Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

Opinion

Two Essential Reforms to the Manhattan DA’s Office to Better Protect Victims


dom vio walk

The 16th Annual Gladys Ricard and Victims of Domestic Violence Memorial Walk/Brides' March (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is in need of reform, but practicality and feasibility must be considered first and foremost when we look to implement changes that can realistically make a difference in its effectiveness in serving New Yorkers. Make no mistake though, internal and pragmatic changes can make those differences significant for many people who experience what are often traumatic instances of direct contact with our criminal justice system.

The debate over reform of our criminal justice system is a long overdo and important one, but in our ardent and compassionate efforts to see justice for those unfairly or arcanely prosecuted and detained, we seem to have forgotten the most important people in the criminal justice equation: victims.  

Two major reforms that I am proposing in my campaign for Manhattan District Attorney are establishing a Sex Crimes and Domestic Violence Bureau at the office and strengthening its investigatory capacity, both of which will go far in ensuring the rights of victims do not become marginalized in the future.

Establishing a Sex Crimes and Domestic Violence Bureau
For too long, sex crime and domestic violence victims have suffered at the hands of their assailants in ways that persist psychologically well beyond the instances of the crimes committed against them. This is a result of the district attorney office neglecting to offer the full support and resources victims need and deserve. 

Victims require additional resources because these crimes are often especially complicated and cannot be treated like normal street crimes. A Sex Crimes and Domestic Violence Bureau will be staffed with assistant district attorneys and social workers who work exclusively on sex crimes and domestic violence cases.

The first step is to educate victims on what their rights are, how the legal system works, as well as the ins and outs of what occurs during the pendency of a criminal case. This information is sometimes lost in the procedural shuffle and not fully understood.  

The next step is to engage head-on the overwhelming consequences that can haunt victims of these crimes, which can often spur emotional, psychological, and physical ramifications. For victims, there are logistical problems of how to maintain housing, the education of their children, and medical care (to name a few) that need attention as well. With a centralized bureau, we will better handle the criminal matter, while at the same time helping the victim begin to regain a sense of normalcy.    

The bureau will allow staff investigators and social workers to address the special needs of sex crime and domestic abuse victims and provide support, which includes counseling, support groups, physical protection, and more. This will provide them the social and mental resources necessary to overcome their traumatic and often unique situations. 

The bureau will also look at mediation and restorative justice to help assist victims in obtaining closure on their road to recovery. This goes beyond just educating victims on how the system works. It also includes listening to their feelings on what justice means to them in each case.  

Additionally, we will staff the newly formed bureau with the right number of social workers to work with victims who feel intimidated or traumatized as potential witnesses or providers of essential evidence in a criminal trial.

Providing these resources will not only help known victims, but further institute a culture that will encourage other victims to come forward without fear of retribution or lack of protection or services. This will comprehensively restore confidence in the justice system so that victims feel supported enough to come forward and allow prosecutors to investigate crimes and bring about justice. 

Strengthening the Office’s Investigatory Capacity
As a former team member of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s Investigation Division, I worked for two years on complex white-collar cases locally, nationally, and internationally. 

New Yorkers are often dismayed by the recurring sensationalization of street crimes through outrageous headlines and fear-mongering in newspapers and on television. While these crimes are unquestionably serious, the inordinate amount of attention we pay them works to downplay in our collective consciousness the often far-reaching and detrimental effects of white-collar crime.

Wealth and power can often provide cover for crimes motivated by greed, while enabling ever more inventive criminal opportunities that skirt accountability. In such uncertain times, our city must be on the cutting edge of fighting white-collar crime, especially with the proliferation of cybercrime, hacking, identity theft, and the new crimes of the 21st century.  

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has lost its focus on its investigatory capacity. We must mobilize its existing powers to pursue with teeth white-collar crimes that impact our economy and directly impact hardworking New Yorkers. 

In the financial capital of the world we need to consider with more gravity malfeasance that not only hurts our financial institutions, but can cripple our economy and devastate hardworking taxpayers, leaving a lasting effect on communities and families. It is essential that we strictly prosecute perpetrators of everything from fraud, embezzlement, and bribery to illegal third party transfers and deed theft. 

This requires establishing in the office a culture of fairness that begins with re-instituting its intake bureau, which once allowed everyday Manhattanites to bring their complaints directly to investigators. Unlike street crime, white-collar crime often does not reveal itself to us inherently, and the NYPD is not equipped to tackle the problem in any practical, legal or functional way.

When we prioritize and strengthen the investigatory capacity and powers of the office to uncover economic injustice, we ensure investigators utilize the full range of resources and tools provided to them and prosecutors are able to compile the necessary evidence required for the convictions they seek. 

The District Attorney’s Office has the responsibility to prioritize all of the investigatory resources it has available to ensure our criminal justice system works for everyone, because white-collar crimes make victims of all of us.  

***
Liz Crotty is a candidate for New York County (Manhattan) District Attorney. On Twitter @LizCrotty2021.

***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Surveillance and the City: Online Bar Exam, Remote Learning Fuel In-Home Surveillance


media avail holds

Inside the mayor's digital briefing (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


Standardized testing has never been fun for students, but in the age of COVID-19, it’s positively nightmarish. As the pandemic forces students and teachers around the globe to stay home, every part of education has suffered, but test administration has completely collapsed. Recently, despite public outcry, more than 10,000 law school graduates sat for the bar exam, putting their careers and livelihoods in the balance. The bar exam used software that was and remains shoddy, invasive, and likely biased. 

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) testing was growing quickly in the United States even prior to COVID-19, and so were the errors. As of 2019, at least 21 states used natural language processing to grade student essays. The resulting marks certainly were artificial, but they were far from “intelligent.” Some students found themselves inexplicably moved from the honor roll to academic probation. Meanwhile, when other students realized that they were being judged by simplistic algorithms, they submitted strings of buzzword-laden nonsense and received perfect grades. 

In contrast, colleges and universities mainly relied on A.I to hunt down plagiarism prior to the pandemic, hiring third-party student surveillance platforms to look for copied language. But in the first weeks of the shutdown, newly-online institutions invested heavily in student surveillance, including behavior tracking, restrictive software, and unproven forms of A.I.. As of April, a majority of colleges and universities used student surveillance services, with nearly a quarter planning on doing so in the future, according to a survey by Educase.

Many K-12 schools are now following suit. Human proctors are being replaced in some cases with spyware that tracks test-takers, their homes, and even their loved ones. In giving test officials unprecedented access to students’ lives—both their digital devices and their physical spaces—testing officials are making students pay for their degrees with their privacy.

Remote student surveillance broadly fits into three categories. First, spyware monitors a student’s computer, identifying any other applications in use. This spyware can include a log of every keystroke and mouse click a student makes, as well as looking at a student’s existing software. Second, many schools use a proprietary “lockdown browser” that provides heavily restricted internet access. Third, and most disturbing, some educators use a student’s own webcam to conduct persistent video and audio surveillance. These recordings not only capture intimate confines of a student’s home, but they are frequently reviewed by biased computer vision software for signs of cheating.

The trend is sadly not confined to educational programs. Aspiring attorneys in New York provided a terrifying test case and a cautionary tale on how this same technology can be misused as part of government licensing exams. The New York State Board of Law Examiners used a suite of products from ExamSoft, for its first online bar exam. First, students were forced to verify their identity using ExamID, a proprietary facial recognition tool. After, they had to run ExamMonitor, deeply invasive software that records test-takers through their own camera and microphone, purporting to use artificial intelligence to detect “suspicious behavior.” 

The bar’s use of facial recognition is disturbing and must not be repeated. The technology is biased, error prone, and antithetical to the values that the legal profession claims to uphold. In some cases, employers have found that facial recognition simply would not recognize Black and transgender applicants. But facial recognition is not unique—every form of artificial intelligence is undermined by biases.

As seen with the United Kingdom’s A-levels fiasco, A.I. is shaped by countless human decisions, replicating and frequently augmenting the biases of the programmers who design the model and select its training data.

ExamSoft has released minimal information on its facial recognition and other artificial intelligence models, not even its accuracy and error rates. Examinees and members of the public have no way to evaluate the reliability of such a testing scheme or how it reflects on test-takers’ fitness to practice law.

Even without A.I., recording footage of examinees’ homes is deeply invasive, prying into their most intimate spheres of life. The risks are far from theoretical. For example, after the American Board of Surgery’s General Surgery Qualifying Exam, proctors reportedly contacted examinees after the exam on social media.

Additionally, ExamSoft’s privacy policy states that it may share data with law enforcement, transforming the bar exam into a warrantless wiretap of test-takers’ homes. It is disturbing and deeply ironic that a cohort of lawyers have been tested on the protections against government searches at the same moment they were forced to use software that eviscerates those rights.

The bar exam fiasco is a cautionary tale of what is to come. It is essential that future exams of this kind provide similar pathways such as the requested “diploma privilege,” instead of subjecting law school graduates to unwarranted, unethical, and unnecessary forms of surveillance. Such measures can mitigate fallouts from comparable testing calamities, but will be little comfort for the millions of other students still facing the threat of online testing and A.I. surveillance. 

***
Albert Fox Cahn is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) at the Urban Justice Center and a fellow at the Engelberg Center for Innovation Law & Policy at N.Y.U. School of Law. He writes the monthly Surveillance and the City column at Gotham Gazette and is on Twitter @FoxCahn.

Alice Beck holds master’s degrees in International Law and International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The NYPD is Undermining Our Ability to Hold Them Accountable. The Mayor Must Act


pol com shea

NYPD Commissioner Shea, Mayor de Blasio, other police officials (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


As an international non-governmental organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports on human rights abuses in every part of the world. Recently, its work brought it to New York City and more specifically, the Bronx. In a newly released report, HRW documented rampant police violence during a summer protest against police brutality, revealing that the NYPD’s actions violated international human rights law.

On June 4, after the city’s misguided and short-lived curfew went into effect, the New York City Police Department executed a planned assault on peaceful protestors. Using a tactic known as ‘kettling,’ officers trapped, rounded up, and arrested hundreds – with no warning. Among them: bystanders, medics, and legal observers.

The NYPD’s conduct that night – which included firing pepper spray and beating protestors with and without batons – resulted in the injuries of at least 61 people and violated international human rights law.

Equally as troubling was the NYPD’s targeting of legal observers, who are neutral, third-party spectators and do not partake in protest. First established in 1968, National Lawyers Guild Legal Observers have monitored New York City protests for decades with an important job: ensuring people are able to exercise their first amendment rights without interference from law enforcement.

While their presence at public demonstrations, rallies, and marches often serves as a deterrent to police violence, when that fails, legal observers record notes, photos, and videos to document police misconduct and potential civil rights violations. At times, these reports lay the groundwork for legal action.

The NYPD’s own Patrol Guide lays out protections for the work of legal observers: “individuals have a right to lawfully observe and/or record police activity including, but not limited to detentions, searches, arrests, or uses of force.”

The manual further states: “All members of the service will extend every courtesy and cooperation to observers. Observers shall be permitted to remain in any area, or observe any police activity, subject only to restrictions necessitated by personal safety factors, as determined by the incident commander.”

As essential workers, legal observers were exempt from the city’s curfew. My office reached out to Mayor de Blasio’s staff to confirm essential status for people providing jail, legal, and medical services to protestors. The mayor’s staff confirmed this on two separate occasions.

In addition to donning neon green hats clearly labeled “National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer,” LOs also carried documentation of exemption that night. They described an entirely peaceful protest until the NYPD got involved.

Yet, none of those things stopped the NYPD from crying “illegal counter-surveillance,” seizing privileged notes, using excessive force, and detaining at least 12 legal observers during the Mott Haven protest.

Not only did many officers fail to wear face masks, many also covered their badge numbers to prevent identification. Legal observers described being marshalled together and prevented from doing their job.

It is clear that the NYPD acted to prevent legal observers from bearing witness to police actions that night. This is in line with the attacks on legal observers happening across the country. During Black Lives Matter protests in Buffalo, Portland, Detroit, Cleveland, Sacramento, and Atlanta legal observers have reported being beaten, detained, and shot with rubber bullets.

Like a free press, legal observers are critical in ensuring our police department and government answer to the people. It should worry us immensely that the NYPD acted to undermine the watchdog role of legal observers. Open season on legal observers and journalists erodes our ability to hold the NYPD and other police departments accountable.

Despite the NYPD’s efforts to cover its tracks, as many as 100 lawsuits in an aggregate amount of hundreds of millions of dollars could be filed against the city. Forcing the burden onto the taxpayers, during a time of financial crisis no less, does not resemble anything close to accountability.

The very act of detaining legal observers demonstrates the brazen actions of a police department gone rogue. Unafraid of consequences and growing emboldened by the day, the NYPD does not expect to be disciplined.

This should come as little surprise considering the culture of impunity Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner Shea have enabled. While the appetite for police reform and calls to defund the police grow, the NYPD is working to strip New Yorkers of yet another tool for accountability.

Under the leadership of Mayor de Blasio, who has been deferential to Police Commissioner Shea, the NYPD has descended into lawlessness. Instead of having meaningful conversations about demilitarizing and divesting from the police department and investing in communities, we are once again at odds with a police department that routinely tramples on the rights of New Yorkers.

The Human Rights Watch report highlighted systemic and indisputable police abuse in the Bronx. Fortunately, it didn’t leave us empty-handed, suggesting various structural reforms like disciplinary action against the Police Commissioner, an NYPD hiring freeze, and budget transparency. Mr. Mayor, it’s not enough to condemn the NYPD’s attack on our constitutional rights that night – what are you going to do about it?

New Yorkers demand accountability.

***
Dan Quart represents parts of Manhattan's East Side in the New York State Assembly. He is a candidate for Manhattan District Attorney. On Twitter @AMDanQuart.

***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This column has been corrected to note that up to 100 lawsuits could be filed, not have been filed as originally stated.



Print Friendly and PDF

Editor's Choice


Gotham Gazette: New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
Gotham Gazette: 
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
Gotham Gazette: 
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Gotham Gazette: 
City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years