Cuomo & SUNY 2020 (photo via The Governor's Office on flickr)
In the height of political chaos across the country, New Yorkers have much to be proud of: our state recently increased the minimum wage and signed paid family leave into law in this year's budget, major contributions toward shared prosperity for all. This is certainly in large part because of Governor Cuomo’s strong leadership.
However, this year’s higher education budget is a mixed bag for New Yorkers, leaving many unfinished items on the table and a trail of uncertainty for years to come.
Governor Cuomo has positioned himself as a hero, the leader who saved our state from political gridlock and dysfunction and delivered for New York families and students. But let’s set the record straight - after the governor introduced his proposed budget in January, it was our students who organized and fought back and our Legislature that held the line against the governor’s unnecessarily austere higher education budget.
We should all celebrate the victories we achieved this budget cycle. Among them are a one-year tuition freeze at SUNY and CUNY, which comes after five years of annual $300 tuition hikes. We also achieved an increase in funding for the state’s educational opportunity programs and for full-time students at our community colleges. Advocates also successfully blocked Governor Cuomo’s planned $485 million state disinvestment to CUNY -- a third of the operating budgets for CUNY’s senior colleges.
Yet, when it comes to ensuring that New York puts higher education access and quality first, these successes are incremental at best.
The state has used tuition dollars to fill funding gaps by raising tuition, thereby shifting the cost to New York families for years. This is part of the governor’s SUNY 2020 Rational Tuition Policy, scheduling annual tuition hikes of $300, totaling $1,500 over five years, which expires at the end of this academic year. How a $1,500 increase could be considered “rational” policy is beyond comprehension.
Furthermore, it’s concerning that the FY 2017 budget did not provide the roughly $100 million to SUNY and CUNY that would have come from continued tuition increases, which after years of disinvestment further starves the universities and threatens their ability to ensure quality, affordable education for New York students.
A one-year freeze should be the first step to rolling back these hikes and strengthening state investment in public higher education.
All of this has taken place as the state’s Tuition Assistance Program (TAP), the key tool to help families pay for college, remains grossly out of date. In fact, the governor’s pervasive funding cuts have created a shortfall for the first time in the program’s 40-year history. What’s worse, the program currently requires that, when a student qualifies for it, SUNY and CUNY must use their operating budget to make up the funding difference between the maximum TAP award and tuition, taking away resources to provide other support services.
This also leaves hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to fill on their own the gaps that TAP used to cover. Currently, the maximum TAP award is stuck at $5,165 while tuition at CUNY is $6,330 and at SUNY is $6,470, creating a gap of more than $1,100 depending on where you go. This is estimated to cost CUNY $50 million in the next year alone.
The state needs to increase and index the maximum TAP award with tuition and make the structural changes necessary to ensure true access for all New York students. This includes opening TAP up to part-time and undocumented students.
Another broken promise is New York’s funding commitment made through the SUNY 2020 plan, which required the state to provide SUNY and CUNY baseline funding levels that would also cover mandatory cost increases, also known as Maintenance of Effort (MOE). Late last year, Governor Cuomo vetoed a MOE bill, which passed through the Legislature with bipartisan support, saying it’s a budget issue. The governor neglected to include it in this year’s executive budget, and it wasn’t included in the final budget deal either, continuing to cost the universities money that could go to lowering tuition, restoring classes cut in tough budget times, and providing support services to students.
The state’s budget deal also comes at the immediate expense of the CUNY faculty, members of which haven’t had a pay raise or contract in nearly six years, threatening CUNY’s ability to attract and keep the talent necessary to provide a competitive and high-quality education in a 21st century economy. Funding for a final contract deal should be reached before the state legislative session ends in June.
With New York’s $147 billion budget and GDP of $1.4 trillion – as much as the country of Spain – our state higher education system should be leading the nation. And it certainly shouldn’t disguise disinvestment as short-term freezes and temporary fixes, particularly when it comes to quality, affordable postsecondary opportunities.
How the governor and the state Legislature address the unfinished business outlined above over the course of this session, and the session following the November elections, will be the true test of how our leaders and lawmakers value access and opportunity at the people’s university.
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Kevin Stump is Northeast Director of Young Invincibles. YI sits on the Steering Committee of the CUNY Rising Alliance.
OnTwitter @KevinStump and @YoungInvincible.
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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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