Fernando Ferrer
[Question: What would your approach be as mayor
to meet the needs of the city's large and growing
Latino population?]
Puerto Ricans and Latinos throughout this city
need what so many who I call residents of the other
New York need, decent and affordable housing and
a good and safe and effective place for their children
to learn. And not a place that is miles away, but
the public school that is down the block or around
the corner. Their public school.
Why are there poor New Yorkers uninsured medically?
If you don't have health insurance you and your
children have no reliable access to health care.
Too many Latinos and others who are of color in
this city, find themselves on the wrong side of
the divide of distrust between them and their own
police departments. That is wrong and does not have
to be.
As mayor, this city needs a bold, creative and
imaginative housing production policy that will
produce 150,000 new units in ten years of low moderate
and middle income housing for renters and for owners.
This city needs to move away from the useless discourse
of restructuring or blowing up the Board of Education,
vouchers or privatization, and needs to move toward
the heart of the matter. Good teaching and good
learning in every classroom, not just in some of
them. To a large extent that takes money and leadership.
Leadership at the state level and at the city level
to recover the governors intransigence on the Campaign
For Fiscal Equity law-suit . So many of us knew
for years, not for months, that New York City school
children have been systematically cheated, not only
of resources, but out of their futures, and it was
wrong.
We also have to work on maintaining high standards
and keeping the doors of opportunity open at City
University. A gateway of opportunity for all. You'll
be hearing more later.
[Question: A major issue facing Latinos across
the country is under-representation, especially
when it comes to decision making levels, and New
York City is no exception. How would you specifically
address this issue? What are your thoughts about
city affirmative action programs?]
I would reverse immediately the incredible retreat
in the last eight years from the monitoring of hiring
practices in city agencies. Ironically, twenty-six
years ago, I worked for the city human rights commission
investigating complaints of discrimination in city
agencies and investigating patterns and practices
of systemic discrimination in city agencies. There
was an executive order creating that unit and requiring
that we monitor these hiring requirements. That
was in fact dismantled and over the course of years
no one has had a clear picture of how many work
at the highest levels of decision making, how many
work in mid-management levels, and how many work
in support levels. That has to come to an end. We
have a disjointed personnel system that intentionally
refuses to keep track of the number of people in
any given agency.
There is no recruitment effort in the fire department,
little recruitment eff ort that has been effective
in the police department, and virtually no recruitment
effort anywhere else.
On the other hand the government is stuffed right
up to the eye-balls with political appointees who
happen to represent the electoral coalition of the
current occupant of City Hall-- not too representative
of the diversity of New York. That changes in a
Ferrer administration.
[Question: What role did you personally play,
how did you respond, not just after serious incidents
like the Anthony Baez police brutality case, but
the infamous Seinfeld and Law and Order episodes
on the Puerto Rican Day Parade and the David Letterman
insulting remarks about the Columbians?]
I have been, not merely as Borough President of
the Bronx, but as a Puerto Rican , singularly responsive
to these issues. Whether it was Seinfeld's very
un-funny jokes in that episode that denigrated an
entire community and an institution called the Puerto
Rican Day Parade, or whether it was Letterman telling
some more un-funny jokes about a community that
is not mine in particular, but all Latinos are related
and in fact a slur against a Colombian community
had to be responded personally by every leader of
this city.
Congressman Henson is only the latest. It doesn't
surprise me that there are members of the congress
who are ignorant. What is dangerous is that they
are running the country.
So it is important not only to respond to those
things, but when Amadou Diallo is shot forty-one
times in a lobby of his own building , it was important
for me to become the highest ranking city official
and to submit myself to voluntary arrest in protest
of the recruitment, training, supervision ,and policies
at the very top and then in the very failure to
hold those four officers accountable, the failure
of accountability. I was very proud to make clear
and unequivocal statements.
[Question: What is your campaign strategy for
reaching Latino voters? ]
First, the mayor has to go beyond slogans that
he likes immigrants, that New York City is the city
of immigrants, that immigrant families are wonderful
and get to real delivery. From the first days of
the proposal of the old Simpson/Mazzoli law, to
the passage of Simpson/Rodino, to the fight for
the extension of 245-I, the mayor has to be a champion
with the congressional delegation and in the United
States Congress to call not merely for the basics,
but the mayor has to call for finally amnesty in
this country. Give people the opportunity, give
immigrant families the opportunity to reunite and
to live legally, and to exist legally in this country.
We have to do a few other things. The children
of immigrants and their parents are currently barred
by federal law from Medicaid benefits. That is immoral.
The mayor of this city has to govern and reform
a health system in the public domain, rather than
cutting or threatening to cut school based health
clinics and community based health centers. We've
got to increase those numbers so that immigrants
and their children have the same access as anyone
else to first quality healthcare.
And finally, the children of immigrants should
get the same kind of education as everyone else,
that is in some schools good and in some schools
not so very good. But the plain fact is that immigrant
children need so much more and when we tell them,
when we use bilingual education for example, as
the newest bullet in the cultural wars and deny
them the opportunity to transition. When we use
other issues in schools as opportunities for great
social debates on the pages of editorials of all
the New York City papers, having little or nothing
to do with the quality of their lives, we had better
know which end is up. Bilingual education should
not be the latest bullet to the American culture
wars, it should be a pathway to opportunity and
that's why I will not succumb to the mass hysteria
about bilingual education. If bilingual programs
fail in schools, it is typically because they exist
in failing schools with little or no commitment
to bilingual education. Finally bilingual teachers
are more likely to be uncertified. That too must
come to an end.
[Question: What would you do specifically for
bilingual education?]
ASPIRA began the first effort to sue the Board
of Ed, resulting in a consent order from federal
court for providing bilingual education, that by
the way is still the law. In case anyone has forgotten
in this entire debate, here's part of the problem,
the board of education has never, until very recently,
even begun to maintain current data on how kids
are doing. Even more shocking is the lack of institutional
commitment to providing good bilingual education.
So while conceptually Chancellor Levy, Mayor Giuliani
and everyone else got into the act talking about
informed consent. Informed consent, conceptually
is right. Parents should be able to make an informed
decision about where their children ought to be
going.
The issue really has always been , what is the
quality of the program in a specific school, first.
Second, what is the commitment of the principal
and the bilingual teacher toward effective bilingual
education and three, are we ever going to pay attention
to the little bit of research currently at hand
that tells us that bilingual programs done right
in elementary school settings work well, in fact,
dual language programs work even better . Second,
bilingual programs in middle schools, because of
high mobility, work less well, there is less continuity.
Third, by the time you're in high school, we had
better try a different approach. Let's pay attention
to the data, let's pay attention to the research
and do right by our kids and avoid all the ideological
and political debates that generally come from people
that wouldn't know a good bilingual program if it
bit them in the backside.
[Audience member asks a question about police
misconduct]
OK, in 1986, as a member of city council, the first
author of the first Civilian Complaint Review Board
was me. But going beyond that in1992, supporting
changes with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Going well beyond that, supporting not only a completely
independent Civilian Review Board, but being very
clear and unequivocal about accountability for all
officers. Let me give you an example, after the
trial, the four officers in the Diallo shooting
were held to a departmental charter. I said, in
fact Alan Hevesi agreed with me in a debate, I had
said it is time at the conclusion of these trials
to show these officers the door. This is about accountability.
A teacher makes a bad call, you're out of here.
A college president makes a bad call, you're out
of here.
The tragically bad judgment of four officers resulting
in the death of a completely innocent and unarmed
citizen has to require some degree of accountability.
No one can remain silent on that issues. That is
at the very heart of accountability.
There is only one kind of profiling, racial profiling--
it is at the heart of bad contact with the police.
Even though it is claimed with a lot of justification,
that we have the most restrained and professional
and best trained police force on planet earth, there
is one very important consideration, the widening
divide of distrust between the people and its own
police department.
The next mayor must appoint a police commissioner
who is absolutely viscerally committed to community
policing initiatives . Viscerally committed to improving
relationships between men and women of the NYPD
and every man woman and child in this city, no matter
of where they live or how much is in their bank
account.