.”

An Ever-Moving Target

The union has been fighting Kelly and the Bloomberg administration for months, publicly calling for the resignation of Kelly for the way he publicly said the shooting of unarmed teen Timothy Stansbury Jr. was “apparently unjustified” before a departmental investigation could be conducted.

In their latest criticism of top department officials, the PBA are seeking to highlight shrinking police department personnel, which since 2000 have dipped by about 4,000 officers to 37,000.

“We’ve reached a point today where because of a significant loss of personnel in our department we are unable to fight crime successfully, and yet the bureaucracy doesn’t want to admit this,” said Albert O’Leary, communications director of the police union.

The controversy also highlights possible shortcomings of the Compstat systemfor tracking crime, which, despite its ubiquity, is not without its detractors.

O’Leary said that precinct commanders were under “tremendous pressure” to reach managerial targets for reducing crime. Compstat simply doesn’t take into account the law diminishing returns, said O’Leary, something top departmental officials have failed to incorporate when evaluating department performance.

“I honestly believe, if [former Commissioner William Bratton] was still commissioner…there would be adjustments made,” said O’Leary.

O’Leary promised that the story is not going to go away, with the union continuing to speak out on the issue “over the next few weeks, as our officers come out with hard and incontrovertible evidence.”

And as for residents or those thinking of moving into a new neighborhood using Compstat numbers to gauge safety, O’Leary had this to say: “Don’t live your life based on numbers like the police department does.”

More Complaints Means…Well, More Complaints

If fewer crimes reported may not mean fewer crimes, what does an increase in complaints about police misconduct mean? According to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, just about anything.

Despite releasing a report in January that showed 5,581 people filed complaints against police officers, an increase of 969 from the previous year, the review board maintains that the numbers don’t necessarily point to widespread police misconduct.

“It’s not a proportional equation.” said Ray Patterson, noting that specific incidents can lead to spikes in complaints, such as anti-war rallies last February. Commissioners on the board have also noted that the introduction of the 311 system for reporting complaints may have also contributed to the increase in complaints.

Christopher Dunn, associate legal director the New York Civil Liberties Union, disagrees. “When complaints over the course of three years increase significantly, that certainly suggests something significant is happening.” Substantiation rates have also increased from year to year.

But Bill Kuntz, a commissioner for the review board, noted during a February meeting(In PDF Format) that during the 1992 “Dirty 30” scandal in which more than 30 officers from the 30th Precinct in Harlem were accused of stealing drugs and cash and taking bribes, complaints about police misconduct were actually going down, citywide and in that precinct.

Kuntz railed against both the police and those from the civil liberties communities who seek to use the numbers as proof of either widespread problems or exemplary performance.

“Life is more complicated than that,” Kuntz said. Of course, the department is currently facing a corruption inquiry focusing on as many as 10 officers accused of taking drug money

Patterson said that the review board simply doesn’t have the resources to undertake the “social science” project to analyze its own data.

So why release the data publicly?

“We’re duty bound by law to report to the mayor,” Patterson said flatly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, Welfare Workers Deserve Workforce Protection


 Beginning in 1997, Tammy Auer’s supervisor at the Sanitation Department made inappropriate sexual comments to her, including the suggestion that they have a baby together. Eventually he began to touch her and threaten that he would fire her. When she secured another assignment, he followed her. Auer resigned and filed a complaint with the United States Equal Opportunity Commission, which upheld her charges.

The next year, Tonja McGhee was assigned to do maintenance work at the New York City Housing Authority. For a while, she was engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with her supervisor. When she terminated the relationship, the supervisor falsely reported to higher-ups that McGhee was not doing her work. Following that, he ordered her to undress. McGhee’s complaints were ignored and she, too, filed a complaint with the federal commission. As in Auer’s case, the commission found reasonable cause to accept the truth of the allegations and referred the charges to the United States Department of Justice.

What these women had in common besides their harassment is that they were participating in the city’s “Work Experience Program,” and there was a question whether they were employees or not, and whether they were thus entitled to federal protection when sexually harassed. They were also part of a case that asked the federal courts to decide.

Previous state and federal cases decided that such workers were not in fact employees and therefore not eligible for employee discrimination protection. (See “Do Welfare Workers Deserve Workplace Protection” by Jonathan Rosenbloom, the February 2003 law topic page update for Gotham Gazette.)

But now, In the case of United States of America v. City of New York, the United States Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit has reversed the lower federal court and decided that women workers who had complained of sexual harassment were indeed entitled to federal protection.

The opinion by Judge Rosemary Pooler said that Work Experience Program workers are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination.

Attorney Timothy J. Casey, of NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, who argued the appeal for the workers said, “It is unusual for the United States Department of Justice and us to take the same position on a civil rights issue, and for the City of New York to take a contrary position.” But that is what happened here.

The parties’ contrary positions turned on whether plaintiffs’ activities constituted employment; the defendants maintain that the answer to that is no. The city argued that the plaintiffs were not employees, were not hired, did not receive wages and were therefore not eligible for the protection of Title VII. In essence, according to the defendants, the aggrieved participants had no remedies and were given no protections by Congress against sex, race or other forms of employment discrimination because they were not employed.

However, the United States Department of Justice and the various named plaintiffs argued that the plaintiffs worked, that their work was a condition of receiving public assistance, that they were paid cash and food stamps, that they received additional benefits such as childcare and transportation amounting to compensation, and that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applied to them. Federal Judge Pooler wrote, “A plaintiff who unjustifiably refused to work could lose the portion of the family’s grant attributable to her. Thus, each plaintiff had to work in order to receive her share of the family grant. A functional commonsense assessment of the plaintiffs’ alleged relationship with the city results in the conclusion that they were employees.”

The plaintiffs became Work Experience Program workers when previous welfare laws were replaced by the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) , which ended government benefits by “promoting job preparation, work, and marriage.” As political figures commonly described the new laws at the time, “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” In order for a state to receive federal this assistance, it must require work activities in exchange for paying benefits to needy families. In compliance with the new laws and mandates, each of the women in this case sought and accepted a work assignment at a New York City agency -- and each was harrassed:

  • Maria Gonzalez was assigned by the Human Resources Administration to work in its office. There her supervisor began to grope her, to speak to her in an abusive and menacing way, including threatening her life. In 1999 she, too, filed a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission, which was also referred to the Department of Justice.

  • Theresa Caldwell-Benjamin, an African-American woman, was assigned to the Parks Department on Staten Island. On her first day there, she found a noose hanging in her work area, as well as a racist caricature of black people. Ms. Caldwell-Benjamin, similarly complained to the commission.

  • Norma Colon received a Human Resources Administration assignment as a computer operator. Her supervisor repeatedly commented on the physical characteristics of Colon and other women; he suggested spending the night together at a motel. Because Ms. Colon rejected him, he refused to authorize her childcare and she was forced to leave the work assignment. She, too, complained to the commission and was granted the right to sue.

Shortly after Judge Pooler’s opinion was handed down, the defendant City of New York, represented by Corporation Counsel, petitioned for a rehearing before the full 2nd Circuit bench. Although Judge Pooler’s opinion was not unanimous (one of three appellate judges dissented), such petitions are rarely granted by this court; no decision has been reached. Unless the full court does reconsider the matter and reverses, a trial will be scheduled on the charges and claims for monetary damages. Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court Justice

Pushcart Wars


 

Community Gazettes, a look at street vendors in:
Banning Street Vendors from Ground Zero
(Lower Manhattan,
Dist. 1)
From Street Vendor To Small Business
(Flatbush, Dist. 40)
Moving Off 125th Street
(Harlem, Dist. 9)
 

Also, articles by two street vendors in New York City:

• Selling Hotdogs, Getting Ticketed
by Anwar Hussein

• Selling Jewelry, Spending the Night in Jail
by Aeisha

Rich McCormick looked with contempt as a street vendor selling drawings in Times Square tried to talk to a passerby. "Stop bothering him," McCormick snapped, and the vendor backed away.

McCormick, a disabled Vietnam vet, is a street vendor himself, sharing the corner uneasily with several other salesmen of the streets -- the proprietor of a hotdog cart and several men tending tables full of reproduced drawings. McCormick sells five-dollar watches, as he has done for 30 years.

McCormick's outburst at the other vendor came because he was worried that too many pitches would scare the customer away.

But his beef is more general as well. He fully understands why vendors have been the target of much ire, and new legislation. "The problem is these guys," he said pointing to his colleagues; they're clogging up the streets.

The owners of retail stores in the neighborhood feel the same way.

"They're taking away our business and undercutting our prices," Capri Lee, who runs Giftmania on Seventh Avenue near 47th Street, told the New York Post in December. "They don't pay rent, they don't pay taxes, they don't pay anything."

Responding to such complaints, state legislators passed a law this month that bans vending in some of the city's busiest, and most lucrative, street corners. The new law explicitly regulates disabled veterans, who long have been given special exemption from most vending laws. The law also prohibits vending in much of Midtown and in the area around Ground Zero. (See the Community Gazettes story about the vending ban at Ground Zero) The result is a sudden and striking visual change. The large numbers of vendors that lined the streets for the last year are gone.

The law forced McCormick to move from his long-time spot on Seventh Avenue, at 43rd street, but it has not seriously affected him; he only had to move around the corner, to 43rd at Seventh. But that is not the case for other street vendors in the city, who say the changes threaten their livelihood.

To the people on the front lines of the pushcart wars, there are lofty principles involved; it is an often-bitter conflict that pits freedom of speech against freedom of movement, the rights of the disabled against the needs of small business, law versus order, arts versus crafts, good taste versus a good hot dog.

A COMPLICATED SYSTEM

Downtown one day last year, Gretchen Dykstra was offering a load of onions to her customers, one by one, for free.

"The city's vending laws are like an onion," said Dykstra, the city's Commissioner of Consumer Affairs, while each member of the City Council's Consumer Affairs Committee looked at the onions she had given them. "It has many layers, and after a while, one can't help but cry."

The commissioner was offering a much-needed demonstration. In a city with thousands of vendors regulated by three city agencies and a multitude of city and state laws, as well as court decisions on several levels, Dykstra says very few New Yorkers really understand how street vending regulations work.

No one is sure exactly how many vendors there are in the city, but the most common estimate is about 10,000. These vendors fall into a variety of legal categories with different licenses:

Category Number of Licenses Who Licenses and For What
Disabled Veterans 374 Department of Consumer Affairs for non-food merchandise
Veterans 1,304 Non-disabled veterans licensed by the Department of Consumer Affairs for non-food merchandise
General Vendors 853 licensed by the Department of Consumer Affairs for non-food merchandise
Food Vendors 3,000 by the Department of Health; an additional 1,000 in the summer
Parks Vendors 600 Licensed for food or general merchandise by the parks department in city parks
First Amendment Vendors -- No licenses
Unlicensed Vendors -- No licenses

In 1979, the city capped the number of general vendor licenses and food vendor licenses in the city, and there is a waiting list many years long for one of those licenses to become available Discouraged vendors often set up shop illegally, after finding out that they cannot get a license.

"First Amendment Vendors" are those selling written material and certain types of art. They are permitted to vend in New York City without a permit, because their merchandise is protected under the first amendment.

While some unlicensed vendors sell merchandise that would be legal if they did have a license, the city is concerned that vendors also sell bootleg merchandise, a trade that costs the city $1 billion annually, according to the city comptroller's office.

That there are all these different categories, says Dykstra, makes it difficult for the city to establish a reasonable regulation strategy for street vending. It also divides vendors, setting them against each other and causing them to ignore their common interests.

Surely the most contentious consequence of the hodge-podge of laws and regulations is the odd linking of vendors injured in wars with those protected by the first amendment.

Disabled Veterans

The long history of street peddling in New York City is accompanied by a long history of regulation. As far back as 1691, the city passed a law forbidding 'hucksters' to sell anything on the street until two hours after public markets opened. Vending has been banned completely as long ago as the 1700s, and as recently as the 1940s.

Many such laws passed out of use, but in the early 1990s one gained new life. Citing a Civil War era state law that exempted disabled veterans from all city vending regulations, Joseph Kaswan, a disabled World War II veteran, challenged the city's ban on vendors in Midtown. He won in court.

While vendors saw a new market, storeowners thought the newcomers were crowding the sidewalk and creating competition. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), organizations that represent business owners in specific neighborhoods , lobbied for restrictions on veterans. Largely because of these efforts, Albany passed a law in 1993 creating two tiers of licenses for disabled veterans: blue licenses, which provided prime access, and yellow licenses, with more restrictions on vending locations. The blue would be awarded based on vending seniority.

First Amendment Vendors

New York State gave licenses to disabled veterans that allowed them to go where other licensed vendors could not. New York City declared that vendors selling certain types of material did not need a license at all.

The idea of freedom of expression first entered into New York City's vending law in the early 1980s, when the city council passed a law, in order to comply with the U.S. Constitution, allowing vendors selling books and other written material to ignore the existing city laws regulating street vending. At the time, the law seemed to be a minor one, since few people sold books on the streets.

As more vendors took advantage of this permission, the city decided to limit the freedom of these so-called first amendment vendors. Instead of giving them free access to any streets, the city said that first amendment vendors could only set up on blocks where at least one licensed vendor was also allowed to do business. Since disabled veterans had access to many places that other vendors did not, the fate of these two groups became intertwined.

Meanwhile, through court actions brought by artists , the definition of what material the city's first amendment law protects has expanded. Vendors selling visual art, including reproductions of original art, do not need a city license; the city also considers DVDs and CDs as first amendment-protected expression, unless they are bootlegged copies of copyrighted material. But those who want to sell jewelry or crafts are told they must get a vending license before hitting the streets.

THE NEW LAW

Starting in March of 2003, the number of vendors in Midtown began to increase dramatically. According to the Times Square Business Improvement District, the number of vendors on Times Square sidewalks rose by 50 percent between April and October, mainly along Seventh Avenue, Broadway, and 42nd Street.

The reason for the increase was that the law limiting the number of disabled veteran vendors had expired, and the nineteenth century law that gave them free reign went back into effect. Veteran vendors rushed back to Midtown, with first amendment vendors in tow.

Lawmakers used the opportunity in having to write a replacement law to try to deal with what they saw as the many problems with vendors. One provision was proposed, for example, that would fingerprint vendors brought in for licensing violations; another would have added extra controls on first amendment vendors.

These added provisions ground the process to a halt. Meanwhile, almost a year passed, with ever-larger numbers of vendors working the Midtown streets.

When the bill was passed, most far-reaching provisions had been removed. The law increased the number of licenses for disabled veterans to vend in Midtown, but banned them from the avenues, and tightened regulations on how a vendor must set up his cart to allow pedestrian flow.

One unrelated provision was also enacted. Since 9/11, heavy foot traffic in Lower Manhattan from tourists visiting Ground Zero attracted large numbers of vendors. The area around Ground Zero -- a box bordered by Broadway on the east, Vesey on the north, West Street on the west and Liberty street on the south -- was also placed off-limit to vendors.

Congestion was cited as the cause for banning vending near Ground Zero, the same logic that is used to restrict street vending elsewhere in the city. But the decision was also made because many felt that it was inappropriate to vend near the site of such tragedy. Because the new law imposes restrictions at least in part to avoid offending people, some art vendors have warned that it sets a dangerous precedent.

"This law was based on the idea that vending might offend somebody, somewhere. Every time I set up I'm offending somebody," said Robert Lederman, the head of the art vendors group A.R.T.I.S.T. "I sell political art."

COMPLAINTS ABOUT VENDORS

"A band of flower peddlers infests my neighborhood along Fifth Avenue from 8th Street to 12th Street. They are dirty, defiant, unlicensed peddlers, and the flowers they sell last about twenty minutes," complained Deputy Mayor Henry H. Curran. "I hear many complaints from people who live about there and whose passage along the sidewalk is actually blocked by these peddlers thrusting their wares on passers-by."

Though Curran was speaking in 1938, variants of the same argument are in common use today. Vendors cause congestion, say critics, dirtying up a neighborhood with useless merchandise.

Many of the complaints come from business improvement districts, groups that seem to be in near-constant conflict with street vendors. These groups complain that vendors using the city's busiest sidewalks cause dangerous congestion. But others argue that a comprehensive sidewalk policy -- one addressing street planters, information kiosks, and ever-present scaffolding as similar forms of sidewalk blockage -- would make more sense than blaming vendors for it all.

Complaints of congestion are often accompanied by harsh words directed at vendors themselves, particularly, nowadays, first amendment vendors.

"I sure as hell don't have any place in my heart for the people who took advantage of [disabled veterans]," said Michael O'Connor, of the Alliance for Downtown New York, the business improvement district for Lower Manhattan. "We were really taken aback by the fact that everybody who was selling a comic book or baseball cards, or anything that is loosely protected by the first amendment -- that they were just all over the place."

City Solutions, From Vendor Markets To Increased Fines

Today, city and state officials usually speak in more diplomatic terms. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, however, was not shy with his disdain for vendors. He grouped them with vandals and panhandlers as the targets of his quality-of-life campaign, earning him the enduring enmity of vendors throughout the city.


Malcolm Shabazz Market

More in Community Gazettes: Harlem: Moving Off 125th Street

Giuliani's quality of life campaign closed streets to vendors, including large-scale removals of vendors from 125th street in Harlem (See Harlem Community Gazettes for related article) and Fulton Street in Brooklyn. As an alternative, the city offered vendor markets, which were located in abandoned lots near their previous spots. Fred Leopold-Hooke, the director of the city's Department of Small Business Services micro-enterprise project, said these markets would keep vendors from congesting streets, while also allowing them to turn themselves into legitimate businesspeople.

While Leopold-Hooke claims success for the program, vendor groups and the Department of Consumer Affairs criticize many of the markets set up as replacement sites for the streets. Markets, they say, have not solved congestion problems, and have hurt vendors economically.

Rejecting one alternative is not the same as creating another, though. Dykstra concedes that the city does not have a clear picture of what needs to be done. The Department of Consumer Affairs is working on a single publication that would clarify the regulations for vendors. In addition, several laws concerning vendors are being considered which would:

  • Increase fines for license violations
  • Regulate first-amendment vendors in city parks
  • Require that vendors keep the areas in which they vend free from litter, including litter that is not their own

The Department of Consumer Affairs sees the freedom of first amendment vendors as the major obstacle to a wider solution to vendor regulation, and says it is considering possible solutions.

COMPLAINTS FROM VENDORS

In the children's book The Pushcart War, New York's street vendors band together after being accused of clogging city streets, and engage in full-on warfare with the real culprits -- truck drivers. Through military and public relations tactics, the vendors force the truck drivers to compromise on the vendor's terms, fixing the congestion of the streets and earning the admiration of millions of New Yorkers.

In New York today, it's not so easy.

Vendors do feel that they are being unfairly scapegoated, not by a conspiracy among truck drivers, but through the efforts of business improvement districts. Using congestion as an excuse, say vendors, business improvement districts try to remove them because they want to eliminate competition, or because they feel vendors make their neighborhood seem downtrodden.

But because different groups of vendors have different interests, they are often at odds with one another. Some veteran vendors are wary of -- or outright hostile to -- the first amendment vendors; native-born vendors sometimes disparage illegal immigrants; licensed vendors worry that unlicensed vendors make it harder on them.

As a result, the concerns the vendors have in common go unaddressed, according to Sean Basinski, the head of the Urban Justice Center's Street Vendor Project (in pdf format). "Imagine it from the city's perspective," he said. "How can you negotiate with vendors when they are not united?"

Police Harassment

If there is one issue that runs across these lines, though, it is the antagonistic relationship that vendors have with police. The arbitrary way that vending laws are enforced, say vendors, often has a bigger effect on their day-to-day lives than the laws themselves. Practically every vendor has stories about getting tickets from police officers when they felt they were set up legally. Vendors have little trust in officers' respect for the law; many doubt that the police even understand it.

"The police come, sometimes they don't even get out of the van, and they say "let me see your license," said Anwar Hussein a hot-dog vendor on Canal Street who says he got 27 tickets last year. (See "Selling Hot Dogs, Getting Ticketed" by Anwar Hussein) "When we give them the license, they don't ask anything, they just write a ticket." Hussein complains that he receives many tickets for being too close to a store, though he has measured the distance and offers to do so for the police who issue tickets. After presenting a judge with photos of the scene, he said, his tickets are often thrown out.

Prompted by such complaints, the Urban Justice Center and other groups have gotten the police to agree to a meeting this week.

But some vendors have simply resigned themselves to repeated confrontations with police.

Aiesha, who continued to vend even after she was told that even the waiting list for general vendors licenses was closed, says that she is arrested too often to keep track. (See "Selling Jewelry, Spending The Night in Jail") Stories like this prove that the total number of vending licenses should be raised, some say. City officials say that this is not off the table -- though there is no current activity to implement such a plan.

"They keep coming, and coming," says Aiesha, who asked that her last name not be used. "They are asking me for the license, they know I don't have it... They say "you're going to have to come with us", and I say 'Okay, I'll come with you. You do your job, I'll do mine.'"

Though Aiesha has spent countless nights in jail, she says that she loves what she does -- and that her customers seem to love her too.

"Besides," she asks, "can you imagine New York without street vendors?"

 



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