A NYCHA building entrance (photo via NYCHA on flickr)
Protests recently broke out in response to the sentencing of former police officer Peter Liang to five years of community service for the killing of Akai Gurley. Officer Liang’s criminal behavior in a stairwell in Brooklyn’s Pink Houses might have been less professional than some of his more experienced peers, but he was hardly an extreme outlier. He wasn’t even the first officer to shoot a totally innocent person by mistake during a vertical patrol. In 1994, thirteen-year-old Nicholas Heyward Jr. was killed by police on the roof of his building in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Houses while playing with friends on the roof. The officer claimed he was startled by Hayward when he opened the door to the roof.
In order to really reduce the chances of these kinds of violent encounters we are going to have to make changes that go far beyond incarcerating one or two officers or changing the way training is conducted. One way to start would be for the City to take broad responsibility for the social and physical conditions that led to this tragic encounter.
The problems in Pink Houses and many other public housing complexes run much deeper than one poorly trained rookie police officer. There has been widespread acknowledgement that the physical upkeep of the building played a role in Gurley’s death. The only reason Gurley was using the stairs was because the elevators weren’t working properly. There was also a lack of decent lighting that at the very least played an indirect role in this tragedy because it produced a climate of fear that contributed to Liang’s decision to patrol with his finger on the trigger.
As I pointed out recently in the New York Times, the City needs to stop using the Broken Windows theory to justify aggressive and invasive over-policing of communities of color and instead fix some actual broken windows. For too long when communities complain about not feeling safe, the City’s only response is to send in more armed police. These communities don’t need more criminalization, they need real services to improve the quality of their lives.
In July of 2014, Mayor de Blasio announced the creation of the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, in response to an uptick in crime in public housing. The plan called for providing much needed maintenance funds to NYCHA as well as some improvements in security technology such as better locks, security cameras, and exterior lighting. There was also a small amount of money for some short term funding for summer youth programs. But, the centerpiece of the program was assigning 700 more police to public housing.
Why hasn’t the City instead used some of the millions of dollars it has spent on increasing the number of police and enhancing security technology to hire doormen for these buildings? Yes, doormen.
One of the major factors contributing to insecurity in public housing is lack of adequate control over building entry. People routinely hold the doors open for others or buzz in people they don’t know. Even more shocking is the routine way in which the locking mechanisms and intercom systems simply aren’t working. A doorman working on the building would be able to control entry and monitor conditions in a building’s lobby and other public spaces.
With doormen, there would be a major reduction of exactly the kinds of low-level quality-of-life concerns that motivate the vast majority of resident complaints such as trash, noise, broken lights, people hanging out in the lobby, and non-working elevators. Right away there would be a huge drop in the number of arrests for trespassing, something the NYPD has been heavily criticized for in the past. Over and over again people tell stories of being erroneously arrested or ticketed for trespassing while legitimately visiting a friend or relative. In a number of cases people who actually live in the building have been subjected to this treatment.
If these buildings had doormen, there wouldn’t be a need for vertical patrols by the police and the dangerous encounters that go along with these patrols.
A doorman policy would also dramatically reduce the numerous arrests and summonses police give out in public housing buildings for a host of minor violations that could be avoided by having someone in charge of “keeping the peace.” In cases where the police are called, the doorman would be able to assist them by pointing out those that belong in the building and those that don’t. A doorman would also quickly learn about suspicious activity such as constant late-night visitors to a particular apartment that might indicate drug dealing or other problematic activities.
Putting in professional doormen would cost the Housing Authority money. But it might also save the city a significant amount of money. Right now the city spends hundreds of millions of dollar on armed Housing Bureau police. A system could be put in place where we incrementally shift resources from policing to civilian doormen in an effort to find a better balance between providing aggressive policing and much needed civilian services.
Some may say that government shouldn’t be providing amenities to poor people that many middle and working class families can’t afford. This is an understandable argument given the exploding cost of living for many. But the reality is that when crime and disorder go unchecked in public housing we all end up paying the price in the form increased expenditures for police, jails, and emergency rooms. Public Housing should be a model of housing for poor and working class New Yorkers, not another burden for those already struggling.
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Alex S. Vitale is associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics. He is on Twitter @avitale.
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Back in the early 1990s, there was a bar association forum devoted to the nascent and growing problem-solving court movement. After I raised some questions about the “we’re all in this together” premise of the courts, one of the advocates pointedly asked me, “Do you really believe that the adversarial Criminal Court is working?” “I couldn’t say,” I replied. “I’ve yet to see an adversarial court.” That remains the case today.
Even though the nation’s Criminal Courts since their inception have been described as assembly lines processing defendants through quick and dirty guilty pleas, there were few efforts at meaningful reform until the 1990s and the problem-solving court movement. What started with the development of a few local community courts soon expanded to a dizzying array of specialty courts and the problem-solving court industrial complex. Presently, across the country there are more than 4,000 community courts, domestic violence courts, fathering courts, youth courts, drug courts, mental health courts, sex offense courts, driving while intoxicated courts, human trafficking courts, and more.
New York State has long been at the problem-solving court vanguard and is home to an unprecedented 141 drug courts and just the other day unveiled a new Veterans’ Court. And yet, as each new boutique court sprouts up, one court remains noticeably absent – an adversarial justice court where police behavior is scrutinized and the prosecution is mandated to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Supporters of problem-solving courts maintain that the courts grew out of the futility and revolving door nature of the Criminal Court and a desire to deal with the causes that brought the accused to the courthouse. The idea is to use the occasion of arrest as a way into addressing, if not solving, defendants’ problems. Owing to the scant historical attention paid to poverty, substandard housing, unemployment, and the cumulative impact of institutional racism, many defendants do have a host of problems. Yet rather than try and confront decades of neglect and devise a meaningful social safety net, those in control began to see the Criminal Court as the repository for all these problems. Ironically, the present reality of scarce resources for serious problems may well have created a place for problem-solving courts.
Although the Criminal Court often does cycle the same people in and out of its doors, that is hardly its only, or most serious, deficiency. Over 30 years ago, a scathing report from the New York City Bar Association pointed to the lack of hearings and trials and questioned whether the Criminal Court was even appropriately called a “court.”
As problem-solving courts now dot the judicial landscape the number of hearings and trials has actually decreased. As one commentator put it, by focusing on early intervention and treatment, problem-solving courts fast forward to sentence, jumping over, if not ignoring, the constitutionality of the arrest or questions of guilt or innocence. As even the Supreme Court acknowledged recently, American criminal justice is a system of guilty pleas.
The lack of adversarial testing of the charges is not just an academic concern. Every study of the consumer perspective – the accused’s point of view – has found that the defendants’ greatest objection to the process is the lack of their day in court; that they had no opportunity to be heard or to question their accusers. This is for many defendants the very problem they would like the court to solve. In fact, scholars argue that defendants afforded their full measure of due process are less likely to recidivate, even if ultimately convicted, because they believe they were treated seriously rather than just rushed through a guilty plea.
Almost fifty years ago the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio recognized the importance of judicial oversight and emphasized the need for trial courts to “retain their traditional responsibility to guard against police conduct which is overbearing or harassing, or which trenches upon personal security without the objective evidentiary justification which the Constitution requires.”
Much-admired federal Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York has written about the “vital function” trial courts must play to police the police. Indeed, it was the Criminal Courts’ abdication of its critical oversight role that led to the Floyd v. New York stop-and-frisk lawsuit in federal court.
An Adversarial Justice Court could hear every case charging a possessory offense that is based solely on police observations and testimony and hold mandatory pretrial suppression hearings to determine the legality of the arrest. Given the ongoing controversy surrounding marijuana arrests, and the recent questions raised about the burgeoning number of “gravity knife” charges, these types of possessory offenses demand public hearings.
Similarly, while the Mayor’s Office and the NYPD are championing a new “gun court” aimed at doling out appropriate punishment, those charges inevitably raise constitutional search and seizure issues that merit adversarial litigation with the police officer testifying under oath and subject to cross-examination about what he did and why he did it.
An Adversarial Justice Court would benefit police officers as well as the accused.
At present, you could be a police officer for years and never once be called to testify. The court-appointed monitor in the Floyd case wrote in his report to the judge earlier this year that police officers were still struggling to understand the sum total of factors that provided reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk. Testifying in court and thereafter having a judge rule on the legality of their actions would better enable police officers to learn what amalgam of facts allows them to stop, question, frisk.
In addition to ordering reform of policies, training, and supervision, the judge in Floyd also recognized the need for ongoing monitoring of police stop-and-frisk behavior. She emphasized that those people and communities most affected by stop-and-frisk should play a central role in the remedial process. What better way to involve the public, and to thereby make the police accountable, than by holding public hearings with officers testifying about their search and seizure activity? The resulting transparency could go a long way in efforts to instill public confidence in the police in the post-stop-and-frisk era.
And if the sky didn’t fall and litigated hearings proved successful, the Adversarial Justice Court might one day even resurrect jury trials, and our case-processing machinery could be fully transformed into a court. Now that would solve a lot of criminal justice problems.
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Steven Zeidman is a professor of law at CUNY School of Law. He is on Twitter @SteveZeidman.
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Minnewaska State Park (photo via @nystateparks)
Most New Yorkers take their drinking water for granted. We think of contaminated drinking water as a problem that happens to other people in other parts of the world. However, the recent crises in Flint, Michigan and Hoosick Falls, New York forced us to realize that these problems can also crop up close to home. As we continue to celebrate Earth Day, let us take a few minutes to reflect on the current situation and consider some of the threats to our drinking water right here at home, as well as what we can do about them.
Flint has become the poster child for the kind of devastation drinking water contamination can wreak on a community. Thousands of children in Flint have been exposed to dangerous levels of lead, and their water is still not safe to drink. This problem is not just happening in Flint, but also Binghamton, New York and likely many more communities across the country that still have lead pipes in place.
Since the time of Roman aqueducts, water infrastructure has been a hallmark of advanced civilization. Yet we have let our public drinking water systems crumble in neglect. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now estimates that communities face a $384 billion backlog to repair drinking water infrastructure across the country.
Unfortunately, there are also many other threats to consider. While our aging infrastructure has been getting the most attention recently, there are many other dangers to our drinking water, which range from toxic chemicals to Superfund sites to factory farms.
While Flint may well be the worst example, it is not the only time reckless disregard for our drinking water has had lasting impacts on public health. In late 2015, the EPA urged residents of Hoosick Falls, a village of 3,500 people about 30 miles northeast of the State Capitol in Albany, not to drink or cook with the tap water. This is because testing of the village's water detected levels of the chemical PFOA that made the water unfit for human consumption. This toxic chemical has been linked to an increased risk for cancer, thyroid disease, and serious complications during pregnancy.
A federal class-action lawsuit has been filed against Saint-Goblin Performance Plastics and Honeywell International, which both operated manufacturing plants that are a focus of the contamination. The toxic chemical is associated with the making of Teflon, which was used in products manufactured at the plants.
Across the nation, concern over various types of water contamination has risen. In recent years, officials have documented more than 1,000 cases of oil and gas drilling operations contaminating local water. Agricultural pollution is threatening drinking water in places like Ohio, where runoff from agribusiness operations contributed to a toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie, which contaminated the drinking water for 500,000 people around Toledo with cyanotoxins in 2014.
We believe all New Yorkers deserve safe drinking water. We know what it will take to achieve this vision.
First, we need to restore the public infrastructure that brings water to our taps. Second, as the incident in Hoosick Falls shows, we also must protect the rivers, streams, and aquifers from which we draw our water. And finally, the public must have the right to know about water pollution – with robust monitoring of our waterways, regular testing from our taps, and standards that truly protect public health.
On each of these fronts, we are making progress, but much more work lies ahead. The crisis unfolding in Flint has finally put water infrastructure on Congress’ radar. In addition to ongoing negotiations to immediately aid Flint itself, New York Rep. Paul Tonko has now introduced bills to triple funding of the safe drinking water state revolving fund. In the past, the program has enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Congress must overcome the current mood of partisan rancor and give communities the resources they need to get the lead out.
For protecting our sources of drinking water, EPA took a landmark step last year in restoring protections of the Clean Water Act to streams, which help provide drinking water to 117 million Americans, including 11 million in New York. But these protections are currently tied up in the courts, while also facing another round of attacks from polluters and their allies in Congress this spring, so we’ll need our representatives to stand up and continue to fight for clean water protections.
We are also seeing small steps to enhance our right to know when our water is at risk. Just two months ago, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill to strengthen EPA’s duty to notify the public when lead is putting drinking water at risk. Other proposals are being considered to require testing for lead in both drinking water and in children’s blood levels.
To build on this progress it will take political will. So on this Earth Day, let us vow to keep drinking water on the forefront of our minds even long after stories of Flint have left the front pages of our papers.
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Heather Leibowitz, Esq. is the Director of Environment New York, a statewide environmental advocacy group. On Twitter @EnvNY.
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