PROP volunteers, including the author (photo: @PROPNYC)
In a recent ten-day period I had experiences that taught me new things about bad NYPD practices, reinforced my cynicism about the lame way that mainstream politicians, including officials who self-identify as progressives, posture on policing issues, and strengthened my determination to press aggressively for fundamental and meaningful changes in NYPD policies. My organization, PROP - the Police Reform Organizing Project - continues to monitor NYPD practices and advocate for real change.
*On a monitoring visit to the Brooklyn criminal court -- PROP representatives and volunteers regularly observe proceedings in the arraignment parts of the city's criminal courts as a way of tracking NYPD 'broken windows' arrest practices -- I stood on a line of about 45 people waiting to pass through the metal detector. I was the only white person -- everyone else was African-American or Latino, the vast majority of whom dressed in clothes suggesting that they were members not of the well-to-do professional class, but of the low-income or working classes.
*On that morning, the Brooklyn misdemeanor arraignment part heard 34 cases, all men of color whom the police had arrested and locked up. Each of these men walked out of the courtroom, meaning essentially that no court official, including in most cases the prosecutors, considered the defendants dangerous or predatory. The charges included suspended license, theft of services (usually fare-beating), marijuana possession, disorderly conduct, and open alcohol container.
*At a meeting later that day, a fellow police reformer reported that he had recently attended a police/community meeting where neighborhood residents had a discussion with officials from the local precinct. The community members expressed concern about a recent armed robbery and asked what the police were doing about it. The officials responded by saying that they were "summonsing like crazy," meaning that police officers were issuing many criminal summonses to people in the neighborhood for representative 'broken windows' infractions/activities like being in the park after dark, littering, carrying an open alcohol container, or riding a bike on the sidewalk. Community members raised the pointed question: But what are you doing to actually investigate the crime and catch the perpetrators?
*At a meeting with a journalist and me, a police officer who is considering coming forward to publicize the ill effects of the NYPD's quota system on officers and New Yorkers alike, reported on the following matters: under the pressure to "make their numbers" each month, some officers working in a precinct with a cemetery within its borders will issue what are known as "cemetery summonses," meaning that they will enter the graveyard and write up tickets with the names of dead people that that they find on the tombstones. Some precincts - those that serve white well-to-do areas, for example - have no quotas. One of the first questions that an officer new to an inner-city precinct asks is: "What is the number?" And, again under the pressure of the quota system, some officers will for most of the month ignore a neighborhood "hot spot," a place where crime such as drug dealing or prostitution takes place in the open, and if they have not met their quotas, will round up the people at those sites at month's end.
*A PROP volunteer, a teacher who instructs students at night classes in the City College system, reported the following stories that he heard during a class discussion about discriminatory NYPD practices: two students of color, both women - one African-American and the other Latina - recounted unsettling encounters with officers on select buses in the Bronx. In one case the woman couldn't at first find the receipt when the officer approached her, so the officer began writing up the summons; she did eventually find it, but when she displayed it, the officer said that it was too late, that he had already filled out the ticket; she has refused to pay the fine and plans to fight the ticket. In the other case, the woman made a mistake in pressing the buttons of the ticket machine at the bus stop and ended up with 2 tickets for handicapped people which totaled the same amount, $2.50, as a regular ticket; the officer still issued a summons and, in this case, rather than take the time that she couldn't afford to oppose the summons, the woman paid the fine.
*PROP released an analysis of the NYPD's misdemeanor arrest practices for 2015, revealing that 87 percent of those arrests involved people of color compared to 85.8 percent in 2013 and 86.5 percent in 2014. To demonstrate the blatant racism associated with these practices, we focused on some specific kinds of arrests including theft of services, or fare-beating, which at 29,198 was the NYPD's most numerous arrest category for last year. Fully 92 percent involved people of color - in fact, in our year-and-a-half of court-monitoring work, we have observed only a handful of white defendants charged with theft of services. Spokespeople for City Hall and the Police Department made statements in response focused on safety on the subways, but that did not address the extraordinary racial imbalance reflected in the numbers that PROP had spotlighted.
Despite these numbers and accounts that demonstrate the undeniable racial bias and deep injustices involved in the NYPD's current application of quota-driven 'broken windows' policing, our city's leading politicians, including Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, announce and occasionally enact the softest kind of modifications that do nothing to fundamentally change or end the NYPD's abusive and discriminatory practices.
Out of political considerations - it would be too risky to promote the fundamental police reforms needed - they have effectively abandoned one of their main constituencies: low-income New Yorkers of color, leaving them to the harsh treatment and societal marginalization that result from the practices and policies of the NYPD and the city's criminal justice system.
It is up to us police reformers and other concerned New Yorkers to keep hammering away at these issues. Despite our frustration and disappointment of the moment, we know that silence will kill all hope of achieving our shared goal of a fair, safe, and inclusive city for all New Yorkers.
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Bob Gangi is Director of the Police Reform Organizing Project. On Twitter @PROPNYC.
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(Diana Robinson/Mayoral Photography Office)
Rookie New York Police Department Officer Peter Liang was on patrol in an East New York housing project in November 2014 when a bullet from his gun ricocheted off a wall and killed 28-year-old Akai Gurley, a black man. The uproar over Gurley’s death culminated in Liang’s conviction of second-degree manslaughter this month, provoking an unusually strong but misguided reaction from the Asian American community.
The anger boils down to the notion that Liang was the subject of selective prosecution. In other words, he did not go through the same judicial process as the white officers who have gotten away with killing young black men. Framing Liang’s conviction in this context is not only insincere but misleading. If we were to follow this trend of unaccountability, we would essentially call for Liang’s freedom—something that would run counter to the concept of justice and, more importantly, devalue Gurley’s life.
We need to consider whether this incident actually illustrates discrimination against Asian Americans or reinforces the reality that white police officers are not being held responsible for the loss of black lives. If the goal of the recent rallies across the nation is to indeed raise awareness of the latter problem, then opponents of Liang’s conviction should have organized long before his trial. Demonstrating now, as New York Times Magazine contributor Jay Caspian Kang succinctly puts it, “deforms the stated intentions.” It also comes across as self-serving rather than a righteous stand against injustice.
I say this in light of the more evident challenges that Asian Americans face. We are unfairly pitted against our black and Latino peers as the “model minority” and perceived as perpetual foreigners. The list of such bigoted behavior against Asian Americans is well-documented. Sadly, however, it has also prompted an unnecessary victim mentality—one that now suggests that Liang is an example of how Asian Americans, like black people, suffer from a miscarriage of justice.
Our status as a minority does not automatically give us the right to share in the experience of others who are more heavily affected, as Asia Times contributor George Koo would have us believe. The truth is that Asian Americans, as a whole, are far less likely than blacks to be targeted by law enforcement or incarcerated. We cannot liken the severity of Liang’s conviction to the death of Eric Garner or Michael Brown, whose passings sparked serious conversations on our country’s execution of criminal justice. We cannot say that Liang and Gurley are both victims. Liang killed a black male; Gurley was a black male who was killed.
When I think of incidents in which our system has actually betrayed Asians and Asian Americans, I am immediately reminded of Vincent Chin, whose deadly beating in 1982 by white auto worker Ronald Ebens and his stepson resulted in just a penalty of three years of probation and a fine.
I think of Cau Bich Tran, whose shooting by Officer Chad Marshall in 2003 failed to lead to an indictment. I remember the death of Fong Lee, whose family burst into tears after Officer Jason Andersen was acquitted of using excessive force back in 2006. These are explicit instances in which I question whether Asian lives matter too.
To somehow portray Liang as the unfair target of what was ultimately a standard legal procedure is a disservice to Gurley, Garner, Brown, Chin, Tran, and Lee. We cannot choose to suddenly designate ourselves as a marginalized minority when the merit of the facts in Liang’s case clearly outweigh the connection we have to him as Asian Americans. Liang and I are of the same community, but his particular crusade is not mine.
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Justin Chan is an editorial production associate at The New Yorker. He most recently served as a columnist at Mic, where he explored the media's emasculation of Asian American men and the rise in spending among Asian American youth. You can follow him on Twitter @jchan1109.
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Freelancers Union rally
In 2012 when I started bringing cases under the New York Labor Law and the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act the hot area was "independent contractor misclassification." Employers in the "on-demand" economy were (mis)classifying their employees as independent contractors to avoid paying overtime or, in some cases, the minimum wage. Employers did not have to buy unemployment insurance, workers compensation, or pay the employer portion of payroll tax (FICA). Over the next few years, almost every player in the on-demand economy would be sued for employee misclassification.
Eventually, companies began to figure out they were better off correctly classifying their workers as employees rather than risking large damage awards. We got our clients a fair deal because we had statutes that provided strong protections in the New York Labor Law (NYLL) and Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
During the years I was busy with employee misclassification cases, another type of client kept trying to retain me. They were photographers, consultants, writers, website developers and many other professionals, some operating as freelancers and some with small businesses. They were not covered by the NYLL or FLSA because they were independent contractors, not employees. Yet they were the victims of wage theft, too.
Their debts were sometimes small ($500) and sometimes quite large ($25,000) but the story was always the same: the freelancer or independent contractor worked, was paid about half their fee, and then the client, sometimes giving excuses, other times just disappearing, never paid the rest. The freelancers who sought me out were not an anomaly: The Freelancers Union estimates that about half of the 54 million freelancers in America in 2014 had trouble getting paid, and that 34% of those who had trouble getting paid were never paid a dime of what they were owed.
It became apparent to me that the lack of practical remedies to freelancer wage theft contributed to the problem. Unlike the landlord, utility company, or other vendors who could simply stop service if they were unpaid, freelancers had no real recourse. As a result, they were paid last, and if money ran out, they were the ones left unpaid. Legal action was impracticable because unlike cases brought under the NYLL and the FLSA, there were no additional damages available as a penalty for non-payment, no attorney's fees, and no liability on behalf of the owner of the employer.
Lawsuits for unpaid wages under $5,000 needed to be in the Small Claims Part of the New York City Civil Court as breach of contract matters. Breach of contract cases in the civil court (up to $25,000) and in the Supreme Court (above $25,000) were subject to expensive filing and service fees, not to mention myriad requirements meant to assure procedural fairness. The freelancer also needed to enforce the judgment themselves, a time consuming and potentially expensive process. The amount of the loss rarely justified the huge legal fees required.
One innovative solution was my new company Indepayment, a comprehensive platform for freelancer debt collection. Indepayment aggregates debts owed to freelancers and independent workers to create a steady stream of cases for commercial collection attorneys and debt collectors who work on volume and collect on contingency. Indepayment operates nationally, and has been growing exponentially since we started collecting debts in June 2015. We're also working with the Freelancers Union to educate freelancers about avoiding non-payment.
The New York City Council has put forward another innovative solution, in the form of a bill, Intro. 1017. Sponsored by Council Member Brad Lander and now supported by 28 Council members, it creates a statutory remedy for freelancer wage theft that provides for double damages, attorneys' fees, and civil penalties which mirror the remedies available under FLSA and the NYLL. The bill requires that freelancers have a contract, and makes it a violation not to pay or to pay after 30 days unless otherwise agreed. If passed into law, these would be significant new protections for those in the growing freelance economy.
Causes of action under the new law could be brought in addition to breach of contract matters in Court. In addition, freelancer wage theft matters are treated as violations of the city Administrative Code adjudicated by the Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA). Establishing a DCA administrative process alleviates some of the procedural complexity, delays, and costs associated with bringing cases in Supreme Court and Civil Court.
In addition, because the collectability of court judgments is sometimes difficult, the city's enforcement of violations is an important feature. The administrative process and the provisions of the bill that require reporting to the city of civil actions will allow the city to keep detailed records of wage theft recidivists and understand the scope of the wage theft problem in New York City.
Although the bill could go further – for example the NYLL and FLSA have provisions that make the owners of the employers liable for wage theft – it's a great start. Intro. 1017 deserves our support because our innovative and evolving freelance workforce deserves innovative solutions to guard against wage theft and protect its livelihoods.
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Jesse Strauss is an attorney based in New York City and Founder and CEO of Indepayment.
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