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Charter Revision Commission Hears Expert Testimony on Police Accountability


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(photo: @Charter2019NYC)


The 2019 Charter Revision Commission met on Thursday evening to discuss police accountability reforms before an impassioned crowd filled with activists. Local advocates along with some politicians have long called for increased transparency and accountability in policing, particularly in recent years following the 2014 death of Eric Garner at the hands of NYPD officers on Staten Island and the slow, somewhat secretive process by which any accountability has been handled for that incident and others like it over the years.

The commission heard testimony from experts from representatives of the Civilian Complaints and Review Board (CCRB), NYPD, Legal Aid Society, and a variety of police reform advocacy groups.

It was the second charter revision commission hearing this year featuring “expert” panels on key areas that the commission is considering for reform recommendations. The commission, which has narrowed its focus areas to four big buckets, will make its recommendations this summer and its proposals for changes to the city’s charter, its foundational governing document, will go before voters in November.

The four focus areas are elections, which the commission met to discuss the week prior, governance, finance, and land use. Thursday’s meeting was the first to discuss governance, which includes police accountability.

The hearing occurred one day after the Legal Aid Society released a database of more than 2,300 cases of police misconduct involving almost 3,900 police officers between 2015 and 2018 (police unions say the database contains false and trivial allegations).

The CCRB is currently the primary mode of formal police accountability in New York City. The civilian board, members of which are appointed by various officials and groups, investigates citizen complaints of police misconduct in four arenas: force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, and offensive language. The board then recommends a certain level of discipline to the police commissioner, who holds the ultimate authority to determine and enforce penalties for misconduct.

The CCRB is a 13-member body: the City Council appoints one member per borough, the police commissioner names three members with experience in law enforcement, and the mayor installs five members and names the chair.

The hearing was divided into three panels, though unlike the election reform hearing, which was split thematically, the police accountability panelists discussed similar issues and recommended similar amendments to the charter to address the topic at hand.

The first panel included representatives from Citizens Union, a government reform group focused on transparency and accountability, Communities United for Police Reform, an activist organization, NYC Campaign for an Elected Civilian Review Board, and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The second panel hosted a criminal justice professor from Borough of Manhattan Community College, an attorney from the Legal Aid Society, president of the Boston-based National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, and the Independent Monitor of the Denver Police Department.

And to conclude the hearing, the third panel was composed of the executive director of the CCRB, the NYPD legislative affairs director, and an NYPD Deputy Commissioner.

All panelists and commissioners broadly agreed on the importance not only of accountability and transparency in the NYPD, but also on the maintenance of public perception of these tenets. Ideas on how to achieve those goals––or thoughts on whether New York City has already achieved them––differed.

With exception from the two NYPD representatives, a consensus emerged among most panelists around amending the charter to increase the CCRB’s legal strength and to compel the NYPD to release public rationale when the commissioner’s disciplinary decisions divert from the CCRB recommendation. Many experts also advocated increasing CCRB’s budget in tandem with that of the NYPD.

Police commissioners typically deviate from the CCRB’s discipline recommendations: according to the 2019 Charter Revision Commission, the police commissioner implemented the board’s recommendations in 26 percent of cases in the first half of 2018 and in 37 percent of cases in the first half of 2017. Deputy Commissioner Kevin Robinson of the NYPD, however, asserted that the concurrency rate––or the rate at which the NYPD acts upon the CCRB’s recommendation––has risen since this dip. The board agreed that the NYPD will often enforce some discipline at the CCRB’s recommendation, but it rarely aligns with the actual suggested measure of discipline.

Executive director of the CCRB Jonathan Darche proposed four amendments to the charter: codification of CCRB’s administrative prosecution unit, allocation of subpoena power to the board’s “highest ranking staff,” a stronger impetus for NYPD compliance with the CCRB’s requests for information and documents, and to raise the CCRB budget to one percent of the NYPD budget.

“While the department will continue to encourage a healthy working relationship that goes beyond the strict bounds of the charter,” said Oleg Chernyavsky, executive director of the NYPD legislative affairs unit, “we do not support such an expansion of the CCRB’s authority.” Darche encouraged the commission to consider the urgency of collecting evidence for misconduct investigations that rely on city resources like street cameras, where footage is routinely taped over.

The NYPD commended its own steps toward increased transparency. Chernyavsky said that last year Police Commissioner James O’Neill gathered an external panel of criminal justice experts to assess the department’s internal discipline process, ultimately finding “no evidence of a lack of fairness.” The department still decided to act on a number of reforms suggested by the panel, like deliberation over the adoption of a standardized disciplinary matrix, according to Chernyavsky.

Some experts suggested amendments to bolster CCRB’s oversight power. Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform, proposed allocating disciplinary enforcement capacity to CCRB, including potential prosecutorial power. She also advocated fully publicizing all of the NYPD budget, enabling oversight of issues like surveillance technology procurement. Michael Sisitzky, lead policy counsel of the New York Civil Liberties Union, supported many similar provisions, including a charter amendment requiring City Council oversight of technology acquisition and decentralizing the disciplinary power of the police commissioner.

“The biggest problem has always been in CCRB’s lack of authority,” said Sisitzky.

Charter Commission Chair Gail Benjamin, former director of the City Council land use division and appointed as chair by Council Speaker Corey Johnson, along with Commissioner Alison Hirsh, vice president of 32BJ SEIU and appointed by Comptroller Scott Stringer, inquired about the disciplinary procedure for “peace officers.” The experts generally agreed that the city lacks an adequate oversight system for these 5,000 officers, but Darche said that the CCRB lacks the resources to oversee peace officers.

The hearing’s most polarizing issue came from Pamela Monroe of the Campaign for an Elected Civilian Review Board. Monroe asserted that the “CCRB has failed,” and instead proposed a board of 21 elected officials “responsible to their district and answerable to New Yorkers.” The members would serve four-year terms that coincide with mayoral and City Council elections, she explained. The campaign has not yet determined if candidates should run along party lines or in nonpartisan elections. Monroe’s testimony drew fervent applause from the audience, which was largely composed of the campaign’s supporters.

Commissioner Rev. Clinton Miller, who was appointed by Speaker Johnson, asked for details, and Hirsh and several other commissioners inquired about the necessity for elected officials on the CCRB and expressed concern over how the NYPD’s political power could sway these elections in the department’s favor and potentially prevent new accountability reforms. “New Yorkers deserve to have the people represent them,” Monroe answered. Local elections are a tenet of democracy, she explained, and espoused her campaign’s belief that the current CCRB is reflective only of the politicians who appoint them, rather than the city at large.

While Brian Corr of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, reinforced Hirsh’s concerns over how police unions may wield their political clout in an election, most other experts declined to take a position on the issue as members of their organizations were still deliberating the idea.

Commissioner Sal Albanese, a former City Council member and appointed by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, challenged many of the suggested reforms throughout the hearing. Albanese celebrated CCRB’s progress from when NYPD officers served on the board, which changed to its current all-civilian structure 26 years ago under the David Dinkins mayoral administration. He also extolled more recent reforms, including the installations of an inspector general and a federal monitor within the NYPD roughly five years ago.

“Are these things not working?” Albanese asked, to laughs from both the audience and the panel.

Corr later told Albanese that large cities need a body independent of the police department with checks on its power from the mayor and City Council, empaneled with “people who are trained in civic oversight, who understand investigations and can also look at systemic issues.”

Commissioner Stephen Fiala, the Richmond county clerk and appointed by Staten Island Borough President James Oddo, asked several experts to detail their complaints with the 2012 Memorandum of Understanding that broadened oversight of the NYPD.

Many experts lamented the lack of any measure compelling the NYPD to provide a public rationale in instances of non-concurrency between the department and the CCRB on disciplinary measures, despite provisions in the 2012 MOU that suggested the NYPD would disclose these explanations. Ethan Geringer-Sameth explained that Citizens Union has had to wield legal action to unveil certain NYPD decisions. “The fact that it’s not public now,” Kang said “really shows how the NYPD has been allowed to make their own rules.”

Commissioner Carl Weisbrod, a Mayor Bill de Blasio appointee, asked the CCRB and NYPD representatives why the MOU “shouldn’t be codified, given the fact that it has stood the test of time.” Darche called the memorandum a “template for charter revision,” while Chernyavsky said that the MOU maintained police commissioner power because those who occupy that position worked through all levels of the police ranks, giving them important perspective on issues of police misconduct.

Issues of police mistrust within communities of color were debated during the second panel. Albanese asserted that polling shows people of color generally trust police officers, while Manhattan Community College professor Liza Chowdhury said she had not heard of these polls and spoke of historical over-policing in neighborhoods of color, drawing enthusiasm from demonstrators in the crowd who carried photographs of African-American men who have been killed by NYPD officers. Fiala, meanwhile, agreed the NYPD must improve its relationship with civilians, but blamed a lack of trust on a general trend toward suspicion of institutions.

Cynthia Conti-Cook of the Legal Aid Society recommended implementing a conflict counselor position within the CCRB to serve as independent legal representation for clients, rather than the standard set by New York City Law Department’s interpretation of state Civil Rights Law 50-a, which she deemed “the crux of the problem.” The state law, she explained, requires attorneys advancing complaints against police misconduct to delineate why they believe misconduct exists, but blocks their access to disciplinary documents from the NYPD. Defense attorneys, Conti-Cook said, are “arguing in the darkness.”

Chernyavsky advocated for amendments to 50-a that would permit the release of information in the public interest––including officer names, trial transcripts, decisions and disciplinary outcomes––while maintaining safeguards “aimed at protecting officers against harassment.”

“Commissioner O’Neill,” Chernyavsky said, “has attempted to be more transparent within the bounds of the existing law,” noting the decision to release body camera footage and CompStat data. “We can have both. We don’t need to throw away the safeguard that are afforded to our officers at the cost of transparency.”

Many experts and commissioners shared a desire to see a police force that demographically better reflects the communities it serves (which has been the trend in the NYPD), and the need to confront trauma both in neighborhoods that have experienced police brutality and within the police force.

Representatives from the NYPD did not propose any charter amendments.

Council Examines CUNY Budget, City Funding for Community Colleges


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Council Member Inez Barron (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)


City Council members on Thursday questioned administrators for the City University of New York as part of a preliminary budget hearing regarding the public university system, which is funded through a variety of sources including city, state, and federal dollars, as well as tuition.

The hearing was helmed by Higher Education Committee Chair Inez Barron, who represents parts of Brooklyn, is a Hunter College graduate and former public school teacher, and has long argued that CUNY should be tuition-free for all students.

The hearing touched on various issues that have been associated with CUNY for years, such as the increased use of adjunct professors in the system, potential for new hiring, and the role CUNY plays as a vehicle for upward mobility.

The total CUNY budget request for this coming fiscal year, from all sources, is $3.9 billion.

Within the CUNY system, the main recipients of city dollars are community colleges; senior colleges are mostly funded by the state. Under the “predictable” tuition increase plan, in place since 2011, tuition at CUNY’s community colleges has increased by nearly 50 percent, from $3,600 to $4,800 annually. Unlike the senior colleges, however, the community colleges have now had three straight years of tuition freezes.

“In my opinion, I’m opposed to annual tuition increases,” Barron said. “We’re glad that community college has not had to bear that brunt. And my objective is to make CUNY tuition-free. That’s my objective.”

At Thursday’s hearing, CUNY administrators said that if a requested increase in state funding of $250 per student “full time equivalent” is not provided, the community colleges may have to unfreeze tuition rates.

“This increase in state funding, along with continued city support, would adequately support community college operations and enable the university to freeze community college tuition rates for a fourth straight year,” said Matthew Sapienza, CUNY’s senior vice chancellor and chief financial officer.

Mayor de Blasio’s preliminary budget, released in February, calls for $1.181 billion for CUNY in fiscal year 2020, which begins July 1 of this year. This is a decrease from the $1.196 billion in the adopted budget for the current fiscal year, and includes a $14 million cut for community colleges specifically, from $1.143 billion to $1.129 billion.

For community colleges, labor costs will grow by $16 million, from $792.2 million to $808.6 million, due to collective bargaining agreements, while the “other than personal services” allocation shrinks from $350.9 million to $320.1 million, mainly from a $34 million cut to the budget for “supplies and materials,” according to a City Council report.

The mayor’s preliminary budget also includes appropriations for senior colleges ($35 million) and for the public K-12 schools on Hunter College’s campus ($18.2 million). Both of these are essentially flat from the current budget. The rest of CUNY’s budget comes from the state, the federal government, student tuition, scholarships, and grants.

The CUNY administrators present highlighted several key areas they hoped the Council would help fund, including expansion of the successful Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) initiative, efforts to address student food insecurity, and expansion of CUNY’s childcare program, which is not present at every school.

The administrators also called for the Council to help significantly increase funding for CUNY’s associate programs, funding for which has remained flat for over 20 years, by matching the funding to inflation. That would double the programs’ funding, from $32.3 million to $65.1 million.

Over the next four years, CUNY wants to hire 800 new full-time faculty, an attempted departure from the adjunctification trend in at its schools and across higher education. CUNY’s labor force now counts 7,600 full-time instructors and 13,000 adjuncts, who make as little as $3,200 per course, do not have job security, and often have to teach multiple classes per semester at different schools just to make a meager living.

The Professional Staff Congress, a union that represents full-time and part-time CUNY instructors, is aiming to both lessen the university’s reliance on adjuncts and double adjunct pay per course.

“If you take the $3,200 minimum pay per course, and divide that by the number of hours it takes to actually teach a course, grading, preparing, meeting with students, responding to their emails, counseling, the actual pay works out to be just about minimum wage or lower,” said Barbara Bowen, the president of PSC. “So for people with PhDs, master’s degrees, teaching the next generation of college students, responsible for conveying to them the message that if you finish your college degree, a good future awaits you, that very person who has a college degree and a couple of advanced degrees is making less than minimum wage. There is something very wrong about that.”

Among those who attended and asked questions other than Barron were Council Members Ydanis Rodriguez, Robert Holden, and Ben Kallos.

On the capital front, major renovations at several colleges, many of which consist of old and somewhat neglected buildings, are included in the mayor’s preliminary capital plan for fiscal years 2019-2023, including $5.9 million in city funding for a major renovation at Hostos Community College in the Bronx. Not included, but requested, is $50 million for a permanent home for Guttman Community College in Manhattan, CUNY’s newest institution.

The Council’s preliminary budget hearings will continue for the rest of March, analyzing the mayor’s preliminary budget proposal. The Council will then release its formal budget response and then the mayor will release his executive budget proposal, triggering additional Council hearings.

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by Ben Brachfeld, Gotham Gazette

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With Williams in Office, Will Public Advocate Get Budget Boost?


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Jumaane Williams (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


Jumaane Williams, the City Council member elected public advocate in a special election last month, has vowed a renewed push for increased funding and an independent budget to bolster the meager resources of the office he now occupies.

Over the course of the six-week long special election that Williams won, virtually all of the 17 candidates who were on the ballot argued that the public advocate’s office needs more funding. One of just three elected positions with citywide responsibilities, the public advocate’s office currently has a budget of $3.6 million for the year, giving it little leeway to pursue the grand promises that each candidate made, whether it involves investigations of city agencies or creating new deputy public advocate offices in the boroughs, as Williams himself has pledged.

“I haven’t met too many people that said the money they have is sufficient to do the work they have to do. So the short answer is, you can always use some additional funds,” Williams said when asked about the public advocate’s budget at his first news conference at his new office on Thursday afternoon. Williams was sworn in by the city clerk at a private ceremony on Wednesday and will be transitioning into the role over the next few weeks (results of the special election still need to be certified and Williams must resign from his City Council seat).

Renewed focus on the office’s budget thanks to the special election comes in the early stages of city budget season, with a new spending plan due by July 1, the start of the city’s fiscal year, and as a charter revision commission considers an overhaul of the city’s foundational laws. The commission’s work will include reevaluation of the role of the public advocate and consideration of independent budgeting for various offices.

Williams appears ready to simultaneously push for more funding for next fiscal year and independent budgeting for the long-term, something that the charter commission would have to propose and voters would have to approve in November, when Williams is expected to again be on the ballot to attempt to earn the rest of the current four-year term through 2021.

In a subsequent Thursday phone interview with Gotham Gazette, Williams said, “Two things that would make this office immediately strong are subpoena power and independent budgeting. As the watchdog-ombudsman, it would make sense that this office would have a budget that’s not subject to the whims of the government that we’re supposed to be an ombudsman over.”

Williams did concede that he doesn’t have a budget figure in mind and that he has yet to figure out “the most pragmatic and effective way to do that.” He added, “I do feel like people understand why it’s necessary.”

Currently, the Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan city-funded fiscal watchdog, is the only city government agency or entity with a budget pegged to another existing one rather than being allocated by the mayor or the mayor and the City Council through the annual city budget process. By law, IBO’s annual budget cannot be less than 12.5 percent of the annual funding for the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget. That precludes any mayor from slashing IBO’s budget at their whim.

The public advocate’s budget, on the other hand, is set by the mayor and City Council, which is what allowed former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to cut funding to the office when he was in power. Mayor Bill de Blasio, a former public advocate himself, restored that funding and has incrementally increased it each year. In turn, calls for independent budgeting also seemed to fade away and then-Public Advocate Letitia James, now the state Attorney General, did not take a position on it.

The mayor’s preliminary budget for the 2020 fiscal year beginning July 1 proposes increasing the budget again, to $3.8 million, up from $3.1 million in de Blasio’s first adopted budget in 2014. When he was public advocate, de Blasio led a push for independent budgeting for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates police officer misconduct, indicating that he’s open to the concept of separating funding for a government watchdog.

“We look forward to reviewing a proposal for an independent budget for the Public Advocate’s office,” said Raul Contreras, a de Blasio spokesperson, in an email. “It’s worth noting that this administration has significantly increased the Public Advocate’s budget by 66 percent since taking office.”

Even at the proposed $3.8 million for next fiscal year, the public advocate would be tasked with keeping watch over a city government de Blasio has said will spend roughly $92.2 billion during the same time period.

The circumstances of the special election had other elected officials also clamoring for greater resources for the city’s ombudsperson, including City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who served as acting public advocate while the seat was vacant for seven weeks.

“I think independent budgeting is key for this office so it’s not on the whims of whoever the City Council speaker is or whoever the mayor is and that it can be a truly independent watchdog,” Johnson told reporters as he walked Williams to his new office at 1 Centre Street last week. “I know that’s what Jumaane would do with whatever budget he has but it’s beyond one public advocate, it’s beyond one speaker of the Council. It’s really about checks and balances.”

The City Council has also called on the 2019 Charter Revision Commission to consider a charter amendment to give the public advocate the ability to submit a proposed budget into the mayor’s executive budget, the second iteration of the annual spending plan.

[Read: City Council Seeks Expanded Power, Sweeping Change in Recommendations to Charter Revision Commission]

In its report to the Charter commission, the Council noted that the mayor sets the public advocate’s and comptroller’s budgets though both are independently elected citywide officials. “This budgetary relationship can become more political than practical and may significantly hamper the ability of these elected officials to do their work — particularly if their priorities conflict with the Mayor’s priorities,” the report reads.

The comptroller’s budget is currently $107.5 million for this fiscal year.

The charter commission is currently holding hearings to solicit expert testimony on various focus areas, including on independent budgeting for entities such as the public advocate and whether to propose modifications to the public advocate’s powers or perhaps eliminate the office entirely.

At a January 31 hearing where the commission voted on those focus areas, Commissioner James Vacca, a former City Council member, did raise concerns about independent budgeting. “I think that you will have a lot of people knocking at your doors and they will be saying that they want to establish their own budgets, too, and I don’t know if that’s fiscally possible or responsible,” he cautioned.

Williams has promised that he’ll make the most of his limited resources. “As a Council member, I didn’t have nearly this kind of budget and I think I was able to be effective,” he said. “And now, in this position, I think I’m able to amplify [issues] even more...An independent budget just makes it that much more effective. So we’re going to continue to push but we’re going to get the job done either way.”

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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