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Police Misconduct Bill Set to Move Through City Council


jumaane williams pthny

Council Member Jumaane Williams (photo: @pthny)


After a lengthy legislative process, a bill regarding police misconduct is likely to move through the City Council this week, beginning with a Tuesday committee vote.

The legislation (Intro. 119), introduced in 2014 by City Council Member Jumaane Williams, a Brooklyn Democrat, would require the city’s Law Department to post online, and to notify the Comptroller, the NYPD, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and the Commission to Combat Police Corruption of, reports covering wide-ranging information on civil actions in state and federal court regarding police misconduct, and for the NYPD Inspector General to use this information to make recommendations regarding “disciplining, training, and monitoring of police officers.” The NYPD would also be required to “study determinations by judges that an officer’s testimony is not credible.”

The information required of the Law Department includes a comprehensive list of civil actions against the NYPD or individual police officers, the type of misconduct alleged in each instance, the names of the law firms representing the plaintiff and the defendant, whether or not the matter has been resolved, and whether the city paid out a settlement to the plaintiff.

“The theme of the bill is to see if we can recognize any patterns that are emerging,” Williams said in an interview with Gotham Gazette, “just in general or with particular officers, that intervention might be beneficial before something bad happens.”

Of the long legislative process for the measure, having been stuck in committee for over three years, Williams said that issues surrounding policing require sensitivity.

“There’s always issues of transparency and how much information is too much. Are we putting too much out there in a way that makes officers look bad? That’s usually what a lot of pushback is about,” Williams said. “And we always push back, ‘No, we’re trying to make policing and officers better.’”

Beyond the aim of increasing transparency about NYPD misconduct and having more data to inform decision-making, Williams also hopes that the bill itself could reduce police misconduct and “bad policing.” The NYPD has faced significant criticism for police misconduct that has led to deaths of civilians, excessive street stops (and frisks), hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements, and other negative outcomes. Officers involved in misconduct are often not held accountable to standards that many, like Williams, believe to be just.

Although the data in question is public, it is not aggregated into a report, and therefore has not been analyzed by the NYPD, City Hall, or watchdogs in order to draw conclusions for improving the department, both in terms of departmental and officer accountability, and the performance of NYPD programs and initiatives.

The legislation has been the subject of two hearings since its introduction: the first in May 2014, and the second in June 2016. Both times, it was laid over in committee without a vote. The New York City Bar Association and the Legal Aid Society have voiced support for the legislation, and its current iteration, Intro 119-D, has nine cosponsors in addition to Williams. When the bill was put on the calendar for a committee hearing this week, Gotham Gazette reached Williams for comment about the status of the bill and its apparent imminent passage.

Assuming it passes through the Committee on Oversight and Investigations, the bill will likely be voted through the full City Council on Thursday. Unlike many others, it may not be approved unanimously by the 51-seat Council that currently includes 47 Democrats, three Republicans, and vacancy.

Big settlements paid by the city often make waves. In January, a settlement was reached for the city to pay $75 million to those who were improperly issued summonses for minor offenses in order to fulfill alleged arrest quotas. The city was unable to prove probable cause in these issuances. The NYPD has consistently denied that it utilizes arrest quotas, though numerous former police officers have gone on the record to state that the department has indeed used quotas.

Smaller settlements, however, also drain the city’s finances and clog the court system. Further, a lack of transparency in terms of civil action and litigation against the department and individual officers can prevent the introduction of necessary reforms.

“Since individual damage claims are in some measure a reflection of the NYPD’s relationship to the community, the report could provide one measure of the effectiveness of NYPD’s management in achieving its goal of improving its relationship with communities across our City,” said William Gibney, director of the Legal Aid Society's Criminal Practice Special Litigation Unit, in 2014 testimony to the Council’s Committee on Oversight and Investigations. “It could help managers evaluate risk as to whether a new program or an existing practice, e.g., police vehicle pursuit, is working well or whether it is unnecessarily costing the City in terms of money paid in damages claims and relationships with the impacted communities. It could help determine whether certain precincts or certain officers need closer supervision or retraining.”

According to a report from the office of city Comptroller Scott Stringer, the city paid out $100.6 million in Fiscal Year 2016 related to tort litigation against police misconduct, about equal to the amount paid out for medical malpractice claims ($101.1 million). Civil rights claims made up $158 million in city settlements.

Over the past several years, the City Council and the NYPD have oftne disagreed over proposed legislation, though there have been numerous compromises reached, and the Council spearheaded the addition of what wound up being 1,300 officers to the force through a budget deal with Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Williams has been a noted critic of the de Blasio administration on police accountability, stating at a Thursday press conference at City Hall that the current administration was “worse than the Bloomberg administration” and that he had not decided on whether he would endorse de Blasio, a fellow Democrat, for reelection.

Williams told Gotham Gazette that policing reform and police accountability and transparency are two separate things, and that the de Blasio administration has had some significant victories in the realm of police reform, but that accountability and transparency were severely lacking.

“I think the NYPD has done more on reform than they get credit for,” he said. “And that’s because on police accountability and transparency, that’s just not the case. Just isn’t true.”

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by Ben Brachfeld, Gotham Gazette

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City Council Bail Fund Begins Operations


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Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito (photo: @NYCCouncil)


The New York City Council’s bail fund, a signature project of Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, has officially launched operations and is actively taking on cases in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

“We had a very soft rollout in June and July,” said Dave Long, executive director of The Liberty Fund, the official name of the fund, which provides bail to low-level offenders facing misdemeanor charges who cannot afford to post bail. The most common misdemeanor charges in Brooklyn, for instance, are for marijuana possession, trespassing, petit larceny, turnstile jumping, low-level drug possession, and driving with a suspended license, according to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, another charitable bail fund in the city.

The fund began operating in Manhattan on August 7 and in Brooklyn a week later.

Although the fund was announced by Mark-Viverito in her first State of the City address in February 2015, its launch has taken longer than expected, in part delayed by the state’s arduous bureaucratic procedure for approving charitable bail funds and their agents. The Liberty Fund currently has one full-time licensed bail agent and another part-time agent who works for the Doe Fund, the nonprofit that is overseeing its operations.

The fund is awaiting approval for nine other applications, including one for Long himself, which he expects will be approved in the coming weeks, allowing them to launch operations in the Bronx and Queens.

“This is one of the longest processes I’ve seen in all my years,” said Long, an attorney and 30-year veteran of city government, who was hired in March to run the bail fund. “To get someone licensed, it shouldn’t take so long.”

The bail fund is an important part of Mark-Viverito’s legacy and her lengthy criminal justice agenda, and is also key to the long-term plan to close the Rikers Island jail complex.

“No one should be shipped off to Rikers Island simply because they are too poor to post bail,” Mark-Viverito said, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “That’s why the City Council is proud to support the mission of the Liberty Fund as they conduct important work to level the playing field and reduce pre-trial incarceration rates.”

The speaker also touted other initiatives the Council has passed under her leadership, including making bail payments easier; passing the Criminal Justice Reform Act, which created civil penalties for certain low-level crimes; and establishing the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, which issued a comprehensive report in April.

Long and his associates have been busy for months, setting up borough offices, hiring employees, and meeting with court staff to make their presence known. “The court staff have been very receptive and very helpful,” he said. “I think we’re a welcome addition to the court process. We’ve done our best to blend in.”

Once fully operational, the fund aims to assist between 1,000 and 2,000 low-level offenders each year who cannot afford to pay bail, which can sometimes be as low as $250. Charitable bails funds, under state law, are only permitted to aid individuals facing misdemeanor charges with bail set below $2000. “We come into play when nobody else can pay bail,” Long said, although insisting that it is a last resort for people who may otherwise end up heading to Rikers Island. “This isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. We’ve said “no” to some cases too.”

The City Council has provided $1.4 million in operational funds for The Liberty Fund while an anonymous private foundation has promised $400,000 for the actual bail payments. That seed funding will help the fund operate for years, Long estimated. Currently, the account holds $20,000, which is a “revolving” figure since 85-90 percent of that funding would return to the account as clients make their appearances in court. Charitable bail funds, of which there are two others operating in the city -- the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund and the Bronx Freedom Fund -- have shown a very high rate of return in terms of clients who make their court appearances.

Beyond keeping clients out of jail, the fund will also provide “wraparound services,” Long said. His staff is comprised of people with experience in court operations and case management, and even a licensed social worker. Together, they create a voluntary social services plan for clients that includes housing, employment, substance abuse and mental health services. “There’s two sides to the coin here,” Long said. “We hope to never have this person return to court again, except for scheduled court appearances.”

“We spent a lot of time preparing for this so we can do it right,” he said.

For certain criminal justice reform advocates, the bail fund is something of a band-aid absent substantive systemic reform. “The city is trying to mitigate a situation that in a just world would not exist,” said Nick Malinowski, civil rights campaigns director at VOCAL-NY, in an email. “Prosecutors and judges should not be permitted to ask for or set bail in amounts that people cannot afford.”

Malinowski wants to see measures for more accountability for the NYPD, district attorneys, and judges, but the idea of the elimination of cash bail for low-level offenders is being discussed by state legislators. In the meantime, the Liberty Fund is seeking to keep more people from entering city jails, missing work, school, and family, and avoiding the snowballing effect that often occurs from even a short jail stay.

Rachel Foran, managing director of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, echoed Malinowski’s comments about wanting to see more criminal justice reform from the city. “We see the work of community-funded bail funds like us and others across the state and country as an important, but temporary intervention to prevent the unjust and unnecessary pretrial jailing of people caged purely for the inability to afford bail,” she also said. “We ultimately want to see the elimination of the cash bail system entirely.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Max & Murphy Podcast: Azi Paybarah


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Ben Max, left, of Gotham Gazette, and Jarrett Murphy, right, of City Limits


August 17, 2017: Azi Paybarah, senior reporter, Politico New York

Azi PaybarahAzi Paybarah has been a mainstay of New York political media for more than a decade. His @Azi twitter feed is non-stop and well-known; he is co-author of the popular Playbook morning newsletter for Politico New York; his reporting on politics, the NYPD, and criminal justice is insightful, newsy, and sharp. Our Ben Max spoke with Azi at length as he is on the verge of taking a leave of absence from Politico New York because he is one of The University of Michigan's Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellows for the 2017-18 school year. His focus for the fellowship is "Reaching beyond natural audiences: rebuilding media credibility through technology."

Azi and Ben spoke about Azi's career in New York political reporting, which has included his helping usher in the blogging era, launching Capital New York, which was then purchased by Politico, and much more.

Listen to the full conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @Azi. You can hear the conversation through the embedded audio below or download it wherever you get your podcasts.

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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

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