Council Member Brooks-Powers, the author (left), with MTA CEO Lieber (photo: William Alatriste/NYC Council)
For too long, New York City’s transportation conversations have focused largely on communities – both geographic and otherwise – that are best able to navigate our city’s streets, sidewalks, waterways, and subways. New York City is now at a pivotal moment where we are seeing historic funding from Washington, D.C. and the first female majority City Council. It is time to reshape the transportation and infrastructure conversation that for too long has left out the outer-boroughs and transportation desert communities.
Transportation equity is a major issue in our city that must be confronted, and I have begun working on it as the new chair of the City Council's Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. It requires addressing the needs of neighborhoods that have suffered from divestment, long commutes, often in two-fare zones, and a lack of transit access. It also calls for us to make our streets and public transportation ADA-accessible, ensure our children are safe traveling to and from school, promote the use of minority- and women-owned businesses (MWBEs) when we allocate our transportation dollars, and focus on improvement – not just enforcement – when we tackle dangerous driving.
Fundamentally, transportation equity can only be achieved by listening to the needs of all communities, and prioritizing people and places that need our efforts and resources most. To engage in thoughtful dialogue regarding transportation equity citywide, the Council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is taking a comprehensive approach. We held our first oversight hearing on the topic this week, allowing transportation stakeholders to provide their insights. As, Chair, I have also embarked on a transportation and infrastructure listening tour of all 51 Council Districts. I want to talk not only to my Council colleagues and transportation advocates, but also to residents in different neighborhoods about how the City Council can help address their transportation needs.
Many of the challenges my district faces are experienced by neighborhoods across the city, and I’m excited to tackle these issues. It’s also important that we remember how these “citywide” issues disproportionately affect some New Yorkers, and question why that is and what we can do to change it.
One example of this is street safety. All New Yorkers suffer when our streets are unsafe, and no neighborhood is immune to the impacts of traffic deaths and injuries. Yet, a lack of focus and investment, historically from the city government, has left districts like mine – District 31 in Southeast Queens – to experience more traffic deaths than anywhere else in the city, based on data from last year. Much is the same in other districts like mine, from the Bronx to Staten Island. This means more of our friends and families are being hurt and killed on our streets. We need solutions that include addressing historic underinvestment that has left streets in some neighborhoods far less safe.
These disproportionate negative effects are also not limited to issues of street safety. As the data confirms, this also applies to traffic pollution, lack of accessible infrastructure, and other challenges.
As the Chair of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in the New York City Council, I want to make sure that we address these important issues holistically, and our city agencies are responsive to the individual needs of communities. That means taking community input seriously and understanding that one solution may not work for every block in the city.
I am committed to making sure all of our communities’ voices are heard to achieve transportation equity across our city.
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City Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers is the Majority Whip of the City Council and represents the 31st Council District, which includes the neighborhoods of Arverne, Brookville, Edgemere, Laurelton, Springfield Gardens, Rosedale, and Far Rockaway. She is chair of the Council’s Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. On Twitter @CMBrooksPowers.
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A new mom (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)
When I had my first child, I couldn’t believe how expensive it was to give birth. Thankfully, I had no complications, but the bills related to my brief hospital stay added up and compounded the financial strain of caring for my new baby.
Eighteen years later, I was pregnant with my third child and worried that the costs would again be too high for me to afford. But this time, I was able to participate in the SEIU 32BJ Health Fund’s Maternity Care Program in partnership with Mt Sinai and my experience was a complete 180 from what had occurred nearly two decades earlier.
Every last dollar of my pre- and post-natal care was covered. I didn’t pay a single hospital bill out-of-pocket, which was an enormous relief, both emotionally and financially. My baby and I are happy and healthy, and I can now focus on saving for his future.
Unfortunately, not every New York mom is so lucky.
The Health Fund was spurred to create its Maternity Program in 2020 in response to the alarming statistics about the danger of giving birth in New York. Roughly 20 women die per 100,000 live births in our state every year, a higher rate than the rest of the county, which is already lagging far behind other developed nations in this important category. And it’s especially dangerous for women of color. Black women are more than twice as likely to experience life-threatening complications during or after childbirth and eight times as likely to die from pregnancy-related deaths.
Even when a pregnancy is routine and without complications, having a baby is still incredibly expensive – and the cost can vary widely depending on where you live, according to a New York State Health Foundation analysis. This is another reason why 32BJ’s no-copay Maternity Program is so important and beneficial to working moms.
It seems logical that a program with a proven track record and the potential to save lives should be expanded and replicated throughout the five boroughs so more mothers like me can benefit. But NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP), one of the city’s largest hospital systems, has threatened the program’s very existence. NYP wanted the Fund to either end the program to eliminate competition from other area facilities or allow NYP to offer it without guaranteeing to meet the high-quality standards that make the program so special.
A new piece of legislation introduced in Albany, the Hospital Equity & Affordability Law (HEAL), will help rein in out-of-control hospital prices and curb the anti-competitive contracting practices employed by hospital executives that block access to innovative care like the Maternity Program. When passed and signed into law, HEAL will enable the Health Fund to expand access to the program and establish a blueprint for other self-insured funds to follow at hospitals across the state.
At a time when new parents should be celebrating and bonding with their newborns, too many are instead worried about how to pay for their hospital bills. Giving birth and caring for an infant is stressful enough. More moms should be able to enjoy this life-changing experience like I did – without having to pay a single cent toward the highest-possible quality care.
It is far past time for the state to do everything possible to improve outcomes for moms and babies – especially moms of color, who face unnecessary and life-threatening challenges when giving birth in New York. Making HEAL a law would be a good first step. I hope state lawmakers and the governor act during this legislative session, so more mothers can get the kind of care they both need and deserve.
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Shaunte Turner is a member of 32BJ SEIU and works in the cleaning division at Madison Square Garden.
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Emergency (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)
At the start of the 1960s, just over four out of every 100,000 Americans were murdered each year. The murder rate rose sharply during that decade, and then fluctuated between 8 and 10 murders per 100,000 for most of the 1980s and early 1990s, before it began to fall in the mid-1990s. By 2014, the murder rate had fallen to 4.4 murders for every 100,000 people, back to where it stood at the beginning of the 1960s.
That year, 2014, was one of the safest in our nation’s history. It is also the year when the trend shifted. In the years since 2014, the murder rate has risen by almost 50%, to 6.5 murders for every 100,000 people.
This is the latest headline that has been broadcast out to the nation. But the headline misses a fact about American violence that is crucial to understanding both its causes and its consequences.
In many cities with relatively high levels of violence, some communities are untouched by shootings and assaults, while others experience extreme incidents of violence on a regular basis. One of the most robust findings about violence is its concentration within a small number of street segments, intersections, city blocks and neighborhoods, characterized by racial and economic segregation.
The spatial distribution of violence is remarkably stable: In a study of violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods over 56 years, we found that the most violent Chicago neighborhoods in 1965 have continued to have the highest levels of violence in every period since, all the way through 2020.
Shifting our perspective from cities to neighborhoods changes the meaning of the latest national trends. From 1991 to 2014, when the murder rate fell by roughly half, the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the most disadvantaged segments of the population, benefited the most. Life expectancy rose most sharply for Black men, the racial achievement gap narrowed the most in states where violence fell the furthest, and economic mobility improved for young people who were raised in places where violence was steadily falling.
But as violence has risen over the last six years, the same communities have been hit hardest. When we analyzed data on fatal shootings from the 100 largest U.S. cities, we found that the recent rise of violence has been concentrated in areas characterized by poverty and racial segregation. Over this period, neighborhoods with lower poverty rates experienced a 59% increase in fatal shootings. High-poverty neighborhoods experienced an 89% increase. In neighborhoods composed of a majority of Black Americans, the rate of fatal shootings rose by 87%, while all other neighborhoods saw a 60% increase.
These trends are a continuation of a long-term pattern. When violence rose in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, it was felt most acutely in areas marked by concentrated poverty and racial segregation. When violence fell from the 1990s to the 2010s, it fell the most in these same communities. Violence continues to be concentrated in neighborhoods that experience multiple forms of disadvantage, from poverty to disease to segregation to joblessness. The question is why?
The answer takes us back to the middle of the 20th century, when a set of social and economic forces combined with federal, state, and local policy to create a crisis in American cities.
As jobs in the manufacturing sector began to disappear, middle-class families took advantage of subsidies to leave central cities, joblessness rose and poverty became more concentrated in central city neighborhoods left behind. As political power and government resources shifted to the suburbs, public housing complexes and schools deteriorated, sidewalks were not maintained, and public parks were left untended.
Instead of responding to this set of challenges with investments in central city communities, the federal government disengaged from urban issues and responded with punitive social policies that have exacerbated the problems faced by urban populations. The abandonment of central cities began under President Nixon, who argued that urban neighborhoods should be left on their own to deal with rising poverty and joblessness.
In the subsequent decades, federal investments in central cities have typically been implemented on a small scale and only for a limited timeframe. Never has there been a systematic effort to deal with the problem of urban poverty through sustained, large-scale investments in the people and the institutions of the nation’s city neighborhoods.
Punishment, on the other hand, has been the most consistent response to urban crime, violence, and poverty. Harsh state policies, such as eliminating parole and establishing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and violent crimes, combined with more aggressive policing and prosecution at the local level to push more Americans into the apparatus of the criminal legal system and to keep them enmeshed within this system for longer durations of time.
Our nation’s response to extreme urban inequality created the conditions for violence to rise. As political influence and public funding declines, core community institutions like schools, daycare centers, parks, playgrounds, libraries, and other features of the built environment are less likely to be supported and maintained. Flagging investment in local infrastructure leads to poorly lit spaces, abandoned lots, and empty buildings that are vulnerable to becoming areas of violence.
Robert Sampson’s research on collective efficacy demonstrates how the concentration of social and economic disadvantage can undermine social cohesion and trust among residents, making it less likely that they will take active steps to reinforce shared expectations for behavior, work together to solve problems, and achieve commonly shared goals for the community.
The relationship between disadvantage and violence is reciprocal. Inequality causes violence, but violence amplifies inequality. Violence disrupts learning, leads people to retreat from public spaces, leads businesses to close shop, and leads parents to seek a way out of the neighborhood. In the U.S. context, the prevalence of violence frequently leads to a shift in the central institutions and actors within a neighborhood. Representatives of the criminal legal system, including police officers, parole officers, school safety officers, and detectives become dominant figures in public spaces, and squad cars, sirens, and police tape become common features of the landscape. When we mapped data on shootings with data on police violence and incarceration, we found that the neighborhoods where violence is concentrated are the same neighborhoods that have experienced extreme levels of imprisonment and police shootings.
It is crucial to avoid the tendency to report these statistics on poverty, race, incarceration, and violence without an accompanying explanation of the link. In the United States, long-term disinvestment in central city neighborhoods has reinforced segregation by race, ethnicity, and income, weakening community institutions and undermining community residents’ capacity to work together to solve common challenges.
Our nation’s response to violence, and to the challenge of extreme urban inequality, has relied heavily on the institutions of punishment. This has compounded disadvantage. Communities with high levels of violence are also places where police violence is more common and where a large segment of the population is entangled within the expansive apparatus of the criminal legal system. It is a mistake to look at this and conclude simply that where there is violence, we should expect high levels of incarceration. The pattern of compounded disadvantage is a result of the unique American response to the challenges that emerged in central cities in the late 1960s; a response that featured the dual strategy of abandonment and punishment.
The fall of violence from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s makes clear that high levels of violence are not inevitable. One of us (Sharkey) has argued that violence fell because of a set of efforts to transform urban space, through both aggressive policing and intensive surveillance as well as through the mobilization of local community organizations who worked to reclaim public spaces and build stronger neighborhoods. But the fall of violence was precarious, because the dominant methods to respond to violence haven’t changed over time. The United States has not undertaken a large-scale, sustained agenda of investment to confront extreme urban inequality.
Our national approach has meant that when violence falls, the most disadvantaged communities will benefit the most, and when violence rises, it is these same neighborhoods that suffer the most severe consequences. And through the ebbs and flows, our reliance on police and prison means that a large segment of the population will experience the dislocation that comes with a period of imprisonment, and entire communities will continue to feel the resentment that comes from seeing their neighbors and family members mistreated by the police.
The trends that we have documented, and the spatial convergence of violence, segregation, poverty, institutional decline, and incarceration, lead us to the following conclusion: it may not be possible to address the challenge of American violence in a sustainable way without addressing the much larger challenge of extreme urban inequality.
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Patrick Sharkey is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and the founder of AmericanViolence.org. Alisabeth Marsteller is a pre-doctoral research associate at Princeton University. On Twitter @patrick_sharkey and @aamarsteller.
This column is part of a series published by Gotham Gazette and appearing in the inaugural issue of Vital City, a policy non-profit focused on developing practical and actionable solutions to public safety problems.
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Mayor Adams & President Biden discuss gun violence (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
In 2020, there were 375,800 fewer serious crimes in America compared to 2019, about a 5% decline. Amidst the overall decline, one specific type of crime ran counter to trend: murders, most of which are committed with guns, were up by 5,000, a rise of nearly 30%.
How should we think about these statistics? Should we be happy that serious crime is down or concerned about the increase in homicides? We argue this trend is actually bad news overall. As Berkeley criminologists Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have noted, crime is not the problem – gun violence is. This distinction has a number of implications for how we think about criminal justice.
Our logic might be easiest to see through analogy. The U.S. in 2020 also saw a decline in the total number of respiratory viral infections, driven by a massive reduction in the seasonal flu. But amidst this overall decline, there was an increase in one new, specific kind of respiratory virus: COVID-19. The result is that amidst a large decline in illness, the number of deaths from flu increased from the normal level (30,000-60,000) to over 600,000.
What’s immediately obvious from this analogy is that every virus is not the same. The public health consequences of the seasonal flu versus COVID-19 are vastly different. Because COVID-19 is so much deadlier than the seasonal flu, billions of people around the world fundamentally changed how they lived their lives. Online replaced in-person, with devastating effects on social life and the economy. A whole generation of schoolchildren were unable to make normal progress in their studies, or in learning how to get along with their peers. The elderly lost contact with their children and grandchildren.
A CDC-sponsored survey in the summer of 2020 found that 40% of American adults were struggling with their mental health during the pandemic. Among people ages 18-25 the figure was more like 70%; fully 1 in 4 young people said that they had considered suicide. Meanwhile, as a direct result of our behavioral responses to COVID-19, the global economy was devastated. In the U.S., the unemployment rate of 3.7% in 2019 surged to 8.9% in 2020.
As with COVID-19, so with crime. Property crime accounts for around 80% of all crime in America. For the victims of a pickpocket or a break-in, crime is a major irritant. For retailers, protecting and insuring against shoplifting and employee theft is a real cost of doing business. But property crimes are rarely life-changing events for the victims. And while the threat of property loss might lead us to take extra care to lock our cars, or install an alarm system, it doesn’t substantially impair the quality of our lives.
In contrast, the fear of gun violence substantially distorts the way that millions of people live their lives. There is increasing evidence that children who witness gun violence tend to underperform in school and have a variety of psychological problems that interfere with normal development. In response to gun violence, families that can afford to move often do. One estimate by economists Julie Berry Cullen and Steve Levitt suggests that, on average, a neighborhood murder has 70 times the effect of other crimes in persuading households to relocate.
A high-violence neighborhood suffers reduced property values and business investment. Employers and people of means seek more attractive places to locate. Reduced tax revenues make it harder for the surrounding city to address these challenges. It is easy to see the linkage here between endemic violence and poverty.
The Nobel-laureate economist Thomas Schelling came up with a way to measure the total social harms from different social problems – what people would be willing to pay to avoid or have less of them. A reduction in serious violence would have tangible effects on property values and the cost of the myriad activities to avoid and mitigate victimization, such as long commutes to the suburbs.
“Contingent valuation” studies, where a cross-section of the public is asked how much they would be willing to pay for reductions in different types of crimes, provide further evidence. One study of this sort by Mark Cohen of Vanderbilt and colleagues estimated the public’s willingness to pay for each prevented crime equaled: $5,098 for larceny, $21,666 per stolen car, $44,606 per burglary, $108,329 per aggravated assault, $356,849 per armed robbery, $369,593 per rape, and fully $15.04 million per murder.
Crime overall may have declined by about 5% in 2020, but the social harm from the rise in murders, most of which were committed with guns, more than offset the reduction of several hundred thousand fewer reported crimes total. The result is that, on net, the total costs or harms of crime in America (murders plus all other crimes) increased by $72 billion according to the willingness-to-pay framework.
If the problem of crime in America is indeed first and foremost a problem of gun violence, several important implications follow. The first is to ensure that law enforcement agencies prioritize violence prevention. “Public safety” begins with protection against fear, injury, and death.
Further, the victims of gun violence, most of whom are from low-income communities of color, need help of all kinds. They also need to believe that their cases are being taken seriously. Ensuring accountability for gun violence can improve public safety without exacerbating the problem of mass incarceration; murders account for only about one-tenth of one percent of all arrests. In a country where the share of unsolved murders increased from 1-in-20 in 1965 to 1-in-3 today (and is more like 1-in-2 in cities like Chicago), law enforcement in America for some reason made 1.5 million arrests for drug charges in 2019 – the vast majority of which, research suggests, have very little public safety value.
We must account for the consequences on crime, especially violent crime, when we are thinking about how much to invest in social policies. New York’s summer jobs program for teens is a case in point; knowing that this program not only provides valuable income and work experience to young people, but also reduces homicide, is surely relevant for decisions about how widely to scale those efforts. Another example is the effort to clean up vacant lots in Philadelphia, which might initially be thought of as a ‘nice to have’ in a city struggling with so many other big problems – until we see in the data that such beautification efforts reduce gun violence.
While some criminologists have disputed large estimates for the social costs of gun violence on political grounds, fearing that they may be used to justify policies they don’t like (such as imprisonment), the large burden gun violence imposes on society is equally an argument for more spending on social programs.
The direct victims of gun violence tend to come from a fairly narrow slice of society, but the threat of gun violence has far-reaching implications. It is serious violence that does the most damage to our quality of life. We recall the “crack” era a generation ago and shudder. As gunplay once again becomes common in formerly peaceful neighborhoods, peace of mind is among the victims.
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Philip Cook is the ITT/Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy Emeritus at Duke University. Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Thanks to Elizabeth Rasich for valuable assistance.
This column is part of a series published by Gotham Gazette and appearing in the inaugural issue of Vital City, a policy non-profit focused on developing practical and actionable solutions to public safety problems.
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Mayor Adams & an NYPD officer (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
Those who live, work, and visit New York City deserve to feel safe, whether walking to the store, visiting a park, or taking the subway. For those who commute to work in the city, like many union construction workers, they deserve to feel safe and know they will go home to their families at night. Unfortunately, right now in New York City, crime is rising, and violence is permeating our normal way of life. It feels like every day, headlines are filled with stories highlighting preventable and tragic loss of life. In fact, the NYPD recently reported that crime in New York City spiked 38.5% in January of this year compared to January 2021, with 9,566 reported ‘major crimes’ in the first month of 2022.
This problem is not unique to New York, it is happening nationwide, and the trend remains troubling.
Unfortunately, the uptick in crime recently hit close to home. A young and talented union carpenter was killed just at the end of January while on his way home from the store. He was only 25 years old and had his entire future in front of him. His father, who is also a union carpenter, mourns his only son. I speak for the entire District Council of Carpenters when I say our thoughts and prayers are with his family. Any loss of life is heartbreaking, but it is truly devastating to see one of our own union brothers have his young life cut short.
As union carpenters, we work both on and off the job to keep our members safe, which is why we advocate for protections and safety measures for hardworking New Yorkers every day. Now, it is time to come together as a city and make a change before we lose more precious lives. New Yorkers have never shied away from a challenge. We have lived through tremendously challenging times -- 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more. The recent increase in crime is no different. We refuse to let our way of life and pursuit of happiness be derailed by those whose intentions are to tear communities apart, rather than build them up.
It is time that we support and invest in common-sense programs that will make the city safer. When the NYC Carpenters Union endorsed Eric Adams to run New York City, not only did we understand we were endorsing a pro-labor mayor, but also, we knew he would work tirelessly to keep us safe. We are proud to support Mayor Adams’ efforts to ensure public safety as a top priority.
In the union, we offer our members access to treatment for mental health issues, so we speak from a place of knowledge when we say that as a city, we need renewed investments in mental health treatment and care. Likewise, we require our members to participate in trainings and certifications to maintain safety standards, so we feel strongly that there should be investment in education, community building, and enforcement.
The bottom line – we must construct a safer city and create a stronger economy for all New Yorkers.
We have endured a long couple of years of COVID-19 pain and restrictions that have upended our lives. Now, spring is around the corner, and people are ready to re-enter society in a new way, but only if we feel safe to do so. More people are returning to work in the city and construction is resuming, but a lot more people who live in the city and beyond want to return to spend money shopping, seeing Broadway shows, visiting loved ones, going out to dinner, and taking advantage of all the city has to offer. These activities are the lifeblood of our city and its people.
The NYC Carpenters Union built this city over the last 100 years, and alongside New Yorkers, we have weathered a lot of ups and downs. We believe that to properly revitalize our economy, there must be safety measures in place, so that people feel safe doing everything from using mass transportation and to simply walking around their own neighborhoods.
Facing this problem head-on and forging long-lasting solutions will not be easy, but with new leadership at the helm, we could turn over a new leaf and build a safer city for everyone. Let’s work together to invest in our neighborhoods and communities, create connections, and build each other up. That’s the union carpenters’ way, but most importantly, that’s the New York way.
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Joseph Geiger is Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the New York City & Vicinity District Council of Carpenters. On Twitter @CarpentersNYC.
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DA Gonzalez & others in Brooklyn (photo: Brooklyn DA's office)
What does a safe community look like? We know the answer, because such communities exist, usually in well-resourced, predominantly white neighborhoods where people have the resources to meet their basic needs—including healthy food, shelter, transportation, clean and inviting public spaces, childcare, education, and health care. A safe community is also a place where people know and trust their neighbors, take care of each other, hold each other accountable, and resolve conflicts peacefully when they arise.
Because safety is rooted in community wellness and community relationships, the work of building long-term safety can only be done effectively by the community, in the community. And that requires investment. Law enforcement, other government agencies, and outside civic institutions should play a supporting role by shifting their power and resources to community members to build the future they want.
Transferring power from law enforcement to community members is necessary because arrests and prosecutions alone do not create lasting public safety. Temporarily incarcerating someone who causes harm only prevents further harm while they are incarcerated (at great cost to them, their family, and the community). Even putting someone through a court-mandated program outside of jail often has little long-term impact on public safety if the program has no organic connection to the person’s life after the mandated period ends. While well-intended, such programs all too easily become exercises in checking boxes and jumping through hoops just to get out from under the court’s thumb rather than opportunities for real transformation.
Enduring public safety is achieved by integrating people into a stabilizing and supportive social network in their own community. It requires empowering grassroots organizations with the resources and autonomy they need to meet struggling people where they are and build trust without the threat of state force looming in the background. And it requires repairing the harm that has been inflicted on poor and working-class communities of color by generations of systemic racism and economic exploitation. Government must direct public resources into communities where poverty, trauma, and despair are fueling violence and empower community members to decide how public resources can best be used to enhance community wellness.
We have long known that good schools, family-supporting jobs, dignified housing, care for those who are mentally or physically ill, and neighbors who look out for and are accountable to each other are key ingredients for public safety. Resolving conflict by calling police and endangering a community member’s liberty, or even their life, should be a last resort. And yet the pervasive and coercive presence of law enforcement has been normalized in poor and working-class communities of color to a degree that would never be accepted in wealthy, predominantly white communities. The movement for Black lives opened up a serious conversation about shifting public resources away from the law enforcement responses that we know are harmful to investments in the basic civic goods and strong community connections that we know can produce lasting safety. Now we need to follow through.
As the Brooklyn District Attorney and as a long-time community leader in Brownsville, Brooklyn, we have come together to transform public safety in one community by shifting power. On one side of this transformation, the DA’s Office is giving up power over a significant number of misdemeanor cases—something prosecutors are normally loath to do—by diverting those cases to community-based organizations and declining to prosecute the individuals involved. On the other side, Brownsville Think Tank Matters (or BTTM, where Cyrus Smith serves Chief Operating Officer) and other community-based organizations are taking up the power and responsibility to redress harm and keep the community safe.
Cases include criminal mischief, petit larceny, possession of stolen property, and misdemeanor assault. They hold people accountable and support them through a sustained process of changing their life circumstances so that they will not harm the community again in the future.
When the DA’s Office first approached BTTM about partnering, Cyrus was skeptical. Like many in his community, he’d had negative experiences with law enforcement, and he was dubious that a partnership with a law enforcement agency could be positive for his clients. It took months of negotiation and baby steps to build the trust we now have, but it has been more than worth it.
The key to the success of our diversion partnership is that the DA’s Office declines to prosecute early in the process, instead of holding the threat of prosecution over the person’s head. The office hands over power and responsibility to BTTM and pays BTTM to stay engaged with the person beyond the duration of the case, keeping them on a positive path. Without law enforcement coercion, BTTM has the credibility to establish trusting long-term relationships with people using resources that would otherwise go to prosecutions.
BTTM’s engagement starts with an accountability conversation about what the person could have done differently to avoid getting arrested, and how they can avoid police contact in the future. Then they focus on how BTTM can help the person reach their life goals. They talk about how they can work toward the person’s individual goals in ways that will also advance community goals.
Many people who get arrested for misdemeanors are unemployed or underemployed, so BTTM helps them develop a 5-to-7-year plan for obtaining a good-paying job. It’s a very different mindset than “what can we do to make sure this person doesn’t get arrested again in the next six months?” Obviously, we don’t want the person to harm someone or have further criminal justice contact, but preventing those outcomes is really a byproduct of helping them look at their life holistically, establishing goals, and opening doors of opportunity for them to achieve their goals. When people have goals, and the tools to achieve them, they have hope. Giving people hope is transformative.
This process isn’t a quick fix, but neither is jail. Most people come out of jail worse off than when they went in, and many cycle through the system dozens of times. If a BTTM client gets rearrested and goes to jail, that person and their family knows they will return to a supportive network that remains committed to their success. BTTM doesn’t give up on people, which encourages their clients not to give up on themselves.
The Brooklyn DA’s Office and BTTM are proud to be part of this transformation, but we are not alone. The 73rd Precinct of the NYPD, which covers Brownsville, is also giving up a degree of power to the community through an initiative called the Brownsville Safety Alliance. The Alliance is a coalition of community organizations that works to improve safety in specific neighborhood locations that have been plagued by crime while reducing contact between police and residents.
The Brownsville Safety Alliance relies on trusted community members to create safety without heavy-handed law enforcement. It identifies locations that have a lot of low-level criminal activity or a history of shootings. The police pull back from these locations for five days and community organizations take responsibility for the area. Violence interrupters (affiliated with the city’s Crisis Management System) maintain a presence to intervene and deescalate conflicts. Other community organizations provide referrals for social services and distribute free groceries.
The DA’s Office is present, but not to prosecute. Instead, the office provides information about re-entry services, victim services, and opportunities to seal convictions. Peer counselors, funded by the DA’s Office but employed by a community non-profit, distribute Narcan kits and train people on how to use them to reverse overdoses. The police are a few blocks away to respond if necessary.
So far, the areas that have been identified by the Brownsville Safety Alliance have experienced less criminal activity, and less contact between police and residents, than when police are on routine patrol.
During a recent Brownsville Safety Alliance week, a violence interrupter affiliated with Brownsville In, Violence Out saw someone pass a gun to someone else and noticed them eying a third individual. He approached the men with the gun and deescalated the situation. They had been selling drugs on that corner to support themselves and their families and were about to shoot someone else who had encroached on their turf. The violence interrupter peacefully secured the gun and promised the would-be shooter he would help him obtain food and counseling as well as training and certification for a better job than selling drugs. No one got shot and no one got sent to prison. Instead, a long-time community resident who has served time in prison for violence himself prevented others from going down that path.
Another initiative called NeighborhoodStat, launched in 2014 by the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, empowers neighborhood residents to set local budgetary priorities and then hold city agencies accountable for delivering on those priorities. By bringing both government data and local knowledge to the table, NeighborhoodStat can direct resources from all relevant agencies to the areas of greatest need and serve as a vehicle for residents to hold agencies accountable, both for long-term investments and for routine constituent service matters.
The next step in Brownsville is to integrate all of the efforts we have described here into a Neighborhood Safety Hub to manage community-based diversion.
Police will be able to take people who would otherwise be arrested straight to the Hub for services, so those cases will never come to the DA’s Office. The Hub will also be a visible one-stop shop where community residents can seek services and opportunities. It will provide help to those who are high risk (because of involvement with guns and gangs), and those who are just one bad break away from being destabilized. The Hub will provide the organizations that make up the Brownsville Safety Alliance a permanent home, institutionalizing their role in keeping the community safe.
This is a whole-community approach. Often in government and the advocacy community, we talk about breaking down silos—between government agencies and between government and the community. The Neighborhood Safety Hub will do just that, shifting power to the community and coordinating public investments to create a safe and healthy neighborhood. If successful, we hope that in the days ahead Neighborhood Safety Hubs will be replicated across the city.
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Eric Gonzalez is the Brooklyn District Attorney. Cyrus Smith is Program Advisor at Brownsville Think Tank Matters. On Twitter @BrooklynDA.
This column is part of a series published by Gotham Gazette and appearing in the inaugural issue of Vital City, a policy non-profit focused on developing practical and actionable solutions to public safety problems.
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Emergency food (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
In the beginning of the pandemic, we longed to return to normal. However, after months of lock down, a racial justice reckoning, and a growing realization that concerns about political incivility needed to be replaced with legitimate fears about the stability of our polarized democracy, we started to think about all the reasons that going back to normal was no longer a viable option. It has become abundantly clear that “normal” never worked for everyone, and that this is by design. Our society’s definition of normal was built on the fundamentally faulty ideas of white supremacy and individual meritocracy.
“Normal” did not work for nonprofit organizations and their workers, predominantly women of color, who provide essential human services.
Just as the pandemic exposed inequities across our society, it highlighted major longstanding problems in the nonprofit sector. At the peak of the pandemic, nonprofit human services workers -- rightly deemed “essential workers” -- were sent out with inadequate supplies and asked to meet soaring demand with fewer resources.
Nonprofit organizations in New York deliver services to communities on behalf of the city and state through government contracts. Unfortunately, those contracts are underfunded, failing to cover the full cost of providing services. This fact harms nonprofit workers who receive low wages and communities who receive less robust services.
Nonprofits and their workers are essential to New York’s pandemic recovery. We’re joining forces to uplift and strengthen our sector so we can support all communities on this journey, and it is time for our city and state government partners to step up for the good of all.
The Nonprofits Make New York campaign is highlighting the vital role nonprofits play in every New York City neighborhood, and the Just Pay campaign is working towards fair compensation for our city’s hard-working human services employees.
Nonprofits have been disrespected because of who we serve and who we employ – our workforce is predominantly women (66%) and people of color (68%). Nonprofits are too often considered “less than” by our for-profit partners, those who equate a lack of resources with a lack of innovation, capacity, or know-how. We have been taken advantage of by public partners who consistently underestimated (or ignored) our economic contributions, and used our desperation to keep services and programs in place as an excuse to offer contracts with unfair, insufficient terms.
We are ultimately caught in a no-win cycle, in which our work is undercompensated by the market because we are motivated primarily by mission and often at the whim of governments, but then our expertise and abilities are undervalued in large part due to having lower salaries than our for-profit counterparts and the types of services we provide, often helping the New Yorkers who are most in need of support.
Nonprofits need to change. We need to demand that our public partners and private funders provide the respect and support warranted by the multi-faceted work we do and reject the scarcity mindset that justifies and requires us to do more with less.
Nonprofits cannot critique the old normal in the passive voice. We cannot gloss over the inherent contradictions of fighting poverty while paying poverty wages. If we do, we continue to perpetuate the cycle we have vowed to break. While the government is often the primary driver of salaries, we must insist that our ability to provide high-quality services depends on our ability to offer equitable, livable wages to the people who make these programs possible.
Currently, human service workers with a high school education and higher, core human services workers, generally make about $20,000-a-year less than a public sector worker with a comparable education, and 15% of nonprofit human services workers qualified for food stamps in the 2016-2018 period.
We all must move beyond the rhetoric of returning to normal and start accepting that things really truly will not and should not be the same as they were. Leaving normal behind means throwing out the rule book and building something new.
Mayor Eric Adams and Comptroller Brad Lander* took a major step by convening a task force with key stakeholders and recently releasing a series of important recommendations for addressing contract procurement issues in the sector. That's the kind of partnership we need and we look forward to seeing the recommendations like establishing time-frames for contract registration and maintaining the Indirect Cost Rate Initiative through to completion. The government must also pledge to end poverty wages for human services workers starting this budget season with key investments like a cost-of-living adjustment to match the State’s investment
Those who dedicate their lives to making New York a better place to live should not have to starve in order to do so. We can, should, and must pay our nonprofit employees a just and fair wage for all of the hard work they do.
The Human Services Council and Nonprofit New York are working together to make these ideas the new nonprofit reality. Nonprofits Make New York. Every day. In every neighborhood. For every New Yorker. It’s about time we compensate the people who make that happen.
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Michelle Jackson is the Executive Director of the Human Services Council of New York. Meg Barnette is the President & CEO of Nonprofit New York (*and Meg is married to Comptroller Lander). On Twitter: @mpjackson of @HSC_NY and @nonprofitnyPREZ of @NonprofitNY.
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Summer Youth Employment Program rally (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)
The criminal justice system is not the only entity that contributes to public safety. There is evidence from across the United States on “civic goods” — interventions, unrelated to the criminal justice system, that have been shown to have meaningful effects on violent crime in the short- to medium-term.
Interventions for Children and Teens
Many kids don’t feel safe going to school each day due to violent crime. As argued by Jane Jacobs, simply having more eyes on the street can deter crime and make streets safer. Chicago's “Safe Passage” program built on this insight by placing civilian guards along pedestrian routes traveled by students to and from schools. Safe Passage not only reduced student absenteeism (which could have beneficial public safety effects in the longer-term), but it also reduced violent crime by up to 20% while the program was underway.
Supplementing school with targeted programs in social skill development can also reduce crime. In Chicago, researchers conducted two large-scale, randomized controlled trials to measure the efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy for high-risk teens. The specific focus was the Becoming a Man (BAM) program, developed by the nonprofit Youth Guidance.
The two studies found that BAM reduced violent-crime arrests during the year of program participation by 45–50%. BAM appears to work by helping teens slow down and reflect on whether their automatic thoughts and behaviors are well-suited to the situation they are in, or whether the situation could be construed differently.
Providing summer jobs to teens reduces violent youth crime not only during the period of employment, but also afterwards. There is now strong evidence from three major cities that summer jobs are an effective intervention.
Random assignment of youth applicants to a summer jobs program in Chicago led to 33-42% reductions in violent-crime arrests in the year after program participation. In Boston, a similar study found that a summer job offer reduced the number of violent-crime arrests by 35% during the 17 months after program participation. And a New York City study found that a summer job offer reduced the likelihood of a future arrest or incarceration during the four years after program participation. It also reduced the likelihood of dying during those years by 18%; this effect was due to a reduction in deaths by external causes (such as violent crime).
We could also do more to help families create a safe living environment for their children. For example, when children test positive for high lead exposure, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends they receive a bundle of services, including help with lead remediation and nutritional counseling, to reduce future lead exposure and to mitigate the effects of previous exposure. Using data from Charlotte, North Carolina, researchers found that children who received the CDC-recommended intervention had fewer subsequent arrests for violent crime, as well as other delinquent behavior, when compared to similar children whose blood-lead-levels were just under the threshold and so did not qualify for services.
Economic Stabilization
Economic insecurity can increase crime. When individuals don’t have a safe place to live, it is more difficult to maintain employment, and the likelihood of violent altercations in shelters or on the street increases.
In Los Angeles County, single adults experiencing homelessness are randomly assigned to caseworkers. An evaluation documented that providing housing assistance substantially reduced the number of jail bookings and criminal charges over the following 18 months. These beneficial effects are driven primarily by permanent housing programs. It appears that 80% of program costs are recouped by direct savings to various public agencies (including the criminal justice system) within the first 18 months of housing provision.
Providing short-term financial assistance is also helpful. For example, Chicago's Homelessness Prevention Call Center connects families and individuals who have experienced a negative economic shock with immediate, one-time financial assistance, but the availability of funding varies unpredictably. A study found that when funds were available, callers were 51% less likely to be arrested for a violent crime, relative to similar callers who received no funds. The decline in crime appears to be related, in part, to greater housing stability.
The timing and mode of distribution of short-term financial assistance can matter. For example, providing social benefits electronically rather than via cash may reduce violent crime. And staggering the payment schedule for social benefits over the course of a month also helps reduce crime.
Health Care
Increasing access to health care has important violence-reduction benefits. For example, researchers have found that expanding access to substance-abuse treatment facilities can reduce violent crimes, particularly homicides.
Another study documented that expanding Medicaid eligibility to include more low-income adults led to sizable reductions in rates of robbery and aggravated assault. A similar impact was seen when Medicaid expanded after the Affordable Care Act: states that expanded Medicaid saw annual violent crime rates fall by 5.3% relative to non-expansion states.
When low-income young men in South Carolina lost access to Medicaid at age 19, their likelihood of incarceration in the subsequent two years increased by 15%. This increase spanned multiple categories of criminal behavior, including violent crime. The social cost of this additional crime exceeded the costs savings from reduced Medicaid eligibility. The effects of Medicaid access were primarily driven by men who relied on Medicaid for access to mental health medications.
Neighborhood Improvements
Reducing neighborhood foreclosures and vacancies can reduce violent crime. A study of New York City found that additional foreclosures led to additional violent crimes nearby. A similar project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania found that violent crime rates increased by roughly 19% when foreclosed homes become vacant, an effect that increased with length of vacancy.
There is growing evidence that “greening” vacant lots and installing better lighting have important crime-reducing effects. One experiment found that shifting daylight from the morning to the evening via Daylight Saving Time led to a 7% decrease in robberies. A randomized controlled trial that placed temporary street lighting in New York City housing developments found that improved lighting substantially reduced street crimes.
A growing body of evidence shows that pollution increases violent crime. For instance, moderate- to high-levels of lead exposure for kids increases violent and delinquent behavior later, presumably by affecting brain development. In addition, day-to-day variation in exposure to pollution – such as air pollution from factories or cars – increases local violent crime on the days of exposure. Reducing exposure to such pollutants can thus have immediate violence-reduction benefits.
Traditional law enforcement tools such as police and incarceration continue to play an important role in fighting crime. But as we consider what to do about rising violent crime rates in cities across the United States, the evidence suggests that investing in civic goods such as education, health care, and neighborhood improvement can reduce violent crime in the short- to medium-term.
Of course, the crime-reduction benefits are often only a fraction of the overall benefits of the interventions studied; these efforts can also improve educational outcomes, employment, and health as well. But even if we only focus on the crime-reduction effects, it is clear that we are dramatically underinvesting in such programs. New York City and other places would be smart to change this.
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Anna Harvey researches criminal justice and judicial decision-making and is the President and CEO of the Social Science Research Council. Jennifer Doleac studies crime and racial discrimination as a Professor at Texas A&M University and is the host of the Probable Causation podcast. On Twitter @annalilharvey & @jenniferdoleac.
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Rep. Nydia Velázquez (photo: Ian Douglass/Waterfronts)
The New York State Legislature has passed, and Governor Hochul has signed, new district maps for the House of Representatives, the State Assembly, and the State Senate. What do these new lines mean for Latino representation?
While space limitations prohibit me from providing an exhaustive analysis, several new district lines are worth noting. Let us begin with Congress.
Of all New York City’s four congressional districts represented by Latinos, Congressional Rep. Nydia Velázquez’s district has undergone the most deviation from its previous contours. Rep. Velázquez was the first Puerto Rican Latina to be elected to Congress. It appears that her district—New York’s 7th Congressional District, covering parts of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, and with a Latino plurality—has borne the brunt of congressional district changes in the city, a result of deliberate maneuvering in order to make the 11th Congressional District more suitable for a Democratic retaking.
The 11th is currently represented by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican and half-Cuban Congress member. NY-11 is the only congressional district in New York City currently represented by a Republican.
Several neighborhoods in NY-7, including Sunset Park and Red Hook, with their sizable Latino presences, have been drawn out of Velázquez’s district and into Malliotakis’. Rep. Velázquez has represented Sunset Park since her election to Congress in 1992 and the neighborhood was included in that district at a time when an additional Latino-majority district was sought. Current opponents of the dismantling of parts of Velázquez’s district point to the potential of voting dilution, since Latinos in Sunset Park and other neighborhoods will now become part of a non-Latino majority district.
Despite all the changes, particularly the possibility of voting dilution, the Latino presence in the new Velázquez district among the voting population has not shifted much, increasing by 4,000 Latino voters from the current lines. The increase is a result of the new 7th district taking in other parts of Queens that Velázquez had not previously represented, namely portions of Ozone Park.
The Latino voting population in the new NY-13, represented by Rep. Adriano Espaillat, has not shifted much, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Latino constituency in her district, NY-14, remains largely unchanged. Interestingly enough, Rep. Ritchie Torres, who represents a Latino-majority district whose Latino representation goes back to Herman Badillo, has lost 11,000 Latino voters (mostly in University Heights), while gaining an additional 18,000 white voters, largely a result of the district’s move north to include Riverdale.
In relation to Latino politics and representation, perhaps the more drastic changes to district lines can be found in the Senate and Assembly districts. Of New York City’s 95 state legislative districts, there are currently five Latinos in the 63-seat State Senate and 11 in the 150-seat Assembly.
Starting in Manhattan, we can begin our exploration of changes in the historic Latino neighborhood of East Harlem. If there ever were a prime example of how communities can be splintered electorally, East Harlem is the one. East Harlem, a geographically compact location that is majority-Latino with a sizable African-American population, will soon be represented by three state senators instead of the current two. Yes, three senators for one community.
Under the new lines, East Harlem will be represented in the State Senate by Senators Cordell Cleare, Michael Gianaris, and Jose Serrano, assuming they all win reelection this year. The East Harlem State Senate seat has had historic importance since Olga Mendez won the seat in 1978, becoming the first Puerto Rican Latina elected to a state legislature in the country.
In Queens, a new State Senate district has been created, what will be the 17th District, part of how the new maps reflect population shifts favoring New York City and a correction to previously gerrymandered districts to favor Republicans outside the city.
Observers note that the carving out of this seat is a result of the increase in the Latino population in Queens and that in essence this becomes a new “Latino seat.” However, the data discloses something entirely different. The Redistricting and You data, excellently compiled by Steven Romalewski at the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, demonstrates that in overall population, Latinos make up 38% of the population in this new district, just a 6% increase from the current Senate lines. In voting age population, Latinos make up 36% of the population, also a 6% increase.
However, when one considers voter registration numbers, Latinos only outnumber the next highest ethnic group (non-Hispanic whites) by 894. When one takes voting participation into account, the numbers would indicate even more that this district is certainly not a “Latino seat,” at least not in the immediate future. Among Democratic voters, non-Hispanic whites in this new district outnumber Latinos by over 5,200 voters, a gap of utmost importance given how often elections in New York City are determined by the Democratic primary.
When it comes to Assembly districts, Queens may also take a hit when it comes to Latino representation. The Corona neighborhood, a mostly Latino community, will now be divided into three Assembly districts.
Most of Corona is currently represented in the Assembly by Catalina Cruz. Interestingly, Corona has produced the first Latino representatives in the borough: Hiram Monserrate (the first Latino elected in the borough) and Julissa Ferreras (the first Latina elected in Queens). Now Corona stands the chance of seeing these historic gains jeopardized, seemingly in order to protect some non-Latino incumbents in other neighborhoods.
The electoral splintering of Latino neighborhoods, in addition to the ongoing gentrification of many of these neighborhoods, does not bode well for Latino representation in the next decade. Is this a result of the lack of Latino representation at the higher levels of state government? It certainly seems that way.
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Eli Valentin is an adjunct lecturer at Union Theological Seminary. He writes regular columns for Gotham Gazette, largely focused on Latino politics in New York City, and is a frequent guest political analyst at Univision NY. On Twitter @EliValentinNY.
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Eli Valentin is a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter @EliValentinNY.
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Health care workers on the front lines (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
As we celebrate Black History Month, I often reminisce on the saying, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." As a cardiologist, Vivien Thomas is one of the many African-American giants whose shoulders I’m privileged to stand on. To me, he is a pillar of cardiac surgery, a master anatomist, an exemplary scientist, and a selfless servant to others.
Mr. Thomas (please note the lack of title to his name, an issue I will touch upon below) was a laboratory supervisor who developed the first procedure in the 1940s to treat "blue baby syndrome," a heart condition that can cause the skin of babies to turn blue because of a lack of oxygen in their blood. Before his contribution, heart disease was a death sentence for those babies. Vivien Thomas holds a special place in my heart as an alumnus of my alma mater, John Hopkins University School of Medicine, where his portrait hangs today.
He served as an assistant surgeon, and what makes his story even more remarkable is that he accomplished this without a professional medical education. He was paid and classified as a janitor while helping develop this life-saving procedure. It wasn't until late in his career that the university awarded him the honorary title of Doctor.
Imagine if, for a moment, he had the formal training and resources to be a doctor, what the ramifications could have been not only for the field of medicine but his community. Studies have shown that diversity and representation in medicine matter immensely. Representation of doctors and nurses of color helps inspire the next generation of healthcare professionals. It also helps to rebuild trust between patients and their healthcare system and has been shown to improve clinical outcomes.
Even 80 years after Mr. (Dr.) Thomas' groundbreaking contributions to infant health and cardiology, serious racial discrepancies still exist in medicine. To date, African-Americans make up less than 3% of doctors in the U.S, and in my specialty of cardiology, less than 1%. This statistic should cause alarm for communities across the country, whether urban, suburban, or rural. We have a growing diverse population, and the doctors charged with tending to it may not understand cultural or racial nuisance or they might present subconscious or implicit bias when providing care.
Two studies from the New England Journal of Medicine show that African-American patients suffering from heart disease are less likely than white patients to receive invasive heart procedures such as cardiac catheterization, even when everything else between the groups is equal. Furthermore, the bias toward Black patients (whether explicit or implicit) persisted even when the treating physicians were Black.
"Factors associated with a difference in race between physicians and patients, such as cross-cultural miscommunication, 11,12 lack of rapport or trust, 13,14 and reduced willingness on the part of the patient to undergo an intervention, 15 may lead to the use of fewer medically-necessary procedures among Black patients," according to the study authors.
And a new study from researchers at the University of Chicago found that implicit bias in the medical field extends beyond the examination room and into the electronic health record (EHR). Black patients were 2.5 times more likely than white patients to have at least one negative term in their EHR.
Even knowing the numbers and understanding the effects, our nation's medical field has yet to properly address the needs at hand. Studies have shown that African-Americans are more likely to suffer from heart-related conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke. To combat these negative health outcomes, we need more doctors who can relate to patients and give them health guidance and strategies to manage their unique journeys in a culturally appropriate manner.
As an ever-diversifying country, we need to develop an achievable and sustainable plan to better recruit and retain minority physicians in all specialties. New York City alone is -- to borrow from former Mayor David Dinkins -- "a gorgeous mosaic of race and religious faith, of national origin and sexual orientation." As of the last Census, minority groups make up over two-thirds of the city's population. Still, less than 3% of doctors nationwide are people of color, and less than 1% of cardiologists are African-American.
At AdvantageCare Physicians, where I practice, we pride ourselves on having diverse, culturally competent medical professionals who identify with or come from the communities where they provide care. Yet our field as a whole still has much more work to do in New York City and throughout the country.
The face of the nation is changing. Our national population grew by over 7% since 2010, according to results from the 2020 U.S. Census. These changes mean that our approach to every facet of life, including providing proper health care, needs to evolve. The next great minds to help address this challenge are out there. We need to find, nurture, and grow them to be ready to join us.
Over the last century, countless institutions throughout our country have contributed ground-breaking work in the fields of cardiology and medicine, including the life-saving surgeries for “blue babies” at Johns Hopkins. However, we mustn’t forget the example that this work was pioneered by an outsider with an untraditional background, who faced insurmountable odds to save lives. As we reflect on Black History and on Dr. Thomas’ accomplishments, we must also contemplate how to move further with his legacy. We can start by attracting other brilliant minds from our diverse communities to help move healthcare into the future.
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Dr. Haitham Ahmed, MD, is Chair of Cardiology at AdvantageCare Physicians, one of the largest primary and specialty care practices in the New York area.
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