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Stringer Takes Veiled Shot at Johnson: Being Mayor 'Not About Dancing Around'


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Scott Stringer, center, with Corey Johnson, left (photo: @NYCComptroller)
(photo below: John McCarten/City Council)


With just over a year until the 2021 Democratic primary that will likely decide who becomes New York City’s next mayor, one of the leading contenders, Comptroller Scott Stringer, in a recent interview took an unmistakable jab at another, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, while previewing his argument that he is best suited for the job.

Stringer has had his eye on the mayoralty for years and is finally making his run, with Johnson, who recently emerged at the top tier of city politics, seen as an especially challenging competitor given the two white Manhattan liberals are no doubt seeking many of the same voters.

After launching a brief mayoral run in 2013, eyeing a challenge to Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017, winning two citywide elections, and more than six years as a citywide official, Stringer has honed his campaign pitch. He made it evident again in a recent interview on Arena Talks, a podcast hosted by Ravi Gupta, co-founder and managing partner of Arena, a national progressive organization that assists and trains left-leaning Democratic candidates, campaign operatives, and government aides, while also take a shot at Johnson.

When Gupta asked Stringer what he would tell voters who might have lost faith in the progressive vision that de Blasio offered for years but in many ways failed to provide, Stringer offered some praise for the mayor’s accomplishments and his “heartfelt” focus on income inequality, while also offering a typically harsh critique. But he also had veiled criticism for Johnson, whom Stringer has mostly not publicly attacked as the two, among others, are on their collision course.

“But we now have to, I think, have a progressive administration that knows how to govern, especially in these very difficult times. We need a progressive who has real on-the-job experience because you can't leave it to chance. This is not about speechifying, I don’t know, dancing around,” Stringer said, with apparent reference to Johnson’s penchant for public dancing, which has often garnered attention at parades across the city.

Stringer continued, “This is about thinking strategically about the economy we want for younger people, [we] want to make sure that we can safely open our schools and our colleges. We have to make sure that the people who are in the gig economy and the frontline workers, in particular the doctors and the nurses, the people who are today's heroes, we need to get them the resources they need. I mean I love parades, I love ticker-tape parades but man, Ravi, hook up the people who every day go to work not knowing that they're going to ever see their child again.”

Stringer’s comments may seem anodyne but, for those familiar with the City Council speaker, it was a thinly-veiled back-handed critique. Johnson, the first openly gay and openly HIV-positive speaker of the Council, is known to some for his outgoing, affable personality, and his dance moves, which he has shown off at several parades, including, for example, the Brooklyn Pride Parade of the last two years, where's he's led a Council pack along 5th Avenue, as he has at other parades in other parts of the city since being elected speaker by his Council colleagues. Some of those dance moves have become sensations on social media, where Johnson has also repeatedly posted himself lip-syncing to pop music and dancing in other venues. At a September news conference when he released a comprehensive plan to combat homelessness, Johnson spoke of his mother, who works with the homeless in his home state of Massachusetts, and how she does a happy dance when she finds a home for one of her clients. Johnson then danced with a reporter.

Corey Johnson dancing parade

Stringer’s ticker-tape comment was a more obvious dig at de Blasio, whose early promise to hold one for first responders and health care workers after the pandemic has passed prompted widespread criticism and ridicule. “I want to guarantee you one thing, that when that day comes that I can restart the vibrant beautiful life of this city again, the first thing we will do is have a ticker-tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes for our health care workers and our first responders,” de Blasio said at an April 21 media briefing.

Stringer did go on to say in the Arena interview that he was “not thinking about” the mayoral race. A campaign spokesperson said the same when Gotham Gazette asked whether Stringer’s “dancing around” comment was meant for Johnson. “There are almost 200,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in New York City. We've lost 15,000 of our fellow New Yorkers. The Comptroller is singularly focused on providing oversight and leadership to help New Yorkers get through this crisis. Everything else is just noise,” said Jennifer Galvin, a spokesperson for Stringer’s campaign, in an email.

Jennifer Fermino, a spokesperson for Johnson’s campaign, said, “The Speaker is focused on the City Council and providing relief to tenants, small businesses, and essential workers during this crisis.”

A Democratic consultant who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely and who is not involved in any 2021 campaigns at this time said there was no predicting how the 2021 race will shape up after the pandemic, but voters will definitely yearn for “competent, steady leadership.”

“The case that Stringer can make to people is that he has worked his way through the rungs of government, that as the comptroller he understands the fiscal side of the city perhaps better than anyone else, and he's been a legislator and he's been a borough president. So he's got a good grasp of how the different pieces of this all fit,” the consultant said. “Clearly, he's making the case that whoever the next mayor is, they need to be someone who has the experience at all these levels of government, and can corral the city's bureaucracy while at the same time projecting a steady hand.”

The consultant said Stringer was making a contrast with Johnson, “who has made a brand of cheerleading for New York, of being an unapologetic New York ‘nationalist,’ someone who wears New York on his sleeve. And there’s definitely a need for that.”

The consultant said the goodwill Johnson has experienced may evaporate at some point. “Corey has had a pretty good run of noncritical press for a long time now and as the campaign eventually heats up, that's gonna go away,” the consultant said.

Though the coronavirus has upended New York City politics, subsuming focus on future elections, the June 2021 primary nonetheless looms large over the city. Every seat in municipal government will be on the ballot, and the mayor, comptroller, four borough presidents, and dozens of City Council members face term limits disallowing them to run again and provoking additional competition. In a heavily Democratic city, the winner of that primary is all but assured to win the general election for almost every seat.

Stringer abandoned a short-lived bid for the mayoralty in the 2013 election that saw de Blasio win the first of two terms as Mayor. Stringer instead successfully ran for comptroller, winning reelection in 2017.

Before that reelection run, Stringer eyed a run for mayor in 2017, when de Blasio faced dual ethics investigations by federal and state prosecutors over his fundraising activities and relationships with donors. But Stringer again demurred when the investigations closed and no charges were filed.

Now Stringer finds himself in the top tier of candidates seeking to become the city’s chief executive, alongside Johnson and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, another two-term Democrat. All three, along with de Blasio, are term-limited from running again for their current seats. Several other candidates are also in the running or exploring a mayoral run, including Loree Sutton, a retired Army Brigadier General and former commissioner of the city’s Department of Veterans’ Services; Dianne Morales, a nonprofit executive in the Bronx; and Shaun Donovan, a former high-level aide to President Barack Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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First Citywide Participatory Budgeting Program on Chopping Block Because of Coronavirus


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Participatory budgeting was due for a big increase (photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)


A new citywide participatory budgeting program, whereby New Yorkers directly decide how to spend city budget money, was meant to be in place by July 1 but may end up being severely limited as the city suffers from the coronavirus pandemic and its multifaceted fallout. 

Creating the participatory budgeting program was one of the core duties for the New York City Civic Engagement Commission, which was established in the city Charter through a ballot referendum in 2018 that was overwhelmingly supported by voters.

The new program would be based on the New York City Council’s annual participatory budgeting cycle, wherein participating Council members voluntarily decide to allocate at least $1 million in capital funding to a process allowing their constituents to suggest and vote on projects to receive that funding. Capital funds are used for public infrastructure projects like improvements to parks, libraries, and schools. Out of 51 Council Members, 32 of them implemented the program in their districts last year. 

The Civic Engagement Commission was meant to take participatory budgeting citywide. It created an advisory committee, which, along with several advocacy groups, called on the mayor in February to set aside a $500 million budget for the new program. His preliminary budget released in January contained no funds for it, and neither did his executive budget proposal that came out last month. In between, of course, the city became home to the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

It’s unlikely that the new participatory budgeting program will receive anything close to what advocates had wanted. The coronavirus has decimated the economy and the city faces a $7.4 billion tax revenue loss by the end of the 2021 fiscal year. To balance the budget, the mayor already decreased planned spending by $6 billion and pulled $4 billion out of reserves in crafting his $89 billion executive budget, which is now the subject of City Council hearings as the mayor and Council head toward the July 1 deadline for a new city budget.

In an April 7 meeting of the Civic Engagement Commission, even before the executive budget was released, commission chair and executive director Dr. Sarah Sayeed conceded that the participatory budgeting program’s budget may be meager. 

“As everyone probably will understand, the city is really prioritizing needs that relate directly to the public health emergency right now,” she said. “Particularly for the executive budget. I think given all the uncertainty it's going to be tough to really make a solid decision on participatory budgeting until this health crisis stabilizes.” 

There’s no telling, however, whether the pandemic will abate before the end of June. Nonetheless, the Civic Engagement Commission has continued to meet with the participatory budgeting advisory committee and is in talks with the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, Sayeed said. “We're going to keep pressing on that front. However we're recommending, given all the uncertainty, we're looking to do a scaled-back pilot program in the first year and we are working with the advisory committee on program design,” she said. 

Council Member Brad Lander, a Brooklyn Democrat who first proposed the idea of a civic engagement commission in legislation before de Blasio created a charter revision commission that put it on the ballot, proposed an alternative program that can employ expense and operational funds, at relatively low cost, instead of capital funds. “What I would love to see is a COVID response and recovery-focused pilot,” Lander said in a phone interview. 

In his district, he has overseen a participatory program that distributes between $1-1.5 million in capital funds and a smaller pot of $50,000 in expense funds that has yielded “extraordinarily creative ideas,” he said, such as funding a sewing circle for domestic violence survivors, a study of the effects of climate change on bats in Prospect Park, and a menstrual equity and outreach program proposed by a middle school student. 

“What it seems to me would make great sense is, alongside the Council's capital [participatory budgeting] program...let’s do a program that gives New Yorkers an opportunity to participate in the COVID recovery by coming up with some creative community-sourced ideas, developing them, and then getting to vote on some of them,” Lander said. 

It would also give some degree of control back to New Yorkers at a time when so much of their lives, including their ability to vote in upcoming elections, has been disrupted by the pandemic. “I think amongst many other problems that we have right now, disengagement from democratic decision-making is definitely one of them,” Lander said.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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De Blasio, NYPD Remain Vague About Social Distancing Protocols Amid Backlash Over Racial Disparities in Enforcement


nypd social distancing nypdnews

Police officers have been charged with social distancing enforcement (photo: NYPD)


Mayor Bill de Blasio has made the New York City Police Department the agency primarily responsible for ensuring social distancing in public amid the coronavirus outbreak, and while police data shows enforcement is taking place primarily in black and Hispanic communities, the city has not disclosed any official enforcement policies or guidance given to officers.

In recent weeks, de Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea have made vague references to "protocols," "instructions," and "the law," while offering explanations of what has come to look like a largely discretionary enforcement model. The mayor has steadfastly defended the NYPD's involvement in social distancing. But it appears City Hall is taking a closer look at police procedures for the first time nearly two months after enforcement began and only after the city released data showing major racial disparities.

"Last night was the first time I saw it and I immediately responded," he said at a press briefing on May 8, in reference to data reported in multiple news outlets the night before and a tweet from the mayor’s account that said, “Saving lives in this pandemic is job one. The NYPD uses summonses and arrests to do it. Most people practice social distancing, with only hundreds of summonses issued over 6 weeks. But the disparity in the numbers does NOT reflect our values. We HAVE TO do better and we WILL."

De Blasio said he had not sought out the enforcement data over the course of the prior weeks “because for weeks and weeks we were focused on saving lives.”

“[W]e don't accept disparity,” de Blasio said, repeatedly stressing that the numbers showed “a huge amount of restraint by the NYPD.”

“When we see disparity, we’re going to address it,” he added.

"We're going to go back, clarify the protocols, more training for officers, more work with supervisors to make sure that they're attentive to these issues. I want to see every community treated fairly, but I want a resolute approach where it's really clear we got to follow these rules," de Blasio said, still several hours before the NYPD released the first batch of social distancing enforcement data to media outlets.

The details of that “resolute approach” to enforcing social distancing are almost entirely unknown. Neither the mayor's office nor the NYPD provided Gotham Gazette with any policies or protocols, while the mayor has repeatedly called the need to enforce social distancing unprecedented and the enforcement itself evolving.

The mayor has mostly spoken in general terms, repeatedly saying that “large gatherings” would not be tolerated and that New Yorkers should follow social distancing guidelines of keeping six feet of space from anyone not from the same household. “We're not going to tolerate even small groups of people not practicing social distancing,” de Blasio said May 3.

Of the 374 summonses police issued for social distancing violations between March 16 and May 5, four out of five have been to black or Hispanic people, according to data released May 8. Several police reform advocates and elected officials, as well as the largest police officer union, have said the police should not be involved in social distancing, suggesting it be reinforced through civic engagement not punishment. De Blasio and Shea have said the NYPD has had 1 million "contacts with the public in our awareness and educational visits across the five boroughs,” but vowed to address the "problem" revealed by the data.

De Blasio has said that large gatherings -- described at times by the mayor as groups with “more than fifty people,” "a few dozen," and "a purposeful group of large numbers" -- would immediately trigger summonses, with arrests for those who resist. But he has indicated that smaller groups would receive a reminder to separate before ticketing. He said people will also be warned to put on face coverings and officers will make efforts to provide them if needed, but disobeying would lead to ticketing or arrest.

But beyond some of the mayor’s comments at press briefings, the only policies publicly available are a limited set of mayoral orders, tracing gubernatorial ones, that ban non-essential gatherings or meetings and require face covering, with few explicit requirements on individual members of the public.

In the days leading up to the initial data release, after a series of violent arrests of people of color were caught on video in the Lower East Side and East New York, de Blasio had to answer questions about how one person can end up with a ticket or arrested and another with a warning and a mask.

"I think the big break line is...the difference between individuals who just need to be reminded to, you know, get that six feet and stick to it, versus when people have made the decision to come together in groups, that's a pretty affirmative decision at this moment in the pandemic," he said on April 30.

Facing intense criticism from many elected officials and others -- including longtime friend and ally Patrick Gaspard, who called the policing "racist" -- de Blasio said he would take a suggestions from, among others, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to include non-NYPD city employees and possibly non-governmental community leaders in social distancing monitoring and enforcement.

According to a New York Times report, one of the people arrested in the East New York incident was charged with resisting arrest.

It is unclear how often social distancing enforcement leads to resisting arrest charges or how this scenario plays into the disparities reflected in the summons data. On Tuesday, the police department released new figures showing officers made 125 "COVID-19 related arrests," of which 90 percent were of black and Hispanic people. A statement from the department notes these are not necessarily social distancing arrests: "The circumstances around the arrests included for example, hate crimes, domestic violence incidents, weapons possession, altercations caused by jumping a line while waiting to enter a supermarket, felony warrants as well as other violent felonies, and resisting arrest."

The NYPD did not respond to a request for a breakdown of the arrest charges. District attorneys in every borough but Staten Island have said they are declining to prosecute social distancing cases when they do not involve other safety threats, Gothamist reported Monday.

But the lack of clarity around what police have and have not been instructed to do to enforce the emergency orders remains.

Policing Protocols
"Each situation is looked at in degree,” de Blasio said during a May 3 press briefing. “If someone doesn't have a face covering, we're going to offer them a face covering. Someone says, ‘I refuse to have [to] put on a face covering,’ they have a problem and they're asking for enforcement.”

But advocates are concerned that the level of discretion given to officers has enabled biased and, in some cases, brutal policing.

"If officers are going to be the ones to enforce social distancing they should have very clear guidelines to follow," said Michael Sisitzky, lead policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, in an interview. "But the larger point is that this should not be something where we're leaning on police officers to do this type of enforcement because police officers are not public health officials."

"Our Legal [Bureau] is guiding us on what we can and cannot do," police spokesperson Sgt. Mary Frances O'Donnell told Gotham Gazette. "We do have a policy. I'm not going to be releasing that right now."

The mayor's office did not respond to multiple requests for information about any guidelines or directives issued to the police department related to social distancing enforcement.

"It's just basically, the mayor made this executive order stating you are going to enforce X, Y, and Z and that's basically all it is. The mayor's executive order, this is the code, and this is when you can use it," O'Donnell said, referring to the administrative code that gives the police the authority to enforce mayoral directives during a state of emergency.

Limits and Latitude in Emergency Orders
The “X, Y, and Z” are murky, and the details of how and whether top brass at City Hall or One Police Plaza have instructed officers on "when you can use it" are unknown.

Since the state of emergency issued on March 12, de Blasio's executive orders have made some references to prohibitions on "large gatherings" -- the most explicit reference being a March 15 order stating: "under no circumstances shall there be more than fifty people gathered" -- but largely defer to orders from Governor Andrew Cuomo on matters of individual social distancing in public places.

On March 23, Cuomo signed an order prohibiting "non-essential gatherings of individuals of any size for any reason," and two days later de Blasio signed an order doing the same.

It was not until April 15 that Cuomo signed an order explicitly requiring New Yorkers to wear face coverings "in a public place and unable to maintain, or when not maintaining, social distance." Another order the next day placed the same mandate on people in public transit and for-hire vehicles.

These are the only two orders related to social distancing on the state's COVID-19 information webpage, entitled "What You Need To Know." Neither defines social distance.

Cuomo has repeatedly said it is up to localities to enforce the measures.

A part of city law known as Administrative Code, section 3-108 gives police officers the power to treat violations of emergency measures as class B misdemeanors "punishable by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars, or by imprisonment for not more than three months, or both."

On April 7, Cuomo signed another order raising the maximum fine for an individual who "is failing to abide by social distancing restrictions in effect in any place which is not their home" from $500 to $1,000.

Large Gatherings
One question is what size gathering triggers automatic summonses and what leads to a warning.

"The first focus is no large gatherings. But gatherings in general are unacceptable," de Blasio said at an April 30 briefing in response to questions about the threshold for getting a warning versus a fine. "If you're talking a hundred [people] or above, there's just nothing to discuss."

"The gatherings are the most dangerous of all sizes. And then just enforcing regular, clear social distancing," he said.

After a funeral in Williamsburg drew crowds of hundreds of Hasidic mourners at the end of April, de Blasio said the police would pursue summonses for large gatherings "aggressively."

According to police data, when officers issued summonses to individuals involved in "social gathering incidents" the average number of summonses issued per gathering was roughly 10.

"We train our officers more than ever now and we treat them as professionals and they are lifesaving professionals. That's what they do. And they use their judgment. But in this instance they have to feel empowered that if their instructions are not being followed, summonses has to be the go-to now. And so we will use that aggressively," the mayor said on WNYC on May 1.

"I will call Commissioner Shea today to make sure he sends out yet another formal instruction to the men and women of the NYPD that they can use their discretion," he said in the same interview about crowds in parks. The de Blasio administration did not respond to requests for written instructions given to the police.

'Credible Messengers'
Many elected officials, reform advocates, and even the largest police union want to see the police department withdrawn from social distancing enforcement.

The administration "needs to employ local leaders such as clergy, and credible messengers with deep ties to their neighborhoods, with a focus on engagement and education, but not enforcement," wrote Public Advocate Williams in a statement Sunday. "It needs to amplify that personal engagement by broadcasting key public health messages, while formalizing a more robust plan for utilizing specific city agencies."

At the end of April, the city announced 1,000 civilians with "enforcement powers" from city agencies like the Parks, Sanitation, and Fire Departments, among others. On Sunday, the mayor said the city was expanding that count to 2,300 by the end of the week.

"This situation is untenable: the NYPD needs to get cops out of the social distancing enforcement business altogether," wrote Police Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch in a statement on May 4. "The cowards who run this city have given us nothing but vague guidelines and mixed messages, leaving the cops on the street corners to fend for ourselves."

Sisitzky from NYCLU said: "The communities that have experienced the worst of police abuse are the same communities that are most heavily impacted by the coronavirus. So to the extent that the police are responding to the coronavirus in those communities, they need to have better rules and guidelines in place.

"What's been really shocking and disturbing in a lot of the videos that have come out is seeing officers without masks or wearing masks incorrectly getting way too close to people, even if they are not actually carrying out enforcement, pushing back people who are filming and getting up in people's faces, not wearing masks," he said. "So it shouldn't be too much to ask for the NYPD to follow the rules that they are purporting to be enforcing."

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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