On Tuesday, the New York City Council passed two police reform bills. One marks a vital step toward police reform and accountability. The other takes our city in the wrong direction.
First the good news: a consent to search bill, sponsored by Council Member Antonio Reynoso, passed with support from over 200 community organizations, including the families of New Yorkers killed by police, and organizations led by homeless, LGBTQ, undocumented, and formerly incarcerated New Yorkers, and black and Latino youth. The bill will require the NYPD to create a policy directive that mandates that police officers notify New Yorkers of their right to refuse a search if the officer does not have probable cause to search them.
The NYPD will also have to document proof of consent, and ensure translation if necessary, so all New Yorkers comprehend it is their constitutional right to refuse searches without probable cause. It is a common sense and long overdue reform that will enhance accountability measures and increase protections for New Yorkers during interactions with officers.
The second bill, sponsored by Council Member Ritchie Torres, was opposed by over 200 community organizations, all five public defender offices, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, the National Latino Officers Association, and the Grand Council of Guardians. This legislation, known as the police identification bill, will in some situations require police officers to provide New Yorkers with a business card identifying the officer and an explanation for the stop.
As with consent to search, community members had pushed for such legislation for years. But inexplicably, because of last-minute changes, the final bill intentionally excludes traffic stops as well as the majority of non-arrest street encounters with police officers. It also includes a broad exception that significantly limits the NYPD’s responsibility to provide New Yorkers with an explanation for why they are being stopped.
Here’s what the holes in the final police identification bill mean in practice. If a young person is coming home from school and an officer asks him, “what are you doing?” or “where are you going?” or has his hand on his gun when he commands, “show me your ID,” that officer will not be required to provide a card identifying him- or her-self after the encounter.
If multiple officers corner a young person in front of her building and begin asking similar questions, they will not be required to provide identification after the interaction. If an officer stops a transgender woman and wants to know “why are you on this block,” or “what are you doing tonight,” this law will not ensure they know who is stopping them and why they are being stopped.
These everyday encounters for many young black, Latino, and transgender New Yorkers, which are just as likely as any other police interaction to lead to misconduct, harassment, or even abuse by officers, have been carved out of the bill without sufficient explanation.
President Obama’s 21st Century Task Force On Policing recommended law enforcement agencies require officers to identify themselves by their full name, rank, and command in writing to individuals they have stopped and provide an explanation for the stop. This past summer, the city of Albany, New York passed a bill requiring just that from their police officers.
New York City is not setting a baseline for future police reform. The baseline has already been set. By passing a bill that creates exceptions for thousands of stops and interactions with police officers, New York is merely confirming the NYPD sets police legislation and setting a weak precedent for other localities.
The Right to Know Act originated from the experiences of New Yorkers most impacted by police misconduct and abuse, including the families of those killed by police officers, and black and Latino youth from Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and East New York who have led our organizing efforts. No one—not Council Member Torres, Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Mayor Bill de Blasio, or NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill—has offered these young people any explanation for excluding common stops and interactions they are forced to navigate on a daily basis. If New York City is committed to “neighborhood policing,” someone should explain why those neighborhood cops shouldn’t simply hand over a business card and offer an explanation after stopping a New Yorker.
It has been over three years since the world watched an NYPD officer choke the last breath out of Eric Garner’s body on a Staten Island sidewalk. Now, this City Council has passed the only bills since that fateful day that address transparency, accountability, and protections for New Yorkers during interactions with the NYPD. It’s good news for all city residents that the Council passed a strong consent to search bill. But it’s deeply unfortunate that the Council allowed the NYPD to squeeze through a gutted version of police identification legislation that comes up short of the necessary reform that so many New Yorkers have spent the last five years demanding.
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Kesi Foster is a lead organizer with Make the Road New York, which a member of the Steering Committee of Communities United for Police Reform. On Twitter: @MaketheRoadNY.
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JFK delivers a speech (via JFK Library)
On June 11,1963, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech to the nation on civil rights. It moved me -- I was 19 years old at the time -- more than any political event up to that moment.
He said: "It ought to be possible...for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would want his children to be treated. But this is not the case.”
"We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” JFK said. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution."
Later in the speech, he made the morality point again. "We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people.”
“It cannot," he added, "be met by repressive police action."
Perhaps because of my religious education -- 12 years of Catholic schooling -- the president stressing the morality of the matter moved me deeply. No stronger case could be made for generally doing the right thing, or for, specifically, passing the legislation that Kennedy presented to address our moral problem.
For Kennedy "moral issue" was not a reference to the "family values" espoused -- up until recently, at least -- mainly by right-wingers upset with the flouting of conservative sexual and marital mores. He referred to fundamental religious and humanistic tenets that we as a society recognize: the common dignity of all people -- as in "all men are created equal" -- and that we have a great responsibility to provide for people’s well-being and to protect them from harm.
Recently, as I do my social and racial justice work -- which included a mayoral run earlier this year aimed to pushing these conversations to the fore -- I think more about Kennedy's remarks and his appeal to the American people, the case he made that we must reject the institutionalized racism in our country because it is immoral, contrary to our nation's founding principles. Not because it is wasteful, expensive, ineffective, but because it is fundamentally wrong either to inflict hardship on our fellow citizens or to ignore their plight caused by society's abuse or neglect.
Starkly racially-biased practices and realities are all too rife and ripe now in our city and country. They are similar to and different from the concerns that JFK and many other Americans in the ‘60s were concerned about and fought against.
For example, today in New York City, people of color are nine times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession, though research shows that white people use and sell the drug in equal or greater proportion to African-Americans or Latinos; black people make up about 25% of the city's population, but over 50% of felony arrests; more than 90% of the people incarcerated on Rikers Island are New Yorkers of color.
Racial discrimination in our city extends beyond our criminal justice system: 98% of homeless families are African-American or Latino; black and Latino children make up about 70% of our public school system's 1.1 million students, and research shows that the system's most dilapidated, poorly-performing schools almost entirely "serve" youth of color; meanwhile the 15% of the system's students who are white mainly attend the best-performing schools.
It came home to me while I ran for mayor and studied possible solutions to the city’s seemingly intractable problems that better remedies are available than are being applied or even discussed, but that out of fear of political risk or the expense involved, no mainstream politician comes forward to propose them. No government policy-maker issues dramatic, pointed challenges to our city's or the nation's citizens that we have a moral obligation, whatever the risks or costs, to rid our society of racist practices and realities.
For example, the city should change its response to mentally ill people in the community: send mental health professionals, rather than cops. Save lives rather than endanger them. The city must end "broken windows" policing tactics and focus policing on what we see cops do on TV shows: apprehending persons who do serious harm to the community. The city should commit to providing the 1.1 million children in our schools with small class sizes, which research and common-sense tell us improve academic outcomes for children across race and class lines. The city must commit to building affordable housing units poor people in the neighborhoods where the housing is provided can afford. Remove profit-making companies from the program and rely on community-based groups with track records in building & managing apartments.
Wrapping up, Kennedy said: "They [African-Americans] are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not freed from social and economic oppression...And this nation, for all its hopes and boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free."
That should still be our goal, our moral imperative. Yet is there any current mainstream leader -- a political heading JFK falls under -- who will lead us there or even utter the words? It is unimaginable, for instance, that our president or New York mayor, despite his progressive claims, would play that role. It is then up to us, the activists and advocates for justice, all people who believe that moral values have a central place in our political life, to organize, to expose the terrible damaging effects that racism has on our fellow citizens and to press the case for the moral reckoning needed to create a fully inclusive society that is fair, safe, and equitable for all of us.
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Bob Gangi is the director of the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP). On Twitter @GangiFromPROP.
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IDC members (photo: @IDC4NY)
For years, dysfunction and real estate power brokers have prevented Albany from strengthening tenant protections in New York, and the result of these failures has been devastating for our neighborhoods: we continue to suffer from record homelessness and increasing displacement across the state.
The Independent Democratic Conference — a group of eight breakaway state senators elected as Democrats — has been a leading force of obstruction since 2011, partnering with Senate Republicans to shut out tenant voices in policy-making.
Recently, things began to look like they were changing in the Senate for the first time in years. The mainline Democrats and the IDC took up serious discussion about how to unify the conference. During the course of negotiations, the IDC claimed that its focus is “policies, not politics,” and outlined a series of key priorities for the conference.
We were extremely disappointed to learn that strengthening tenant protections was not one of them — especially since several members of the conference have both privately and publicly stated to us that this would be their top issue in 2018.
We are tenants and we are constituents of three IDC members: Senators Marisol Alcantara, Jose Peralta, and Jesse Hamilton. Joined together, these State Senators have the highest concentration of rent-regulated units in New York City.
We are fighting every day to be able to stay in our homes. Our neighborhoods are facing gentrification, and our landlords know loopholes in the rent laws mean they can raise our rents to market rate as soon as we leave. As a result, we face harassment, reduced services, and deplorable living conditions – all in an attempt to get us out of our homes. We have called on our state-level elected leaders to prioritize strengthening the rent laws through closing two major loopholes: the 20% eviction bonus and preferential rent. Our communities are experiencing increased rents, speculative landlords, and mass gentrification.
Over and over, Senators Alcantara, Hamilton, and Peralta told us that the IDC is the best vehicle to meet so-called progressive priorities. After serious pressure, they had committed to prioritizing these issues for the overwhelming number of tenants who live in their districts.
But once it came time to deliver, these senators and the IDC once again proved that they are the conference of the real estate industry. This is devastating for the tenants who are suffering in their districts daily because of laws that favor landlords.
In Peralta’s district, families at LeFrak City are sacrificing their savings, pulling their kids out of after-school programs, getting second jobs, and moving into smaller cramped apartments just to make ends meet. Many of us are seeing large rent hikes. At the end of every month, moving trucks haul the belongings of yet another family that has lost its apartment due to the preferential rent scam that Senator Peralta could fix next year.
In Brooklyn, just a few weeks ago, Senator Hamilton joined the Flatbush Tenants Coalition to tell the story of an 85-year-old grandmother recently evicted and now forced to live with friends on their couches, with her belongings in storage. Housing court in Brooklyn often has lines stretched around the block because the state ludicrously rewards landlords for evictions by allowing management to collect a 20% increase in rent — an eviction bonus.
The eviction bonus is the largest contributor to rent increases in rent-stabilized apartments. It doesn’t matter if the tenant moved out willingly or because the landlord refused to provide basic services to keep the apartment livable. The landlord can take that 20% increase, even if it raises the rent above market value.
Preferential rent is a bait-and-switch scam to get tenants out and collect the 20% eviction bonus. When a tenant first moves into an apartment, the landlord offers them a “discounted” rent. But when the lease is up, tenants can see increases of hundreds of dollars on their monthly rent.
This is simply a tactic used to get the eviction bonus and keep rents skyrocketing.
Preferential rents are causing tenants in Alcantara’s district to face potential increases of $1,000 or more when their lease expires, causing tenants to move and disrupting communities.
To be very clear, this can be changed through legislation in Albany.
Senators Alcantara, Hamilton, and Peralta could help change this next year. They have spent the past years and months promising tenants in their districts that this is a top priority. Alcantara and Peralta went as far as publishing their promises in an op-ed. But we have since seen that like so many things with IDC senators, these promises ring hollow, as the IDC did not list rent regulations as a priority area in its negotiations to realign with mainline Democrats.
There are only a few months left for the members of the IDC to deliver for tenants. If they fail to do so, we will remember in September.
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Aisha Gomez is a resident of LeFrak City in Senator Jose Peralta’s district in Queens
Sherryann Bain is a resident of Flatbush in Senator Jesse Hamilton’s district in Brooklyn
Lauren Nye is a resident of Washington Heights in Senator Marisol Alcantara’s district in Manhattan
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