The way Dana Monroe tells it, she went to the Silver Dragon Restaurant in Bensonhurst to order some take-out food, and the proprietors demanded that she pay before they would send the order to the kitchen. When she refused to pay in advance, they refused to send the order. But then Monroe noticed something that outraged her. Other patrons were not asked to pay in advance. What was the difference? They were white and Asian. Dana Monroe is African American.
In March, Monroe filed a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. Using a simple practice that got little if any use during the last administration, the commission sent two investigators to the Silver Dragon to test the complaint.
Sure enough, the African American investigator was asked to pay upfront and the non-African American tester did not have to pay until picking up the order. Finding a pattern of discrimination against African Americans, this month the commission issued a "probable cause" finding in the case. The owners of the restaurant face fines and damages if found to have engaged in unlawful discrimination.
The owner of the restaurant (who would not give his name to a reporter from WNBC-TV News) claimed that the restaurant did not have a discriminatory policy and that it was up to the customer to decide whether to pay before or after the order comes. But the testers found otherwise.
Human Rights Commissioner Patricia Gatling said, "Everyone must be treated equally regardless of the color of their skin. We will continue to investigate and vigorously prosecute these types of cases until people finally get the message: discrimination is against the law and will not be tolerated."
Now that Bloomberg has his 13-member Panel for Educational Policy going, he may finally turn his attention to getting the City Commission on Human Rights up to speed. Of course, the education panel only has an advisory role and the 15 human rights commissioners have the responsibility of making final determinations in cases that are heard there. Bloomberg appointed Patricia Gatling the chair of the commission early this year and there are two holdovers, but 12 spots remain open. A mid-October announcement of the new appointees is expected.
"Equal employment benefits to the employees of city contractors." That's the title of a bill, also called Intro 271, that was submitted to the City Council and referred to the Contracts Committee on September 25. It sounds no more controversial than a street name change, but it may prove to be one of the more contentious issues taken up by the new council because it requires those who do business with the city to provide domestic partner benefits if they already provide spousal benefits. But the mayor did not support it during his campaign last year and it is likely to encounter strong opposition from conservative religious contractors and some businesses.
Domestic partners have been able to register since the Dinkins administration in 1991. The city has provided benefits to the domestic partners of its employees since 1993 when a suit was settled with the Gay Teachers Association. Mayor Giuliani codified that settlement into law in 1998.
While many private companies have been providing such benefits since the Village Voice started doing it in 1984, there is no law here requiring them to do so.
While the gay and lesbian community is the main force behind this legislation, seventy percent of the domestic partners are male-female couples. Any two unmarried adults who live together in a mutually supportive relationship can register. This includes older and disabled people who cohabitate to share expenses.
The bill is not a new concept. It has been the law since 1997 in San Francisco, where even the Catholic Archdiocese complies with the law in order to keep its contracts. But while the Archdiocese of New York has yet to take an official position, Cardinal Edward Egan has already tangled with Albany over the women's health bill, demanding a "conscience clause" exemption from providing insurance coverage covering contraceptive devices. (He did not get as strong an exemption as he wanted. It only covers employees who are involved in religious activities.)
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has yet to take a position on the specifics of Intro 271, but during his 2001 run for mayor he said he wanted "carve outs" for religious groups and "maybe others." But Comptroller William Thompson, who helped draft the bill, and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum are fully supportive of it.
The Equal Benefits Bill applies only to those with contracts that are over $100,000. The contractor must extend benefits to its employees who work in the city or, if an out-of-town contractor, those who work on the city contract. The employer does not have to pay more for a domestic partner policy than the cost of a spousal policy -- and may just give the employee the cash equivalent of a spousal policy if a domestic partner policy cannot be obtained through his or her insurer.
The business community has yet to weigh in on the bill, though business groups tend to oppose government restrictions on their contracts. The mayor has shown an aversion to imposing additional regulations on contractors. But State Sen. Tom Duane (D-Chelsea), who intends to introduce a similar contractors bill in Albany, said that passage would help "attract the most highly qualified and motivated people to the city."
For more on this story, see my piece in the Gay City News, "Quinn Proposal Could Shake Up American Workplace."
Dennis de Leon, who was the chair of the City Commission on Human Rights in the Dinkins administration (1990-93), has just been recommended by the Rules Committee the City Council to be the Manhattan representative on the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Since 1994, he has been the president of the Latino Commission on AIDS where he has fought for more resources to stem the HIV epidemic, which has disproportionately affected Latino/a New Yorkers.
An attorney and longtime civil rights activist who is originally from California, de Leon is Latino, gay, and living with HIV, statuses that give him a unique perspective in monitoring police misconduct. As the City's Human Rights Commissioner, he chaired weeks of hearings on police-community relations that focused on the "Us vs. Them" mentality that hinders public safety and effective police work. (I was on the Commission myself at that time.) Police Commissioner Lee Brown, now mayor of Houston, asked us not to conduct the hearings, but the Human Rights Commission proceeded to take testimony from a broad range of New York communities frustrated with the wall that often exists between police and the policed.
De Leon said that he is taking on the Civilian Complaint Review Board "because I think that with my experience with the City Commission on Human Rights and working with police misconduct at the City Law Department [in the Koch administration], I have something to offer. I want to see if the Civilian Complaint Review Board is a vehicle for bringing about meaningful reform."
Civil Liberties Union Calls for Videotaping Interrogations
In the wake of revelations that the young men convicted in the 1989 Central Park jogger case may not have been the perpetrators of that crime, the New York Civil Liberties Union is making a renewed call for videotaping police interrogations. In an op-ed piece in Newsday now on the group's website, Christopher Dunn and Donna Lieberman of the Civil Liberties Union look at the case, under review by the Manhattan District Attorney until October 21. They say videotaping is the best defense against coerced confessions and note that when police officers are accused of wrongdoing, such taping is required.
Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights. He is co-host of the weekly Gay USA on Channel 35 on Thursdays at 11 PM.
Most New Yorkers probably think that government learned a great deal from September 11 about protecting the city, its symbols, landmarks, and people. The attack's immediate aftermath saw a barrage of reassuring official actions that were military-like in their precision -- securing vital areas, shutting down ground access to the city, and patrolling New York's perimeter from the skies and seas. In the months since, the official presence has withdrawn from the skies and the streets, but most New Yorkers assume hopefully that this retreat masks ongoing work behind the scenes. Citizens have no way of knowing for sure, since all anti-terror operations are secret. For those who agree with the former city official who told Richard Cohen of the Daily News that the September 11 attack meant that "the government let us down," the secrecy is yet another barrier to evaluating government actions.
Most New Yorkers -- 72 percent -- believe another terrorist attack is very or somewhat likely, according to a poll conducted by Blum & Weprin for the Daily News. A plurality of 28 percent speculate that it will probably involve smaller-scale car bombs or suicide-bombers, while 20 percent anticipate the use of biological weapons and 16 percent expect chemical weapons. Still, 72 percent say they feel safer or as safe in the city as anywhere else in the country. Are they right?
September 11 badly damaged public confidence in the federal security agencies -- the FBI and the CIA -- but enhanced confidence in the NYPD, which immediately went onto Omega Alert, its highest state of readiness. Through what Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly calls "target hardening" it has since been able to reduce the number of officers assigned to Omega posts Ñnot an insignificant matter since some violent crime, including rape, seems to be heading back up.
Nonetheless the New York Police Department has been refocusing the problem-solving strategy that helped reduce violent crime from local crime to terrorism. The strategy's specific elements, according to policing expert George Kelling, are accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment, effective tactics, and relentless follow-up and assessment. The media have contained many accounts of both historic and recent federal stone-walling of the NYPD on intelligence, the greatest federal failing, of course, on September 11. All parties now insist publicly that this is a problem of the past.
Perhaps it is. The NYPD is led by a police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, who has far stronger federal security credentials than any previous commissioner. His federal experience helps him in the many instances in which the NYPD tangles with the FBI and the federal Department of Justice over jurisdiction. As Cooper Union historian Fred Siegel says, "In a time in which the distinction between war and crime has narrowed, Kelly has already worked in positions in which he had to deal with this reality. Given that we're a target in New York, it's a huge asset that he's in a good position to make a difference."
Kelly has been aggressive, assigning NYPD personnel to areas that were once exclusively federal -- training some cops abroad, sending brass to the Naval War College, expanding the intelligence office to include foreign terrorism, and setting up a medical office to coordinate with federal agencies and the city's Department of Health on biological weaponry.
He has brought in high-level people with federal experience. He hired Ret. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Frank Libutti as Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism to head a new division on counterterrorism and to direct the department's work with the FBI/NYPD Joint Terrorist Task Force. The idea is to ensure cooperation and flow of information between the agencies Ñnot a strength in the past. Libutti oversees the new Terrorism Security and Analysis Section, which conducts comprehensive security assessments of terrorist threats in the city. An Incident Response Team has been set up to respond to requests for assistance at suspected terrorist events. Kelly also hired a former top CIA operative, David Cohen, as the new Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence. Both deputies report directly to Kelly, who also established a new position of medical adviser to coordinate with the Department of Health.
How effective are these measures? We're unlikely to know unless -- probably until -- there is another attack. Over the last decade, the city has been the target of at least three other known terrorist plots: the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center; the 1993 plot to bomb the United Nations and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels; and the 1997 plan to bomb the subways. New York remains the symbol of capitalism and Western culture, and a target.
Even before September 11 New Yorkers had become accustomed to security measures deterring the common thug: metal detectors, photo IDs, bag searches, checks of electronic equipment. The devices are often primitive and the training of the personnel poor, but routine security checks have prevented at least some crime and perhaps some terrorism. The future, however, lies with high-tech solutions that are independent of human judgment, such as new sensing machines that can detect biologic agents, explosives, suspicious voids in truck cargo, or weapons hidden on someone a distance away. Private companies tend to be way ahead of government in spending the millions of dollars these machines cost.
The other set of measures are what the security trade calls Israeli tactics -- traffic-stopping checkpoints, street closings, intrusive questioning, random identification checks, intimate searches, and racial profiling. These are ostensibly meant to deter crime, but they are also meant to remind the public often and aggressively of the presence of terrorists and to get the public to accept the authority of the police and military. The inconvenience that accompanies these tactics is deliberate.
Giuliani's NYPD actually introduced a few of these ideas, such as the traffic-stopping checkpoints that were ostensibly for drunk-driving or seat-belt use. His 1998 pedestrian-controlling concrete barriers are another Israeli tactic, a re-engineering to encourage people to go only where they are directed and to accustom the public to accepting restrictions on their movements.
Street closings, immensely disruptive to the city's business and psyche, are increasingly being insisted on by powerful interests, including the federal government. The main federal building in Lower Manhattan, 26 Federal Plaza, has always had security problems. It houses the FBI field office that has investigated many terror plots. It houses the Immigration and Nationalization Service. Lines of anxious immigrants with federal applications snake around the building during peak periods. In late 2000, the General Service Administration installed barriers and posts and hired additional guards. Some federal officials are now urging the closing-off of Broadway(the main artery downtown), Centre Street (which leads to the Brooklyn Bridge), and Worth Street.
The public has very limited access now to most government buildings in New York. The new federal courthouse, for example, is blocked by a huge hydraulic truck barrier. Police headquarters, never really accessible since it was built during the Lindsay administration, has a 24-hour guard out front. Visitors must go through three checkpoints, carrying a government-issued photo I.D.
One bright spot on this glum governmental scene, however, is City Hall, which Mayor Bloomberg has re-opened to political events. press conferences and peaceful gatherings . They are again allowed on the steps of City Hall, as they had been from the early 19th century until the Giuliani administration.
And it's not just public buildings that have internal checkpoints and external barriers. Ugly concrete bolsters are being installed in front of otherwise handsome new buildings, like the Jewish Community Center on the West Side. The elegant glass, iron, and greystone building would be a beauty, if its exterior were not marred by white and yellow blocks of junky concrete, looking as if a sloppy contractor forgot to take them home.
Much as it will seek to protect itself, New York will only be safe insofar as others protect it as well. The plane that flew into the World Trade Center took off from Logan Airport in Boston, an airport that the Federal Aviation Administration has repeatedly cited for safety violations. Everyone wants whatever went wrong at Logan Airport in Boston fixed. But what was it that failed? And will the FAA's new proposals and restrictions on passengers work? Are tactics like the FAA's ban on steak knives in first class or the abolition of curbside checking effective? Certainly neither would have prevented the hijackings.
Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, argues that aviation security is a law enforcement function, and belongs with a law enforcement agency, not the FAA. Law enforcement officials would be far less ready to listen to concerns about the weight of new cockpit doors (additional weight would affect the cost of every flight), or the extra costs of sky marshals or deputized pilots.
New York has an acute interest in these issues, and in all matters having to do with its air space. In May the FAA announced that its ban on flights by small planes and helicopters over key American cities had been lifted. Planes could return to flying under visual flight rules without asking permission to enter a city's airspace, or identifying themselves to FAA regional or local controllers.
Even before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, local officials had often been at odds with the FAA, which maintains that all small aircraft should be able to fly low, with no restrictions, over major cities and national monuments. This is in part because the FAA's role is to promote the aviation industry Ñnot police or regulate it beyond preventing collisions. They argue that flying freely anywhere in the country is a basic American right and expectation. As an FAA representative said at a community meeting in Manhattan, the same rules that apply over Kansas wheat fields apply to flying over New York City.
There is little doubt but that Al Qaeda intends to use small planes to attack more targets. Plans to pack a corporate jet with explosives were found in a German apartment rented by suspected Al Qaeda terrorists. Cell members in the U.S. trained at flight schools, obtained small-plane pilot licenses, and sought to rent crop dusters. The FBI renewed its warning about air attacks in early July.
Even the FAA concedes that some landmarks may be vulnerable. Deferring to its sister federal agency, the National Park Service, the FAA in late June banned flights near the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and the St. Louis Gateway Arch during the July 4 holidays. The Statue of Liberty ban will continue through September 30, and forbids any plane from flying below 1,500 feet within a 6,000-foot radius of the statue.
These bans may be comforting to some, but they are not significant security measures because the FAA has no air police to stop a plane violating its rules. It can only suspend the pilot's license and levy a fine. The NYPD, though it has an aviation unit and some older helicopters, has no official enforcement role or authority in the air over the city.
Anyone with a license can rent a plane at many of the approximately 2000 general aviation airfields within a short flight of New York. Few of these have more than the most minimal security. Pilot licenses, which are easily forged and carry no photos, are seldom verified. Planes, which can fly into these fields from almost anywhere in the US, are not inspected before departure. Helicopters do not even need an airport for departureÑand in any case can stop anywhere to pick up anything.
So long as New York's skies are open, the city is undefended. An attacker boarding an airplane at LaGuardia faces far more government inspection than one flying a plane at 700 feet across 42nd Street.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.
Rape was in the news recently in a couple of horrendous stories from Pakistan. But the crime should be making some headlines here as well. That, clearly, was the view of the people who attended a Women's Leadership Summit, convened last month by the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women, which is the largest NOW chapter in the nation. The summit was intended to determine what specific issues are of urgent concern to women, and several at the top were connected to rape.
According to Matthea Marquart, NOW's NYC chapter president, some recent court decisions have resulted in victims not being permitted to sue for pain and suffering when they were raped in the workplace (including one at Macys); they could only apply for workers compensation.
There is also a tremendous backlog of DNA evidence in rape cases, in the thousands. Former state chapter chair Noreen Connell said that there was a backlog of 16,000 evidence samples that had not been analyzed and that the New York Police Department now says that number is down to 6,000. "Some hospitals are not collecting the evidence correctly," she said, "and when the police get to it a year later, it's not usable." NOW is among the groups pushing for the Debbie Smith Act in Congress, named for a rape survivor whose perpetrator was eventually found to be in jail for a subsequent offense. It would provide training, funding, and uniform standards for sexual assault cases and rape kits. Senator Charles Schumer is sponsor of the alternate Sexual Assault Justice Act that would fund the processing of DNA samples from rape kits.
Connell also cited the way women who call the police about being battered often get their children taken away and put into foster care because they allowed their children to witness the abuse. "She is the victim and she is doubly victimized," Connell said. "These women are placed in homeless shelters for singles and are not able to get their kids out of foster care. They can't get housing for families because they have open 'abuse' cases," a Catch 22 if there ever was one. In the federal Nicholson v. Williams case, New York Judge Jack Weinstein ruled in March that the city had to stop prosecuting battered mothers for child abuse. The women's group is focusing on how to get the city to follow through on the ruling.
Harriet Lessel, president of the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, talked to the group about the need for emergency contraception at city hospitals. State law only requires the hospitals to make sure that victims can get the timely drug within a certain amount of time, but does not require the hospitals to distribute it themselves. The state Department of Health could issue such a guideline under the Sexual Assault Reform Act of 2001. But legislation is being pushed by the New York chapter of National Abortion Rights Action League to mandate such treatment.
Finally, the summit took up the continued backlog of cases at the city and state human rights commissions. The state chapter of the National Organization for Women has had a lawsuit against the State Division for Human Rights for more than a decade now to get them to clear up its backlog. The lead attorney in that case, David Raff, has authored a bill for the state legislature to commit necessary resources to the division, but given the millions of dollars it would require, no hope is given for its passage in this economic downturn.
Just as alarming as the backlog, said Connell, is the fact that more and more businesses are forcing their employees to sign statements pledging not to invoke civil rights laws as a condition of employment. The courts have upheld these contracts, wherein the employee promises to abide by arbitration rather than suing. "About 40 percent of large law firms now have them," she said. "It makes the human rights laws unenforceable." There is a Civil Rights Protection Act in Congress to ban these contracts, but "it won't see the light of day in the Republican House," said Connell. Marquart is working with the City Council's Select Committee on Civil Rights to see if something can be passed on the local level to counteract this trend.
Mayor Bloomberg has yet to make a single appointment to the City Commission on Human Rights other than its paid chair, Patricia Gatling. That leaves twelve of fifteen unpaid commissionerships vacant and just three available-the minimum number required to make final decisions on cases.
Cliff Mulqueen, the Deputy Commissioner of the Law Enforcement Bureau, said, "The commissioners only become involved if a case goes to trial and the administrative judge makes a decision and orders a penalty. That hasn't happened in a while. They weren't doing a lot of work on these cases during the Giuliani administration." He said that there were about three cases that made it all the way up the line in the last three years and twenty since 1994, according to General Counsel Randy Wills who also served under the previous mayor.
Avery Mehlman, also a deputy for law enforcement, said that thousands of complaints have been resolved by settlement or by a finding of no probable cause. Gatling's original goal was to get the backlog of 4,500 complaints resolved by May, but so far 2,000 have been reviewed. Some are being referred for trial. And many of those that have been denied probable cause are appealing back to Commissioner Gatling. If she turns the complainants down, they can appeal to the courts.
The mayor's press office did not return calls for comment on why Bloomberg has failed to appoint new commissioners. The administration, after budgeting for a few new staff to work on the backlog, is now asking for cuts (along with every other agency).
I made an error in my July column, leaving the category of "disability" out of the list of criteria in which discrimination is illegal in the state of New York. Thanks to disability activists, I found my mistake.
The state law posted in the Division of Human Rights web site leaves out disability and some other protected categories in its first listing of them. "The opportunity to obtain employment without discrimination because of age, race, creed, color, national origin, sex or marital status is hereby recognized as and declared to be a civil right," it says. You have to scroll well down the page to find that the disabled are also covered in employment. Age is also treated that way. (No matter how far down you scroll, you won't find the category of "sexual orientation." The State Senate ended its session once again without passing the state gay and lesbian rights bill that has passed the Democrat-dominated Assembly overwhelmingly for the past decade, despite the fact that Governor George Pataki said he would do "all in his power" to pass the bill this year.)
The City Commission on Human Rights does not have the same problem as the state commission. When the city's law is amended, the entire law is rewritten to include new categories (such as "gender identity" passed this year). The city web site also includes a plain language version of the law that is user-friendly for potential complainants.
Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights. He is co-host of the weekly Gay USA on Channel 35 on Thursdays at 11 PM.