Donovan Richards and John Miller (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
As the internet continues to transform the landscape of threats to the United States and New York City specifically, the NYPD has had to adapt, and the police department in the country’s largest city, what some call its ‘number one terror target,’ uses monitoring and surveillance tools that have raised questions. Advancements in technology and tactics -- as well as age-old concerns about privacy, free speech, and due process, plus prior departmental errors in judgement -- have led to calls for more transparency by some advocates and lawmakers.
Amid the push to ensure civil liberties and NYPD transparency, the department has fought to maintain its own privacy, arguing that keeping its strategies and tools secure is necessary to truly provide public safety in the age of internet terrorism. Particularly, the NYPD’s intelligence and counterterrorism units must be given wide latitude to fight today’s threats, argues NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller.
Appearing last week at the “Protecting New York Summit” hosted by City & State, Miller spoke about the threats the city faces, the balance between transparency and secrecy, the lines that separate monitoring and investigation, and his work to keep New Yorkers safe. Appearing next to Miller during the discussion, moderated by Gotham Gazette editor Ben Max, was City Council Member Donovan Richards, a Queens Democrat and chair of the Council’s public safety committee, who wants to see policing done more fairly and transparently.
Whereas terrorist organizations until recently worked methodically in organized hierarchical structures, they now rely on propaganda-driven operations, Miller said, where senders and recipients often exchange messages without even knowing who is on the other end. Most of these messages move around on the internet, sometimes in public chat forums, providing the NYPD both a challenge and an opportunity.
While Miller and his team, along with other law enforcement partners like the FBI, are able to monitor some conversations that indicate the possibility of illegal activity or threats to public safety, there is also an incredibly vast world of potential danger where individuals are at times moved to do harm after sitting in front of their computers -- an intimate space often difficult for law enforcement to penetrate.
“The world has become a much smaller place. The world is a dangerous place. Now it’s a smaller more dangerous place,” Miller said at the summit, describing some of his thinking about his patrol.
But as the NYPD and others monitor, surveil, and investigate -- Miller took pains to insist on careful nomenclature, though a common set of definitions was not fully established during the free-wheeling hour-long conversation -- some want to know more about what words and phrases can trigger heightened policing, as well as what specific tools the NYPD is using, and when, where, and how they are being deployed.
When asked about calls for NYPD transparency by the City Council, activists, and advocates, who want to know more about how the NYPD is carrying out surveillance, what tools are being used, and how people are winding up on certain lists, Miller said: “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“If you give complete transparency you will be ineffective,” Miller said. “I have undercover officers who take their lives into their hands and go into places with dangerous people who would kill them if they knew what their role was. To describe what equipment they wear - it would be to put them in danger.”
In the interplay between Richards and Miller, one specific potential police oversight measure that the City Council is considering is a bill that would require the NYPD to be transparent about which technological tools it is using, when, and how.
The Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, originally introduced in 2017 by then-Council Member Dan Garodnick, would require the NYPD to publish the details of equipment it uses to record audio and video, and perform other surveillance tactics. The bill was heard by Council committee, where NYPD representatives vociferously opposed it, did not move in the Council, and was reintroduced in 2018 in the new four-year Council session. It has not received a committee vote. The parties involved say they are continuing to negotiate the details of the bill.
According to Miller, NYPD and Council representatives sat together to go over the bill line by line, whereby the police department explained concerns and outlined changes it wanted to see in order to support the bill. Miller said the legislation showed no signs of changes asked for by the NYPD, that it remained a bill written by advocates.
“I think we believe in the work NYPD does every day but that does not preclude them from being accountable to the public,” Richards said. “We wouldn’t be the first city to reveal some of the tools the NYPD uses already.”
Miller and Richards both said that New Yorkers and visitors to the city, should not have to give up any additional privacy or freedoms due to the need for greater policing and counterterrorism work in the city -- which has been home to 30 mostly foiled terrorist plots since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Miller said, including three that were carried out (Chelsea bombing, subway bombing, West Side bike path truck attack) in the past two years.
They also agreed that there are of course some limits to free speech when it comes to disrupting or making threats to public safety, getting at one of the key tensions in how the NYPD monitors the internet.
“The Supreme Court has decided it’s not OK to yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. Not all speech is protected. It’s probably OK to yell ‘god is great’ in a crowded theater; but if you say ‘allahu akbar,’ does that make it different? My answer is no...But if you’re saying something like ‘we should do something here, to hurt and kill people,’ that’s not OK,” Miller said.
“Even as we enjoy the freedom as Americans of free speech,” Richards said, “it doesn’t give individuals the right to go out there and prop up propaganda that can lead to violence and attacks in our city.”
Richards pointed to what he sees as unequal treatment of certain groups by the NYPD. He raised the issue of Muslim surveillance, which the department practiced after September 11, 2001, and more recently how the NYPD treated the presence of the Proud Boys, a rightwing extremist group, at the New York Metropolitan Club versus reports that the department has surveiled Black Lives Matter activists.
“Are they being treated equally? The answer to that question to me is no,” Richards said. “There has been historically a difference in how certain communities have been surveilled in our city.”
Miller denied allegations that the NYPD practiced improper surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists, who have also accused the NYPD of jamming their phones.
“We don’t jam anybody’s phone,” Miller said. “It would be a crime and against the law.” He said if members of a protest see their phones stop working it’s likely due to the fact that so many people in a concentrated space are trying to connect to wireless networks at the same time.
Among the causes of the recent uptick in white supremacy-motivated attacks of “domestic terrorism,” both Miller and Richards cited the increasingly hostile climate surrounding national discussions of race and ethnicity.
Asked if his job has been made more challenging by the fact that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has promoted conspiracy theories, stoked racial resentment, and encouraged extremist groups, including targeting a New York member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Miller said he wanted to stay away from the politics of it all.
“The things that are said, the names that are called, the calls that are made certainly have set a bar that has unleashed more vitriol that used to live in shadows way out into the open,” Miller said. After observing attackers who emerge from “online spaces, you would be foolish to deny that the brittle tone of the national discourse doesn’t have something to do with that,” he said. (The panel took place before the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio that rocked the nation this past weekend.)
According to a previously unpublicized FBI document, fringe conspiracy theories can now be considered “domestic terrorism,” Yahoo! News reported. The document, released May 30, details a number of arrests related to violent incidents motivated by such theories.
When it comes to surveillance, the NYPD does not treat cases of “domestic terrorism” any differently than other threats that compromise public safety, Miller said.
“If you’re talking about committing acts of violence, blowing something up, you’re going to be our focus,” Miller said. “The rules we use to collect information on rightwing extremists, leftwing extremists, Islamic exteremists, we can’t do anymore with one than we do with another,” he said.
On August 1, just after the panel discussion, the New York Times reported that the NYPD keeps a database of mugshots, including those of arrested teens, to be cross referenced with facial recognition software. Despite studies demonstrating that facial recognition software is less accurate in identifying people with darker skin, the NYPD defended its use, citing its as a necessity to make “sure we’re doing everything to fight crime,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot F. Shea told the Times.
The NYPD does not use facial recognition to “lock anyone up,” nor as probable cause, but it can serve as a lead in investigations, according to NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill, City & State reported.
“Our committee is ensuring that even as surveillance is done there is a level of accountability,” Council Member Richards said at the summit. “One of the things we are trying to focus on is ensuring that we do protect the people’s right to the freedom of speech, and done in a way where certain communities don’t feel like they are unjustly targeted,” he said.
The NYPD has also come under fire for its surveillance of internet forums. However, Miller said that the NYPD does not surveil people unless there is a legitimate threat or allegation.
“When you’re in public forums where people know there are other people there. I don’t know that anybody is being watched until there is a possibility of illegal activity,” Miller said.
Miller said that the NYPD follows the “Handschu agreement” -- a set of guidelines that regulate NYPD activity designated after the department was found to have violated free speech among members of the Black Panther Party in 1985 -- when it comes to opening investigations, getting the approval of a judge. Miller said that compliance with the Handschu agreement precludes the possibility of surveillance that infringes on the constitutional right to free speech, and took issue with the term “surveillance,” which he argued has been manipulated by advocates to be misleading and have a negative connotation.
“Surveillance means I send out a surveillance team. If we have a case open we have to write it up,” Miller said. “The Handschu committee has to go and say this fits within the agreement. That's not surveillance, that’s investigation. Mixing these words together -- surveillance, spying -- advocates know what they’re doing by choosing these charged terms. We work within precision, rules, oversight. It bothers me when I hear about ‘police surveillance of neighborhoods.’ We don’t surveil neighborhoods, religions, activities, unless it fits within the guidelines.”
Richards drew a comparison between those who inaccurately predicted that drastically reducing the NYPD use of stop-and-frisk would lead to ‘streets running red with blood’ and those warning of increased transparency in NYPD surveillance.
Miller made a different point about stop-and-frisk, using a metaphor favored by his former boss, former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who likes to say that policing is like giving medicine to a patient. Doctors often have to give more medicine and treatment the sicker the patient is, but too much medicine (policing) can be counterproductive, and when the patient shows signs of improvement, it’s important to adjust the levels of medication. Miller said that in the later years of the Bloomberg administration, dosages of stop-and-frisk had gotten totally out of hand, to the point of being counterproductive, and that the NYPD did not appropriately respond to feedback from its patients.
Miller said that with a more strategic and precise approach, more guns are being taken off the street in recent years than even at the height of the stop-and-frisk era.
Asked about whether he’s worried about being blamed if he pursues reform and it is believed to contribute to an increase in crime or major incident, Richards said he is not “too concerned” about increasing transparency because he believes “that once again the more we build that trust collectively together the safer our city will be.”
“We’ve talked a lot about building trust with the NYPD. Why are communities feeling safer? It’s because we are building trust. We build trust by being transparent with each other,” Richads said. “It enables someone who could learn of a threat to want to communicate that to the NYPD. We close the door on that particular scenario if we are not being transparent.”
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by Noah Berman, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
former Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen (photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)
While she insists she has no intention to run at this time, former Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen is not ruling out a campaign to become New York City’s next mayor, and says the city needs a woman in charge after her former boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, is term-limited out of office at the end of 2021.
“Right now I have no plans to run for mayor because I think that the constant speculation about who’s running for mayor sort of distracts from what the real issue is,” she said during a recent interview with Gotham Gazette. “And what the real issue is, is what kind of mayor do we need going into the next decade? And, in my mind, I think this town needs a woman mayor. I think this town needs somebody who actually has experience and a track record of running things.”
With the all-important Democratic primary for New York City mayor just under two years away, in June 2021, the four declared and likely Democratic candidates, all men, have begun earnestly raising funds and pitching potential allies for what is expected to be a highly competitive race. Each of the four -- Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, and Comptroller Scott Stringer -- has significant political experience, a base of support, and an early, distinct pitch of their vision for leading the city.
While one essential question of the last open race for mayor, in 2013, was whether the city would elect its first female mayor, in then-Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who lost to de Blasio in the Democratic primary, one ongoing question about the 2021 race is whether any female candidate will enter the race. (Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis challenged de Blasio in the 2017 general election and lost by a wide margin, indicative of Republican chances in today’s New York City.)
Given her fairly high-profile status as deputy mayor for housing and economic development for de Blasio’s first five-plus years as mayor, Glen’s name has been bandied about as a potentially strong contender should she jump into the mayoral race, though she would clearly face an uphill climb given the likely field, and her lack of an electoral base or popular name recognition. And while she would face criticism over various housing-related crises the de Blasio administration has faced, she would be able to boast a series of tangible accomplishments at the highest level of city government.
A controversial figure given the affordable housing program she designed, her work to broker the ill-fated Queens Amazon campus deal, and the state of the city’s public housing, Glen would likely face opposition from a growing progressive movement across the city. But some say Glen would present a clear and viable alternative to the other candidates and that her time as deputy mayor makes her perhaps most qualified to be New York City’s chief executive. Glen has been in and around city government for decades.
As Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top housing and economic development official for nearly five-and-a-half years, and as a former Goldman Sachs executive, Glen has managerial experience and concrete accomplishments that would make for a robust mayoral resume. She’s helmed the mayor’s housing program, which is on schedule to create and preserve 300,000 units of affordable housing over 12 years (2014-2026); she spearheaded large economic development projects, like those at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, that are expected to directly and indirectly create tens of thousands of jobs; she helped turn around the operating finances of the New York City Housing Authority; and she oversaw the expansion of the Citi Bike program and the launch of the new ferry system.
But with each item on her resume comes an asterisk, especially in a Democratic primary. Housing advocates say the mayor’s plan doesn’t target enough housing for the lowest-income New Yorkers and marginalizes the homeless; the ferry system is massively subsidized and isn’t linked to the current MTA fare system for buses and subways. The biggest blot is the public housing system, home to more than 400,000 New Yorkers and scandal after scandal. As residents continue to live in squalid and dangerous conditions, a federal monitor is now in place. And while de Blasio and Glen have accurately pointed to a lack of adequate federal and state support for NYCHA, with crises dating back into past administrations, the turnaround job they promised is far from complete.
Those who have worked with Glen believe that she has the chops to be mayor. Vishaan Chakrabarti, associate professor of practice at Columbia GSAPP and founder of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, said he would vote for her. “I think that position [of deputy mayor] definitely qualifies one to run for mayor,” said Chakrabarti, formerly a city planner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“I'm hoping we get to a place where we can reconcile the...very progressive agenda that...many people want to see with the ability to really get things done on the ground, where it's not just rhetoric, right? It's actually being able to deal with the controversy of bringing change,” he added, insisting that Glen has the “toughness” for the job of mayor.
Glen is no stranger to controversy and she has never shied away from tough decisions. And she sees the job of mayor as more than a political position. “[I]t’s also a job that requires you to be able, in a very complex economy, in a very complex jurisdictional construct between state, regional, national politics, in a city which is still, I would argue, the global capital of commerce, culture and hopefully innovation -- that requires I think some skills that are not necessarily the skills that people who are always in the political class appreciate as much,” she said, insisting that she was not referring to any of the current candidates in the race.
Mary Ann Tighe, CEO of the New York Tri-State Region for CBRE, a commercial real estate services firm and chair emeritus of the Real Estate Board of New York, said Glen “would make a great mayor.”
“It would be thrilling to have a mayor who would place all her energy in the job and who knows how to manage,” she said. “You know, at the end of the day, a mayor’s job is that of a manager. It's not setting national policy, if you know what I mean. It's sticking up and getting the garbage picked up. It's making the life of the city fair and safe. I think Alicia would do thrilling things that would really benefit New York City if she were to be elected.”
One of the challenges for Glen may be her close association with de Blasio in a race where most of the candidate will be running as a break from him. Organizations like the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, ascendant in recent state and city elections, would also be heavily opposed to Glen, given her ties to real estate and business.
Some Democratic consultants believe Glen’s chances of victory would be slim. “She has no constituency to count on. She is not well known in the city,” said George Arzt, a veteran of citywide races. “That said, there is also no woman in the race.”
There are relatively few women in elected office in New York City: none of the current citywide officials are women and while two of the five borough presidents are women, neither Manhattan’s Gale Brewer nor Queens’ Melinda Katz, who may be on the verge of becoming district attorney, is likely to run for mayor in the next election. Just 12 of the 51 members of the City Council are women. Quinn has been the subject of speculation with regard to the upcoming mayoral race, but few if any other names of women have been mentioned in the early chatter.
“I think I wouldn’t rule it out because of the fact that New York City doesn’t have, right now, a lot of women candidates,” Glen said just after leaving City Hall, appearing in March on the What’s The [Data] Point? podcast, adding, “There are an unbelievable number of young women out there who blow my mind every single day, but there’s still a dearth of women who have executive experience, have run complex organizations, who’ve had multiple experiences, both in politics and the private sector, and in the nonprofit sector. You know, it’s something I would obviously think about at the right time.”
Arzt said Glen is behind. “If she started earlier, she could have been getting some publicity,” he said. “Starting this late and going into it next year, I don't think she has the momentum going forward or the fundraising that the others do…She is way behind.” Arzt also noted that, even if she chose to run, even real estate interests and business groups would be unlikely to rally behind her. Rather, they’ll back the candidate most likely to win, he said. “I would view her potential candidacy as a real long shot,” he said.
Another consultant who wished to remain anonymous in order to speak more freely said Glen doesn’t have the progressive track record necessary to be successful in the upcoming Democratic primary. The consultant cited Glen’s past as a Goldman Sachs executive, her lack of focus on NYCHA, and the city’s unaffordability despite the much-touted affordable housing program.
“I think she would be an interesting foil for the rest of the candidates, especially Stringer, who is focused on running as a progressive, because I think she would turn off folks like DSA,” the consultant said. “I'm not totally sure where she would actually get her votes from because it seems like Eric Adams is focused on Brooklyn, Ruben Diaz Jr. has the Bronx. Corey and Scott are sort of fighting over Manhattan. But Alicia seems like she would also be working on Manhattan...So I’m not totally sure where her base would be that wasn’t overlapping with multiple other people.”
Glen has hardly the level of name recognition as the others. Diaz Jr. and Adams are popular in their boroughs, each having won multiple borough-wide elections as well as legislative ones before those. Johnson is increasingly seen as stepping in for an absentee mayor as de Blasio runs for president. Stringer is ubiquitous at events around the city and the only one of the four already elected citywide (twice). “The everyday person does not know what a deputy mayor is,” the consultant said. “Alicia Glen is not a known name outside of the political chattering class.”
For her part, Glen says she will continue to work towards the city’s future, whether she’s in government or outside of it. She’s currently the new chair of the Trust for Governors Island, but it’s unclear what other moves may be on the horizon, near- or long-term.
“At the end of the day, New York City is a really, really, really complex organism and I do believe strongly that we need to have a mayor and a team of people who can appreciate that and sort of understand you have to get stuff done,” Glen said during the recent sitdown with Gotham Gazette. “And that doesn’t mean there aren’t really important policy arguments going on, and policy informs implementation but you have to be able to play in a much more nuanced, complex world.”
“[T]he economy is not necessarily going to stay as strong as it has been,” she warned, “just as you look at historical cycles and that’s going to require people who understand how to leverage resources really well, assemble great teams, manage the balance sheet and those are hard skills. I don’t think you need Michael Bloomberg to come back. What he may have known about running a big company he may have lacked in understanding some of the other great things that our mayor has to do. But I do think I want to be part of the ongoing success story of New York and however that plays out, I’ll be there.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Speaker Corey Johnson (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson on Thursday announced a plan to address hunger and the lack of equitable access to fresh food in New York City, laying out a package of legislative proposals that the Council will consider over the next year.
Food insecurity — the absence of or insufficient access to affordable, nutritious food — affected nearly 1 million New Yorkers as of 2017, according to a new City Council report that Johnson released at Cypress Elementary School in East New York. The school is the first in Brooklyn that has a greenhouse and incorporates nutrition education into the curriculum.
The Council’s report, titled “Growing Food Equity in New York City,” found that food insecurity particularly affects individuals living in poverty, seniors, and people of color, and it pervades higher education — 48% of students at City University of New York said they had experienced food insecurity in the last month.
Johnson, a Democrat who is exploring a run for mayor in 2021, outlined measures that would address neighborhood inequities in access to healthy food through improvements in food governance, reducing food waste, promoting healthy school lunches and nutritional education, and expanding urban agriculture.
The proposals include the creation of a citywide food plan, a push to help seniors receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (also known as food stamps), and increased city funding for coupons called Health Bucks, which are provided to low-income New Yorkers to buy fresh food at any city farmers market.
“Adequate access to nutritious food is a human right,” Johnson said. “This principle isn’t just for developing countries. It’s something we must follow right here in New York City, one of the richest cities in the world.”
The food equity plan is the latest big policy announcement that Johnson has made since becoming speaker. In March, Johnson proposed a plan for municipal control of the city’s subways and buses, followed in May by a sweeping criminal justice reform agenda.
As part of the food equity plan, the Council will work to expand existing programs that have already been successful such as Health Bucks, nutrition programs in schools, and lunches cooked from scratch at public schools. One bill would require that schools send information about summer meals programs to families, and another would create an Office of Urban Agriculture that would focus on incorporating city farming and gardening into city planning.
The Council and the Department of City Planning will also work to expand the number of neighborhoods eligible to receive the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) zoning bonus. FRESH offers financial assistance and zoning incentives to grocery stores that provide affordable and fresh food in communities that lack access to nutritional food.
Johnson said the City Council will also advocate at the state and federal level to protect and expand access to SNAP benefits. In June, the Trump administration announced plans to change SNAP eligibility requirements. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that nearly 3 million people would lose their food assistance as a result. Johnson said the Trump administration’s “relentless attacks” on SNAP are an enormous threat to the city as food stamps generate up to $5.3 billion in economic activity and the president’s “fear-mongering” has discouraged some who worry they would lose their immigration status.
“Shame on the federal government for using food as a weapon to disenfranchise vulnerable communities,” Johnson said. “Shame on the Trump administration for denying the rights of food to families and seniors while heavily subsidizing corporate interest.”
The speaker was joined on stage by Council Member Rafael Espinal, a Democrat who represents East New York. Espinal noted that 16% of New Yorkers go to bed hungry every night, and 20% of those city residents live in Brooklyn. The Council member has helped pass legislation that set up the city’s first website dedicated to urban agriculture and authored a bill with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to create a comprehensive urban agriculture plan.
Espinal spoke of his own experiences with food insecurity growing up in East New York. He said healthy food was hard to come by, but his father’s garden helped reduce the number of times his family had to drive for miles to buy fruits and vegetables.
“I grew up learning about soil, harvesting and maintaining produce, eating healthy food, and how to become a healthy adult,” he said. “The majority of kids across New York do not have the same opportunity, and to this day most communities are deprived of this kind of experience.”
Another piece of legislation the council will consider would improve and codify the Office of Food Policy, which the speaker said has been under-resourced. Getting New Yorkers more accessible, healthy food options should be one of the city’s top priorities, Johnson said.
“What I really want to see, and what’s at the heart of the food justice movement, is for all of our communities to have greater control over their food options,” Johnson said. “Food is power. We feel it when we eat it. We feel it when we feed our children. We want that power in the hands of our communities.”
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by Samantha Handler, Gotham Gazette
@sn_handler @GothamGazette