The defendant, charged with drug possession, walked to the front of the courtroom, her head down, her hands clasped behind her back, as Judge Alex Calabrese peered down at her, and pronounced her sentence: Job training. Community service
"There are a lot of services in this building that could help you," he tells the defendant. " And it's much more likely you won't have to come back here again." He is talking about the Red Hook Community Justice Center.
Opened just last month, the Justice Center is one of a handful of "community courts" across the country that re-envision how the criminal justice system should operate. By offering on-site services -- including drug treatment, G.E.D. classes to get a high school diploma, and job training -- the Center seeks to address the underlying problems that contribute to high crime rates. They also offer soup in the arraignment room.
At the same time, alternative sentences -- such as cleaning up a neighborhood park -- aim to make punishment visible while putting offenders to work in their communities. The Red Hook Justice Center joins the Midtown Community Court, which opened in Manhattan in 1993. A similar court in Harlem will open later this year. All three are designed to address one of the criminal justice system's most glaring failures: those arrested for low-level offences often are back on the streets in a matter of weeks or months, committing crimes.
The case of Paris Drake, a career criminal who had been arrested more than twenty times before allegedly attacking a woman with a brick in broad daylight last winter, highlighted the "revolving door" problem in New York's overburdened courts. Both Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani have called for tougher, mandatory sentences for low-level offenders.
More defendants in the Midtown Community Court who are sentenced to community service actually do it than in any other criminal court in the city. Yet there is also a recidivism rate that is as high as those of the other courts. Still, community court supporters say the push for reform, spearheaded by New York State Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye, is building. "This language of rethinking and improving business as usual is starting to seep out," says Greg Berman, one of the Red Hook Justice Center's planners. "It's not just us."
In Red Hook, changing business as usual meant not just improving the criminal justice system, but tackling a host of other quality-of-life issues within the community. Later this year, the Justice Center will add housing and family court cases, making it the country's first multi-jurisdictional court. The Red Hook Public Safety Corps, an Americorps program housed within the Center, has already become one of the neighborhood's biggest employers. The Center's services are available not only to offenders but also to local residents who may have no connection to the criminal justice system.
"The notion of bringing courts back to the community, that courts can play a role in making communities safer, stronger-these are notions that resonate with people," says Berman, Deputy Director of the Center for Court Innovation (CCI), a joint project of the state court system and the non-profit agency, the Fund for the City of New York.
Berman and other planners at CCI began work on the Red Hook Justice Center in 1994, meeting with community members and using the Midtown Community Court as a model. Many of the Justice Center's innovations are literally built into the building. The detention rooms, for instance, where people are held before they are brought to trial, use plate-glass windows instead of bars to allow natural light to enter.
"We felt that the building's design should reflect the principles of the program," says Berman. "We want to communicate respect for people."
Judge Calabrese says his colleagues within the judiciary wish they had the services available to him in sentencing offenders. He cites the case of a sixteen-year-old high-school dropout who appeared before him, arrested for possession of four vials of crack.
"I thought he was someone on the wrong path," said Judge Alex Calabrese. "He was working with a drug dealer, starting to make some money, and it's tough to compete with that." As part of his sentence, the young man began job training, attending GED classes, and talking to a counselor who had worked for twenty years at the state prison in Attica. "This counselor makes a very convincing argument that drugs will land you in prison in the long run.
"I think this case would've been handled very quickly downtown. They would've addressed the charge, but they wouldn't address the underlying problem. He would've gotten his jail sentence and he'd probably get out and go back to working with a dealer. I don't think he could've been straightened out."
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The battle over police practices in New York is now being waged on paper. On April 27, one year after it first announced its investigation of the NYPD, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission released a much anticipated 250-page draft report. The Police Department weighed in on May 16 with an angry 700-page rebuttal.
The Commission faults the NYPD for inadequate diversity training and failed minority recruiting efforts, but its most serious charge is that police officers use racial profiling in their stop-and-frisk tactics. The report cites the Department's own records, which show that in Staten Island, for example, 51% of the people stopped in 1998 were black, though blacks make up only 9% of the borough's population.
The report dismisses the Department's claims that stop-and-frisks occur most often in high-crime, minority neighborhoods, and that officers are simply responding to descriptions of suspects as reported to them. After reviewing nearly 150,000 records of stops made in 1998, the Commission determined that officers usually acted on their own judgments and observations, rather than victim identifications.
In its rebuttal, the NYPD disparages the report as "an unfortunate exercise in shoddy reporting" and "an embarrassment to the United States government." In particular, the Department ridicules the Commission's reliance on perennial police critics Al Sharpton and the New York Civil Liberties Union's Norman Siegel. Mayor Giuliani has called the report "a political operation of the Democratic Party," neatly timed to give Hillary Clinton a boost for her Senate run. (The Commission consists of an eight-member panel of four Democrats, three independents, and one Republican. The New York Observer has reported that the head of the Commission's head, Mary Frances Berry, has made campaign contributions to Hillary.
For all the controversy it has created, the Civil Rights Commission report contains little that New Yorkers haven't heard before. In restrained language, bolstered by numerous charts and citations of hundreds of thousands of documents reviewed by its panel, the report makes some familiar accusations, but also pats the NYPD on the back in several instances.
The Commission offers some remedies that are unrealistic (officers should live in the City) or ill-begotten (the elitist proposal that officers be required to have four-years of college instead of two because better-educated officers are less likely to engage in misconduct). Another recommendation, the formation of an independent monitor to review civilian complaints of police misconduct, would in effect create a second oversight agency to monitor the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
The Commission finally gets it right when it discusses the pressure felt throughout the NYPD„from Commanding Officers to beat cops„to produce arrests. Could it be that if the Department eases up on quotas to make collars and stands down the armies of Operation Condor personnel, it will help defuse the issue of police misconduct? It may be wishful thinking, but the Mayor's newest resolution to reach out to all the City's residents may give his administration one last chance to find out.
Jerome Chou is a freelance writer. He works part-time interviewing recently released ex-offenders about their re-entry into society.
Stop-and-frisk searches, one of the most controversial police tactics of recent years and a hallmark crime-fighting tactic of the Giuliani-era, are under scrutiny again. Investigators for the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) have charged that police officers regularly fail to file the required paperwork after they search people on the street.
The CCRB began reviewing more than 1700 stop-and-frisk complaints in March 1999, shortly after the Amadou Diallo shooting, then narrowed its sample to 228 cases in which the Board had conducted a full investigation. Of these, the Board found that written search reports, or UF250s, had been filled out in only about half of the cases. The reports, which are supposed to record the time, place, reason for and results of each search, are meant to ensure some level of police accountability, as well as to protect officers from accusations of misconduct.
The CCRB's findings, contained in a 54-page draft report obtained by the New York Times, echo a similar report issued by state attorney general Eliot Spitzer which accused the NYPD of unfairly targeting black and Hispanic New Yorkers for stop-and-frisk searches. CCRB chairman Frank Wohl cautioned that the draft report was "extremely preliminary" and yet to be discussed by the full Board.
Perhaps more than any other police tactic, stop-and-frisk searches bitterly divide tough-on-crime advocates from those who feel the war on crime has gone too far. Aggressive searches have led to increased gun and drug seizures, and are widely credited with lowering crime rates, but many minority residents consider these searches a threat--at any moment they may be subjected to a humiliating invasion of privacy, though they have committed no crime. Tracking searches, however, may be a quixotic task. Paperwork is generally a dirty word within the NYPD's ranks; for many officers, filing reports is an unnecessary burden (see 5/1 Commentary).
Police Commissioner Howard Safir declined to comment on the CCRB's findings, telling reporters through a spokesperson "It's inappropriate to respond to a report we have not received."
Stop-and-frisk: patting down the outside of a suspect's clothing, feeling for a weapon
Search: reaching inside a suspect's pockets or other interior parts of clothing to determine if an object felt is a weapon.
Police Action |
Complaints |
UF250 filed |
Percentage |
Frisk |
228 |
135 |
59% |
Search |
54 |
18 |
33% |
Frisk & Search |
85 |
38 |
45% |
Arrest |
168 |
33 |
20% |
To Mayor Giuliani, police coverage in the Times means more cop-bashing stories. But beat writer Kevin Flynn has published a number of articles from behind the Blue Wall, including one last month on the deteriorating conditions at the City's 76 precinct houses: crumbling walls, decrepit plumbing and electrical systems, overcrowded offices, and a backlog of thousands of repair orders.
With its numbers growing by 25% to 40,000 over the past decade, the NYPD has found itself competing with the Board of Education and other agencies for limited building maintenance funds. Now the City has earmarked over $40 million over the next four years to build two new Brooklyn station houses and renovate the Central Park station house. And Police Commissioner Howard Safir recently announced the Department would spend an additional $5 million to improve building maintenance.
The biggest story here, however, may be the timing of the Times article. This isn't the first time someone has sounded the alarm about the NYPD's falling buildings; Alan Hevesi described many of the same conditions, and recommended extensive renovations, in a 1998 report. And an additional $5 million for repairs is a drop in the bucket compared to the NYPD's $3 billion 2000 budget. But for a Department whose strategies have been repeatedly questioned this year, a report on spending priorities may have been in order.
Jerome Chou is a freelance writer. He works part-time interviewing recently released ex-offenders about their re-entry into society.