Friday's press conference (photo: Vocal New York)
A coalition of housing rights advocates and elected officials is seeking a “new deal” for homeless people living in New York City, as one activist put it at a rally on Friday.
Members of the coalition gathered in front of City Hall to point out what they believe to be shortcomings of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s housing agenda and the dangers of celebrating too early the plan to shutter the Rikers Island jails. The jails are a cornerstone of the city’s criminal justice system that the advocates say have helped destabilize communities and contribute to the cycle of incarceration and homelessness, particularly among black and Latino New Yorkers.
Just after the City Council’s Thursday passage of the new jails plan and in the shadow of the brutal killing of four homeless people in Chinatown two weeks ago, the groups are calling for a holistic approach to homelessness centered on adequate housing for at-risk New Yorkers.
The press conference, organized by VOCAL-NY and Coalition for the Homeless, came less than 24 hours after the City Council took the decisive vote to replace the Rikers jails with four new locally-situated jails. The vote is a historic step towards ameliorating what has been described as devastation to individuals, families, and communities caused by mass incarceration and lock-up inside the city’s blighted detention facilities. In addition to the ones on Rikers Island, the system includes antiquated jails in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and a Bronx barge that are all set to be replaced.
But the advocates at City Hall Friday say the city’s emphasis on replacing the Rikers jails without including affordable housing creation in new plans fails to address the root causes of mass incarceration and its relationship with the homelessness crisis. There are currently about 7,000 detainees in city jails and more than 62,000 homeless people in New York City.
The groups on Friday were rallying around a set of recommendations under the “House Our Future NY” campaign launched by Coalition for the Homeless to address the city’s shortage of meaningfully affordable housing. As part of the campaign the organizations are pressing for 30,000 more units of affordable housing dedicated specifically to homeless people, of which a vast majority -- 24,000 units -- would be newly created.
Participants included community-based organizations like Housing Works, Make the Road New York, Neighbors Together, and New York Communities for Change. Three elected officials -- Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, and Council Member Stephen Levin -- also spoke.
The groups are seeking action in three areas: permanently affordable housing for homeless New Yorkers; supportive housing for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless and need social services on-site; and improvements in the city’s shelter system to materially address the experiences of people it is meant to serve.
“If you want to shut down Rikers Island and reduce the number of people who are incarcerated...and if you want to end homelessness in this city it starts with access to safe, affordable housing,” said Charles King, CEO of Housing Works, at the Friday rally.
“The only solution is housing,” said Felix Guzman, an organizer with VOCAL-NY who identified as formerly homeless and incarcerated. “We must build housing for the people that need it the most in our city.” Guzman questioned plans for the MTA to hire 500 new police officers aimed at addressing homelessness in the subway system and what he called the criminalization of street homelessness, explaining that some people who sleep on the street are afraid of the city’s shelters.
There are approximately 78,600 people in beds or chairs across the city’s shelter system or who are homeless and unsheltered, according to data provided by the city to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development in January, and cited by advocates Friday. The count is greater than another frequently-cited metric -- roughly 60,000, the daily population of those living in Department of Homeless services shelters -- because it counts people in shelter placements not administered by DHS, such as ones for people with HIV and AIDS and people who have experienced domestic violence, said Craig Hughes of the Urban Justice Center, in an interview with Gotham Gazette. The figure also includes estimates of unsheltered people, he said. Hughes did not participate in the press conference but had discussed the metrics with organizers leading up to the event.
“It shows that the city has failed in solving homelessness and its housing crisis,” Hughes said. “My argument would be that its housing crisis is producing homelessness at a much higher rate than we are often talking about.”
The DHS shelter census of roughly 60,000 has been relatively stable in recent years as the city has continued to implement a variety of programs, including rental vouchers and a “right to counsel” for thousands of low-income tenants, which has led to large drops in evictions. Still, many thousands of New Yorkers are cycling through the shelter system each year, and advocates say de Blasio’s approach is not designed to meaningfully reduce the city’s homeless population.
The $8.7 billion plan to construct new jails to replace Rikers Island capacity, which the City Council passed Thursday, came with $391 million in additional funds for community investment and criminal justice reform initiatives, according to a press release from the city. Among the reforms are tens of millions in pre-trial diversion programs, incarceration alternatives, and re-entry services. The plan also includes a provision to increase the number of supportive and transitional housing units for homeless people who have been involved in the criminal legal system.
“That plan needs to be enhanced and needs to be executed. If we talk about this thing as already done, then we have lost,” Public Advocate Williams said at the press conference. “I was pleased about some of the investments that I saw. Unfortunately, it seems like the majority of them have more to do with what happens inside the criminal justice system, as opposed to what happens to prevent people from coming in in the first place.”
“What we need to see is significant investment to the tune of the same amount of money that was put into that plan yesterday. Closing Rikers was never simply about bricks and mortar,” he added.
One of the groups’ central goals is the accelerated creation of permanently affordable housing accessible to the lowest-income New Yorkers.
The mayor’s housing plan, Housing New York, is a sweeping initiative to preserve or create 300,000 units of affordable housing over 12 years, coordinating across a myriad of public and private entities. An initial version of the plan (for 200,000 units over 10 years) was unveiled in 2014, later updated with the current goals, and as of June has led to the preservation of 91,500 rent-regulated units and creation of 43,900 such units, according to the program’s website.
But critics say it does not meet the affordability demands of the city’s lowest-income households. A report by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD) found the ratio of housing unit development for “low-,” “very low-,” and “extremely low-income” was the inverse of the citywide need in terms of those populations.
The groups rallying at City Hall Friday also say the current housing projections are not sufficient to create an affordable landscape for future generations because they lack permanency. The ANHD report indicates that 234,520 subsidized affordable units could be lost by 2037 due to expiring housing programs.
There is “too much money being wasted for temporary housing. Give them permanent housing, they deserve it,” said Gail Gadsden of New York Communities for Change.
Creating new affordable housing is better for homeless New Yorkers than keeping existing units affordable, said Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, speaking on the steps of City Hall. That’s because preserved units are often already occupied and don’t address New Yorkers currently living without stable housing, she said.
The coalition also wants to hold the de Blasio administration to the mayor’s 2015 commitment to build 15,000 supportive housing units to serve at-risk New Yorkers with mental health and substance abuse issues.
Supportive housing refers to domiciles that come with social services geared toward the diverse needs of homeless individuals and families. According to the city’s Human Resources Administration website, support units can come in the form of congregate housing -- meaning, supportive units make up a larger percentage of a building’s total housing and have on-site service providers -- and scatter-site housing, which are individual units located in private buildings that are served by contracted non-profits. The coalition is pushing for half the 15,000 units to be congregate and the other half to be scatter-site.
In 2016, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his own plan to create 20,000 supportive housing units statewide over 15 years. According to recent reporting by Gothamist, the governor’s office has said the state has funded 5,348 units since 2016, but that only 1,426 are operational.
In addition to affordable and supportive housing, the groups backing the House Our Future campaign are seeking changes to the shelter system itself, including reforming the intake and assessment process and improving access to safe havens and emergency shelter placement for homeless living outside. Reforming the shelter system will encourage people to choose city services over the dangers of streets and public places.
The DHS shelter intake process is a bottleneck, according to Routhier. She said there is one intake center each for single men, families with children, and adult families without children, and two for single women.
“For example, for men there is only one intake center and then a handful of sites you may be sent to for assessment before ending up at your ‘official’ shelter. Intake and assessment sites are often the ones men are least willing to enter,” she told Gotham Gazette, “which is a big deterrent for many folks.”
“The community is calling for a caring and compassionate New Deal,” said Jawanza Williams, lead organizer at VOCAL-NY.
“I’ll be in office for another two years and a couple of months, you have my full commitment that this is priority number one,” said Brooklyn Council Member Stephen Levin. “We need to do this for the next generation.”
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
De Blasio with a body camera (photo: Rob Bennett/Mayor's Office)
The New York City police department is set to finally publish its formal policy regarding the release of body-worn camera footage, nearly seven months after every uniformed patrol officer was equipped with a body camera. While the signature reform has been touted by Mayor Bill de Blasio as a means to improve policing and to provide transparency and accountability to the public, there have been no clear guidelines on how the department determines when to release footage to the public and the press.
Indication of the impending announcement, given to Gotham Gazette by an NYPD spokesperson, comes amid questions about the death of NYPD Officer Brian Mulkeen in a ‘friendly fire’ incident last month – including when the city will make public the body-camera footage of officers involved in the shooting, which apparently occurred as Mulkeen wrestled with a suspect who was also killed by responding officers.
In March, the NYPD completed the roll out of body-worn cameras to every uniformed officer on patrol, roughly 20,000 in total, and began assigning another 4,000 to officers in specialized units. In the Mulkeen incident, all of the officers were equipped with cameras and had them activated, except for Mulkeen, according to news reports. While there are detailed guidelines on how officers must use those cameras, there is no formal policy on how footage is released to the public or the press.
NYPD spokesperson Devora Kaye told Gotham Gazette that policy will be posted to the department’s website by the end of the month. Kaye did not provide any further details about what the policy will include or who was consulted on creating it.
The NYPD first began a pilot program to equip a limited number of officers with body-worn cameras in April 2017, after the settlement of a lawsuit over the department’s policing tactics, specifically the unconstitutional manner in which officers employed street stops known as stop-and-frisk. The camera program was launched under the supervision of a court-appointed special monitor, Peter Zimroth, who has continued to assess its efficacy. In July 2018, a federal judge ordered the police department to begin recording all encounters, not just the more serious ones that officers had been recording thus far.
The body-worn camera program was to be fully implemented by the end of 2019 but was expedited last year by de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O’Neill. But, while the two have repeatedly said they support greater transparency in how the police operate, critics say they have been hesitant to act unless pushed to do so or become more secretive, as has been the case with the city’s narrowed interpretation of a state law related to the public release of officer personnel records.
As early as December 2014, Mayor de Blasio emphasized the need to balance privacy and legal concerns as the city sought to implement a pilot body camera program. “I think part of this is seeing how it works in practice and helping us refine that balance...We're dealing with a lot of unexplored territory in this issue that the public...the media, and we in the police profession, and the courts for that matter, don't fully understand. We're going to all learn together,” he said, quickly noting that an early issue that emerged was the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).
In April 2017, the mayor noted that the program continued to be a “work in progress” for the police department. “It will build out over time. We are reserving the right to make adjustments in the policy as we go along,” he said.
At a January 2018 news conference, when the city announced the accelerated implementation of the body camera program, police officials were reluctant to commit to time-bound policies for release of footage or a policy around doing so, emphasizing again that they believed it was too early to make such decisions. “I think what we are trying to do is gather the experience to inform that policy,” said Assistant Deputy Commissioner Nancy Hoppock.
In the wake of several high-profile officer-involved shootings, police reform advocates and the families of individuals killed by officers have repeatedly raised alarms about the department’s culture of secrecy and the apparent absence of a universal standard for releasing body-worn camera footage, and no public indication as to when such a policy would be forthcoming.
Such concerns were again raised last month, after Officer Mulkeen and a civilian, Antonio Williams, were killed in the Bronx in an attempted arrest gone wrong. Mulkeen had chased Williams after a street stop, and when the two struggled as the officer tried to restrain him, several fellow officers showed up and opened fire, killing them both.
At an October 8 news conference on the latest crime statistics, Commissioner O’Neill said the department would release some footage of the incident. “We’re in discussions, this is an active investigation with the Bronx DA’s office,” he said, adding that the department was “going to end up releasing some of it but certainly not to the point where right before Detective Mulkeen gets shot, just to what led up to it.” (Mulkeen was posthumously promoted to Detective by the NYPD.)
The previous week, the mayor defended his administration’s “consistent” approach in terms of working with district attorneys first and noted the complexities of releasing body camera footage.
“[T]his is what we said from the beginning about body cameras, that we have to, in each instance, make sure that the release is appropriate and that begins with dealing with the District Attorney’s Office,” he said, in his weekly appearance on NY1’s Inside City Hall on September 30. “And as you see, the release of footage has happened consistently in the days after an incident. But there are...legal considerations that have to be accounted for and then we proceed to release the footage.”
But the police department has not always been forthcoming or consistent, as the mayor claims. In a June ruling in a lawsuit brought by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a judge ordered the department to release all relevant footage from the 2017 shooting death of an unarmed, mentally ill Bronx resident at the hands of police. An earlier collection of footage the department had made public excluded certain officers who were at the scene.
The NYPD had initially sought to prevent releasing the body-camera footage under the protection of Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights law, which the department and city lawyers have argued prohibits officers’ personnel records from public disclosure. But the department later reversed its position, indicating it would release the footage. That did not, however, stop the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police officers union, from filing a lawsuit on those grounds. The suit was struck down by a state appeals court in February this year.
Advocates continue to deride the fact that the NYPD itself is creating the policies around disclosure. Kesi Foster, an organizer with Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition of advocacy groups, said the department’s current policies are “substandard and are designed to protect abusive officers instead of the public.”
“We have no faith that the NYPD's expected revision of their policies will change this since body cameras can never be a tool for transparency or accountability while the NYPD owns the footage, controls release of footage and unilaterally dictates related policy,” Foster said in a statement. “Despite promises from elected officials that body cameras will create stronger accountability or reform policing, it’s clear in NYC and across the country they are another tool for officials to protect police departments from transparency and control the narrative around interactions between residents and police officers.”
There is broad agreement that the department needs to have a detailed formal policy on handling the release of footage to the public and the news media. Before the initial launch of the body-worn camera program, the NYPD in 2016 conducted a survey of police officers and the public, and commissioned a subsequent report on the public feedback received by the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project.
“A majority of respondents (57%) either agreed or strongly agreed that the NYPD should be required to show footage of a person’s interaction with an officer to a news or advocacy organization upon request, noting that recordings were public documents, and that making footage available would promote transparency and accountability,” the report noted. Those who believed footage should not be released pointed to privacy concerns or the effect it could have on police investigations.
Groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and more than a dozen media organizations urged the department to formulate a written policy and to ensure that exemptions to the city’s Freedom of Information Law are only applied narrowly for maximum access. Additionally, the report noted, 51% of respondents said the police department should release footage of high-profile incidents – including a serious use of force or custodial death – “as soon as possible” while 25% said footage should be released after an internal department investigation.
Even a report from the Police Executive Research Forum, published in 2014 and commissioned by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, notes that “Agencies should have clear and consistent protocols for releasing recorded data externally to the public and the news media.” The report is linked on the NYPD’s website.
The NYPD patrol guide minimally addresses these issues. Its eight-page body-worn camera policy details when and how officers should use their cameras, protocols for activating them, and circumstances when doing so would adversely affect their duties. It specifies which activities, individuals, and locations officers may not record – protests and other forms of political activity, victims of sex crimes, the inside of a medical facility, to name a few. And it outlines how the footage must be stored, maintained, and reviewed.
But it only briefly refers to how the footage can be made accessible to outside parties, including oversight and investigation agencies and the public. For instance, the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau handles requests for footage from the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which monitors and probes abuse of power and misconduct by officers. Those requests are not always handled in a timely manner, however.
For instance, in December 2018, about 8% of CCRB investigations had pending requests for body-worn camera footage (the number was never higher than 12% for any month last year). In September of this year, however, that number was at 30%, after hitting a high of 37% in June, according to the CCRB’s latest monthly statistical reports.
“Oversight agency access to body-worn camera footage has the potential to revolutionize civilian oversight of police across the country,” said Ethan Teicher, a CCRB spokesperson, in an email. “Currently, the CCRB requests body-worn camera footage from the NYPD in order to use it in agency investigations, and does so because this evidence is crucial to the CCRB’s oversight function.”
The patrol guide explicitly provides instructions to refuse access to body camera footage when initially requested. “Requests by a witness or victim to view a BWC recording must be declined and referred to the appropriate prosecutor handling the case. Requests by civilians to view a BWC recording that is not related to a criminal case must be declined and referred to the Legal Bureau’s Document Production Unit,” it reads.
City Council Member Donovan Richards, who chairs the Council’s public safety committee, is hoping the upcoming policy will provide greater transparency and access to body camera footage.
“In a perfect world, they would be much more transparent – which they are not as of now – in terms of releasing body camera footage immediately after events, as fast and expedient as possible,” he said in a brief interview at City Hall. He cited the recent police-involved shooting in Fort Worth, Texas, where an officer fatally shot a woman inside her own home. The shooting occurred on Saturday and the body camera footage was released quickly after, forcing the officer’s resignation within two days of the shooting. (He was charged with murder just hours later.)
Richards said he wants to see a policy that details time-bound releases of footage. “Things are always going to be under investigation and it needs to be a policy that enables us to get access to body camera footage much faster. So we're going to look for timelines. That's what I'm most interested in seeing,” he said. He is also pushing for an oversight hearing in November on the issue of body camera footage where the new policy would likely be up for discussion.
Richards did not commit to advancing legislation mandating timeframes should the policy not include any. “We will always use the power of the committee to push the NYPD to be more transparent and more accountable to the public. And we will use the full weight of our committee to do that,” he said.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Note - this article has been updated.
Abbi & Ilana of 'Broad City' fame in Charter Revision Commission PSA
When trying to gin up public attention on seemingly mundane government minutiae, a bit of star power never hurts.
Most New Yorkers probably don’t know that they can vote this fall -- starting with the launch of early voting on October 26 -- on fairly significant changes to city elections and governance, so the team behind the ballot proposals is enlisting two people known for New York City pride.
As early voting and November fifth’s Election Day approach, the 2019 Charter Revision Commission is ramping up efforts to inform voters about the series of ballot questions and encourage them to head to the polls, and they’ve recruited “Broad City” television and comedy stars Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson to help get the message out.
In the next phase of the commission’s public education campaign, a new public service announcement will launch Tuesday that features Glazer and Jacobson talking up the City Charter and opportunities to vote on changes to it.
The Charter Revision Commission, tasked with proposing changes to the city’s seminal governing document, has placed five questions on the ballot, with a total of 19 proposals contained within that would change how elections are conducted, enhance the powers of a police oversight agency, strengthen ethics laws, provide dedicated budgets to the public advocate and borough presidents, and make tweaks to the city’s budgeting and land use processes.
To ensure a robust response to the ballot questions, in what is expected to be a very low-turnout election, the commission launched its campaign aimed at reaching voters through ads on buses and subways, television, radio, print, and digital. The commission is spending between $1-1.4 million on the entire campaign. The spot featuring Glazer and Jacobson seeks to add a bit of buzz to the more traditional ads that have been published thus far. The PSA, for which Glazer and Jacobson volunteered their time, cost $16,000 to produce and will run on TV and digital media through Election Day.
The comedic duo is seen sitting together in a living room, reading the City Charter and imagining, in their typically absurd brand, voting on benefits to give New Yorkers, like a government-issued personal force field for anyone who steps foot in Times Square.
But then they turn to the charter.
“Did you know on November 5th, we can vote on other cool stuff? Like, we get to amend our city’s charter,” Glazer says.
“Our constitution!” Jacobson responds.
They list two of the more significant proposals – ranked choice voting, which would radically change election administration, and improving police accountability, through strengthening the authority of the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
“You can vote on that!” the two comedians say, echoing the signature line of the charter commission’s awareness campaign.
“This election is happening during an off-year so we want to do everything possible to make sure that New Yorkers know that these proposals are on the ballot,” Charter Commission Chair Gail Benjamin said in a statement about the ad, which Gotham Gazette previewed. “That’s why we were so excited to have Abbi and Ilana join us in this campaign. We know that when they talk, people listen.”
Benjamin and the Broad City stars are hoping that New Yorkers say ‘Yas Queen!’ to voting, if not all five ballot questions.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Note - This article has been updated.