Police at Curtis High School on Staten Island
For students who attend one of New York City's 86 public schools with permanent metal detectors, simply getting through the door can pose one of the day's biggest challenges. The metal detectors are just the beginning. In its increased efforts to make its schools safe, the Department of Education also uses bag checks, hand-held wands, ID scanners and the watchful eyes of school safety agents, uniformed civilian members of the New York City Police Department.
Since a series of well publicized crimes in schools in 2003, the Bloomberg administration has ratcheted up security in middle schools and high school across the city. While statistics say the programs have reduced violence, and some student reports feeling safer, critics charge that the presence of security devices and uniformed guards unfairly stigmatizes many of the city's more than 1 million public school students.
Conflicts and Resolutions Police in the Schools: Hanging Out and Hurting Business: Breaking the Cycle of Violence: Taking A.C.T.I.O.N. at The Point: Cutbacks After School: |
The Bloomberg administration has shown that it will pull no punches when it comes to school safety in New York City's 1,200 public high schools. In 2004, the mayor launched his Impact Schools Initiative, which greatly increased the police presence in schools. Since then, good news and rosy numbers have flowed out of City Hall.
"We launched the Impact School initiative in order to put a stop to the culture of crime and disorder that was ruining the educational opportunities for our students, and the results have been promising," said Bloomberg in a 2005 press conference. The following year, Bloomberg reported violent crime in New York schools was down 11 percent from the previous year, and according to the city's numbers, the rate has continued to fall -- except for a rise in the number of thefts of electronic items, like pricey laptop computers, it would seem that the mayor's plan is working.
While everyone wants safe schools, some see the security as having a cost. Many students, teachers and others are deeply troubled by the increased police presence in the city's schools. Some 4,625 school safety agents patrol the city's approximately 1,100 schools, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, along with at least 200 New York City police officers, who, unlike the safety agents, carry firearms. More than a fifth of the city's public middle and high schools now have permanent metal detectors, and any public school can receive a surprise visit from the police department's "roving" metal detector program. The Department of Education did not return repeated phone calls to confirm these numbers.
Students, teachers, administrators and civil liberties groups express concerns that some of the tactics used to police the schools are overzealous and even abusive. A report released in March by the New York American Civil Liberties Union entitled, "Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-policing of New York City's Public Schools," suggests that misconduct by the police and especially safety agents -- from verbal assault to the unjustified arrest of students, teachers and principals -- is not uncommon. In once case a police officer said he arrested a student for a "smart-aleck." The student had been waiting outside the school for his mother, who had agreed to pick up his cell phone for him, since it would otherwise be confiscated.
While students understandably chafe at such treatment, the city clearly has had a school safety problem. At Martin Luther King Jr. High School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, for example, the security measures are more than precautionary. In 2002, two students were shot at King on the civil rights leader's birthday. Five years later, after the restructuring of the King campus into a cluster of smaller high schools and the addition of school safety agents to the already permanent fixture of metal detectors, many students say they feel safe at their school.
The school safety agents on the King campus seem to have developed some semblance of a working relationship with students and faculty. On a warm day in June, the students huddled in small groups on and around school grounds talking among themselves and hanging out. "Keep it moving," one agent says to a group of teenage girls on the street corner outside the school. "You can hang out across the street, but not here."
"They're pretty nice. I don't have any problems with them, really," said Staring Jones, a 15-year-old first-year student.
"Everyone gets treated the same," said Fancellys Alvarado, a first-year student. Fourteen-year-old Veronica Taylor agreed. "There's not a problem here. They're nice," she said of the agents.
The kind of working relationship between school safety and the students and faculty found at King, however, is not a given, but a constant work in progress. Jamaal Bowman, dean of Martin Luther King, Jr. High School of the Arts and Technology on the King campus, said he personally watches all his students enter school every morning to make sure everything goes smoothly and no students are mistreated by safety agents. Bowman said that outrageous behavior by school safety teams is rare at schools where the administration is vigilant about protecting its students' civil liberties as well as their safety.
"We have a different sergeant this year," said Bowman, referring to the NYPD sergeants that are in charge of school safety agents at every school. Last year, he said, the sergeant insulted students, using sexual and racial epitaphs, and, according to Bowman, "even got into a couple of fights with students," he said. "This year [the agents are] more nurturing than in past years. They'll let us deal with infractions because we know [the kids] and their families."
Some King students, particularly black male students, still have problems with the agents. One, 17-year-old Aaron Flournoy, said the agents have an attitude. "They curse, they yell. And they get violent for no reason," he said as a uniformed agent walked outside the high school and encouraged students to "get going" and move away from the school grounds.
Despite the police presence, Deron Gates, also 17, said he does not feel safe at the school. "It's MLK for God's sake," said Gates. "My 10th grade year people got jumped for no reason. If someone wants to hurt you they're going to hurt you," he said.
In general, the civil liberties union and Bowman say, the city's minority students, who comprise two-thirds of all public school children, are more likely than their white or more affluent counterparts to be humiliated and treated like criminals. "I think black males feel disenfranchised already," said Bowman, who starting a support group for black males on the King campus.
Bowman sees discrepancies between the treatment given his students and those at LaGuardia High School, a prestigious public arts high school across the street from King. "Being right next door to LaGuardia, it's like a slap in the face," he said, shaking his head. "When our kids go over there for summer school they put up the metal detectors. It's blatant discrimination. And blatant racism."
LaGuardia has no metal detectors to speak of and, according to John H. Lewis, a teacher there, school safety agents there are not an overbearing presence. "The kids are much more savvy [at LaGuardia]. They have a clear idea of what their rights are," he said. Asia Fisher, a 17-year-old LaGuardia senior from Brooklyn, said that at LaGuardia "security guards can be your friends."
In contrast, at the poorer school in Brooklyn where he used to teach, Lewis said, "The kids were treated like criminals and humiliated. At LaGuardia kids get treated better in every respect. It's sort of like the gloves are on."
David Bloomfield, the president of the Citywide Council on High Schools, said there was a "consensus" among educators speaking at a recent council hearing on school safety that the school safety agents are disrespectful. But he also said it was possible -- and vital - to foster a closer relationship between the agents and school administrators.
Special police officers outside Martin Luther King Jr. High School following a shooting there in 2002
Even courteous careful safety agent and police can pose a problem simply by being in the school building, according to some critics. Udi Ofer, field director for the civil liberties union's legislative council, says the Department of Education relies too much on police to deal with issues that could be handled by school administrators. "This is not just about metal detectors. This is about the extraordinary presence of the NYPD in public schools. New York City now has more school safety agents per student than most cities do per citizen," said Ofer.
"The police department has no business in the schools. They're used to dealing with criminals," said Lewis
When students believe a school safety agent or police officer has treated them unjustly, there is very little they, their parents or their teachers can do to press a complaint. Deputized by the police department, school safety agents are not accountable to the administrators, principals, parents, or communities of the schools they are commissioned to protect.
If there is a mechanism in city government to report misconduct, "the city hasn't made anyone aware of it," said Bowman. He said a city official suggested he call the city's all-purpose 311 non-emergency help line to lodge a complaint. In general, he said, if faculty and parents want a problem to be taken seriously, they should call the civil liberties union.
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In April, Henry Talbert <http://www.nypost.com/seven/04172007/news/regionalnews/teen_blown_away_at_bklyn_eatery_regionalnews_eric_lenkowitz_and_perry_chiaramonte.htm>, a 16-year-old junior at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York and an aspiring firefighter, was murdered. The teen was shot in the neck by another youth after an altercation outside a restaurant at around four in the afternoon.
Talbert’s death was not an isolated event. Residents of East New York and neighboring Brownsville must all too often mourn the death of young people brought down by violence. And this so-called epidemic of violence affects other parts of the city and urban communities throughout the nation. In Chicago, there have been <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/southsouthwest/chi-teenshotjun27,1,2492031.story?coll=chi-newslocalssouthwest-hed>34 students shot since January.
Waddell Parks, parent coordinator at Thomas Jefferson High School, has seen too many senseless deaths and injuries. Outraged by these events, he has joined with other community members and school employees to encourage youths to confront the problem. Parks and the Parent Coordinators Coalition to Stop the Violence are developing a comprehensive program to deter youth violence in Brownsville and East New York. The program, operating in conjunction with community-based organizations, will work within the schools. The group hopes to solve the area’s problems from within, using approaches tailored to the neighborhood and developed by people who live there.
Conflicts and Resolutions Police in the Schools: Hanging Out and Hurting Business: Breaking the Cycle of Violence: Taking A.C.T.I.O.N. at The Point: Cutbacks After School: |
For example, Parks speaks of putting on a hip-hop revival, “returning to the early days of hip-hop, back before it got so commercial.” While the music now is widely viewed as violent, Parks and other say that, before it became so commercial, hip-hop was credited with helping to reduce violence by promoting hip-hop battles where confrontation was expressed in dance, rhyme and artwork – not with bullets. The group also hopes to create programs to encourage youth to look more critically at the way violence is portrayed in entertainment. Peer mediation sessions will offer more options for resolving conflicts peacefully.
In June, local schools participated in a march and rally to “stop the violence and increase the peace.” The event, held by the East New York Urban Youth Corps and the Parent Coordinators Coalition to Stop the Violence, and organized by community advocate Winchester Keyes, drew close to 1,000 young people and community supporters. Through speeches and a show of numbers, the event tried to make violence less acceptable and so decrease its prevalence. For many of the students who attended, the rally was a starting point.
Following the rally, a number of organizations participated in a family information fair, intended to help connect teenagers and their families to resources in the area. Many groups with important missions go largely unnoticed within the community, Parks said, and this was an effort to “bring them out into the open.”
“Violence overall is a major problem out here…it’s almost become the norm to solve any conflict,” including minor altercations, arguments, even a stare, said Parks sitting amid stacks of research and literature. “The real problem is the disrespect for black life—for black youth.”
Youth show disrespect for each other, he said, and in turn do not get respect from adults in general and the police in particular. According to local residents, the police presence here is staggering; and the complaints abound. In the latest Civilian Complaint Review Board report, the two precincts covering East New York and Brownsville, the 75th and the 73rd respectively, had the highest numbers of complaints about police in the city. Local leaders attribute this partly to the frequency of “stop-and-frisk” searches of local youth. Because of the prevalence of violence, police don’t respect the neighborhood’s young people and make assumptions, often erroneous, about their behavior. Often police stop the youth, mostly black and Latino, on the streets, and frisk and search them without cause.
“Youth, students, they’re intimidated, harassed, of course it creates hostility. They’re being bullied [by police officers]” said Parks. The stop and frisk searches have recently become the target of the New York Civil Liberties Union and will likely be a subject of upcoming litigation.
As things stand now, police do not respect the young people and the young people do not trust or respect the police and, worse, may feel threatened by them. Such an atmosphere of mutual mistrust makes it difficult to confront the very real problems of crime and violence in the area.
Parks hopes that providing youth with positive activities can change that. Instead of waiting for the teenagers to fail, he believes, community members should provide them with opportunities to excel and resources to succeed. When youth start to respect themselves and each other, Parks added, they can then step up and become the leaders their community needs to take it into the future.
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"Buying?" "Selling?" "I got box seats," the scalpers furtively muttered as I walked to Yankee Stadium.
It was a beautiful Saturday in the Bronx - perfect for watching the Yankees. The bleacher seat I coveted was sold out both at the box office and online at Ticketmaster, the Yankee's authorized sales outlet, so I found myself nervously approaching scalpers two blocks from the stadium. The process quickly became uncomfortable. One group of scalpers started fighting over who got to approach me first, while another followed me for a block, angrily demanding to know why I didn't want a ticket in another section.
Not long ago, I would have been out of luck. For years, the only option for a fan seeking a sold-out seat was to buy an illegally scalped ticket, risking an unpleasant interaction, a counterfeit ticket or, in the worst-case scenario, arrest. Fortunately, the day before I had logged on to StubHub and purchased a bleacher seat for $8, plus a $15 service charge, from an anonymous seller.
By buying a resold ticket on StubHub, I became part of a booming secondary market for tickets, which grossed close to $3 billion in the United States in 2006. This largely on-line system charges buyers and sellers a commission in exchange for offering a safe and secure way to sell already purchased tickets. And on June 1, Governor Eliot Spitzer endorsed this approach to ticket scalping, signing legislation that removes from the books almost all of the restrictions on the resale of tickets that have existed since the 1920s. In doing so, New York joined other states that have relaxed laws on reselling tickets. "Ticket scalping laws historically have not worked," said Spitzer. "I think permitting a free market to work its magic there is the smart approach."
Supporters of the new open market believe the new law will fundamentally transform the experience of buying and selling tickets to rock concerts, baseball games and theater performances, promising more choice and convenience for consumers. But others, including some consumer advocates, fear this free-for-all will raise ticket prices, putting many events out of the reach of average New Yorkers.
Old anti-scalping legislation allowed only licensed agents to resell tickets. And even they faced restrictions. Tickets to events in large arenas such as Yankee Stadium could be sold for no more than 45 percent above face value. For smaller venues, like a Broadway theater, the limit was 20 percent above the original ticket price.
Under the new law, regular fans, small-scale entrepreneurs and large-scale ticket brokers can all sell tickets - and they can charge as much as they want. Scalping in close proximity to concert halls and baseball stadiums, though, remains illegal. That means my unsuccessful attempt to buy a resold ticket near Yankee Stadium was illegal, while my purchase of the ticket online was perfectly legal. Professional ticket brokers must register with the state and pay a fee, but fans planning to sell fewer than six tickets to a single event are free to do so as they please.
The new legislation also helps websites like StubHub by expressly prohibiting the Yankees and other teams from punishing season ticket holders who resell their unused tickets online. Previously, the Yankees had claimed that the resale of tickets by fans violated the contracts signed by season ticket holders. For example, according to the New York Times, the team revoked a season ticket held by Orlando Bautista, a doctor from Smithtown, New York who had sold six tickets to a game through StubHub.
The legislation has to be renewed in two years, giving hope to opponents of the law, such as consumer advocate Russ Haven of the New York Public Interest Group, that anti-scalping legislation will be restored.
The term "scalping" has been around since the 1880s, when it referred to speculators who bought stocks and grains with the intention of selling them for profit, as well as to agents who sold fake train tickets to passengers. Scalping admission to cultural events has been an issue at least since the 1920s, when New York passed the first anti-scalping legislation.
Until recently, theater owners, sports franchises and other event producers seemed locked in an eternal conflict with ticket speculators. The owners and producers tried to limit the secondary market, while speculators searched for new ways to get their hands on low-priced tickets. The logic behind this conflict was simple: Producers tend to charge less than the market will bear for tickets, either to guarantee a full house or to ensure that regular fans can attend a performance. Ticket speculators have no such scruples and simply want to maximize their profits. Ticket prices also tend to be hard to set in advance, creating opportunities for speculators to buy low and sell high - or to lose money if, for example, a play highly touted in advance turns out to be a box office bomb.
Speculators have resorted to an astounding variety of schemes to get their hands on cheap tickets. The strategies described in a 1999 report issued by then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer include: hiring "diggers," typically homeless people to stand in line at the box office to buy up as many tickets as possible; using high-speed dialing equipment to buy tickets sold over the phone; and paying "ice," or bribes, to box office employees willing to illegally set tickets aside.
In one case, scalpers opened a counterfeit Ticketmaster outlet with the sole purpose of diverting allotted tickets for resale on the black market. A bogus Long Island outlet sold its sixth set of allotted Barbara Streisand concert tickets to the first person in line, and its 22nd set of tickets to the sixth person in line, the report said, "leading to the conclusion that the outlet operator was setting aside or purchasing tickets, in between sales, for resale to a ticket broker for personal profit." As a result, approximately 50 percent of the seats never went on public sale
In response to such tactics, some theater owners and rock bands tried to fight back. In 2006, the rock musician Tom Petty voided 600 tickets sold through a fan club web site after he discovered that tickets were being re-sold at several times face their value. Petty then offered the tickets for resale on the site, but required that buyers show up to the concert with photo identification to ensure that they were the original purchasers of the tickets.
The Internet emerged to dramatically change the equation. It transformed the sometimes shady world of secondary ticket sales into a safe, secure and booming business. Companies like StubHub, started in 2000 by two Stanford business school graduates and sold to Ebay last year for $310 million, make money by serving as a third party between anonymous buyers and sellers. According to spokesman Sean Pate, 3.3 million tickets were sold on the site last year. By charging both buyers and sellers a 10 percent commission on each sale StubHub garnered over $400 million in gross revenues, a significant slice of the $3 billion generated in online secondary ticket sales nationwide.
Policing secondary ticket sales, which was always difficult, became virtually impossible with the new technologies. This was particularly true in New York, where the anti-scalping law was relatively toothless. All secondary market companies had to do to evade the law was set up shop out of state. And so, according to estimates reported in Playbill, New York City accounted for one-third of all secondary market sales nationwide.
Last year, Broadway owners, long-standing supporters of strict scalping regulations, signaled that they would not oppose legislation ending most restrictions on ticket scalping. In a letter to state officials, Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the League of American Theatres and Producers, wrote, "Ticket prices would probably not skyrocket if the cap placed on the resale of tickets were to be lifted." Instead, according to Schoenfeld, "an increase in the number of legal resellers (who comply with licensing and other regulations) will increase legal competition in the marketplace and drive prices down."
And the legislation passed this year gives special inducements to theater owners. Those operating venues with 5,000 or fewer seats will have the exclusive right to open resale offices within the 500-foot scalp-free buffer zone. As with StubHub, theater resale offices would make a profit by taking a commission on each ticket sale.
Sports teams have also joined the secondary market stampede. The Mets have their own service, Mets Ticket Marketplace, where season ticket holders can sell individual game tickets for a 10 percent service fee. The Yankees have announced plans to launch their own site, called Pinstripe Management.
The most important issue for many fans is whether or not ticket prices will rise as a result of the new law. According to Pate and Schoenfeld, ticket buyers will benefit from the expansion of the secondary market, because the ease and security of the Internet will make more tickets available for resale. And Economics 101 holds that greater supply leads to lower ticket prices. At the same time, by giving consumers multiple options to choose from, sites like Stubhub.com remove the "information asymmetry" problem common to ticket scalping. It's the difference between furtively approaching a number of ticket scalpers in front of Yankee stadium and reviewing information about ticket prices on the Internet.
But not everyone is convinced. Some argue that an open secondary market will relentlessly increase demand, and thus prices, for tickets. "All this free market stuff is a lot of hooey," Haven of the New York Public Interest Group said. To Haven, ticket sales "are not a traditional marketplace" because the supply of tickets to popular shows can't be increased to match the demand. The result will be a world where "consumers compete against corporate expense accounts for the best seats." While some might say that that is the way things should be in a capitalist system, Haven believes that the fact that most stadiums are subsidized by public dollars also gives "taxpayers a greater interest in fair distribution of tickets at fair prices."
In a contrarian's view, University of Texas economist Craig A. Depken found that cities with anti-scalping laws charge an average of $2 more per game for baseball tickets and $10 for football tickets, essentially because hard-core fans may be willing to pay more than speculators for advance tickets to games where the game's true value is unknown. For example, a ticket speculator might figure that a late September game between the Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays, both currently about 10 games behind division-leading Boston, would be an exercise in futility for both teams - and not a good investment. A die-hard fan would be more likely to imagine the Yankees being locked in a hot pennant race at that point and so would eagerly buy a high priced ticket now to insure being in on any late-season action.
Those knowledgeable about the buying and selling of tickets can cite examples where a free market would bring up prices - and other cases where it might result in lower costs for fans.
In 2002, Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger sent 12 graduate students to Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising Tour" concert in Philadelphia, where close to 20,000 tickets had been sold for a uniform price of $75. The students interviewed 858 fans and found that between 20 and 25 percent of the fans surveyed had scalped a ticket, at an average price of $280. If all the tickets had been sold at the "market" price of $280 (the average price fans were willing to pay), Springsteen could have collected an incredible $4 million in revenues over and above the $1.5 million he made from selling 20,000 tickets at $75 apiece.
On the other hand, tickets for Barbra Streisand's farewell tour last year, where prices ranged from $150 to $5,000, could be bought for only a quarter of the full price online. "I got three $850 tickets for only $750 from a guy on Craigslist," said concertgoer Ronald Butts. "It's evidence that the free market works both ways."
There are creative strategies that sports teams, theater producers and artists can employ to keep ticket prices low - if they choose to use them.
One example is Tom Petty's method of requiring identification to ensure that cheap tickets are being used by the original purchaser. Another is the strategy used by the Public Theater for Shakespeare in the Park. Fans arrive as early as 6 a.m. to line up for free tickets, which are distributed the day of the performance. Each person can get only two tickets, and monitors make sure that people do not jump the line or join friends who are ahead in the queue. In essence, the Public Theater gives fans the opportunity to trade time for money, while limiting opportunities for scalping. In addition, the Public Theater sells a small number of premium tickets for $150 apiece, giving consumers who don't want to wait in line another option.
Independent of the effects of ticket scalping, ticket prices have been rising in recent years, particularly for superstar events like The Police concert tour and the Super Bowl and Broadway musicals. In 1953, for example, orchestra seats for "The King and I" went for $14 in today's dollars, far less than the $65 charged for cheap seats at popular musicals today.
Price aside, many patrons are pleased to be rid of the illegal scalpers. Fans waiting in line to pick up their tickets at StubHub's Last Minute Service Center four blocks from Yankee Stadium agreed that StubHub's biggest advantage over illegal scalping was security. For example, the company offers refunds on tickets that are counterfeit or arrive too late. As one customer picking up two tickets said, "If you go to an [illegal] scalper, you never know what you're going to get."
Karl Silcox, manager of StubHub's Last Minute Service said that, perhaps in recognition of this some illegal scalpers are already starting to sell their tickets through StubHub instead of in front of Yankee Stadium, although he hastened to add that it's the "more respectable guys" who are choosing that option. Over time, the law might put the worst of the ticket scalpers out of business, or at least force them to change their ways.
Back at Yankee Stadium, I settled into my bleacher seat, where my $5 soft-serve ice cream quickly melted in the hot sun. I was pleased with my vantage point - and the price I had paid for it. Still, some things remain open to chance. Despite all the hard work I put into getting a ticket to the game, the A's battered the Yankees 7-0.
Aubrey Fox is project director of Bronx Community Solutions, aimed at changing the Bronx court system's approach to low-level crime.
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On many nights Shaun Cheeseboro is awakened at 1 a.m., 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. by the cacophony of gunfire.
A 22-year-old resident of a New York City Housing Authority project on the Lower East Side, Cheeseboro, who just graduated from college with a degree in anthropology, vows to move out of the neighborhood by November. The gunfire and violence that saturate the streets where he grew up, Cheeseboro said, are far from welcoming.
"I'll go about my day as long as I'm home by 10 p.m., because I'm afraid I'll get shot," said Cheeseboro at a recent town hall meeting on violence in lower Manhattan's housing projects.
Cheeseboro is not alone. Gunfire still echoes through many city streets, even though New York City has what are widely believed to be the most stringent gun control laws in the country.
Faced with this paradox, residents and city officials contend that the guns come from other municipalities and from states with far less restrictive laws, where dealers can buy weapons in bulk and illegally sell them here. And so Mayor Michael Bloomberg has expanded his fight against crime far beyond the city’s borders. He is trying to get illegal guns off streets in New York City by lobbying for legislation in Washington and using covert sting operations to track down so-called rogue gun dealers, mostly in the South. People on all sides of the issue agree that Bloomberg has become the mouthpiece for gun control on the national level. But beyond attracting attention, has his campaign produced any real results?
New York City has come a long way since 1990. With crime nearing a low not seen in years, recently released statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation show the city is the safest of any large metropolis in the country.
While violent crime increases across the nation, New York City's rate fell 4.6 percent in 2006 compared to 2005. Although the city's murder rate rose last year, it is down roughly 74 percent from 1990, according to the New York City Police Department.
Though violence is declining, illegal guns still extract a hefty toll in the city, officials said. In the first half of 2007, the police department’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Paul J. Browne said, illegal guns were used in 67 percent of the 232 murders that occurred.
In testimony before a House of Representatives subcommittee last year, Bloomberg said more than 300 people died by the trigger of an illegal gun in New York City in 2005. And, according to Bloomberg, 82 percent of the guns used in crimes in the city were purchased outside of the state.
While some neighborhoods are certainly far safer than others, no neighborhood, street or block is immune from violence. And a bullet can strike at anytime (a weapon was recently fired in Cheeseboro’s neighborhood in broad daylight striking one resident several times).
In an effort to stop the shooting, Bloomberg, along with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, spearheaded Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a bipartisan coalition that in just a little more than a year has attracted more than 225 mayors in more than 40 states. Aimed at eradicating the illegal gun trade, the coalition is intent on repealing the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts law enforcement’s access to data, compiled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, tracing firearms across the country.
Currently, law enforcement officials can use the tracing data only to investigate a specific crime. For instance, when a gun is picked up at a crime scene, the police department can use the bureau's information to trace the origin of that specific weapon. But, under the amendment, police are unable to look at other data to spot trends or isolate problematic dealers, city officials said.
This was not the case before 2003, when the amendment was first included in a federal appropriations bill. Then, the police department "could use data from all crime guns (which the federal government once provided) to detect patterns of crime gun purchases … from certain gun dealers in certain states," Browne stated in an e-mail. "The information could be used to detect, for example, that a gun trafficker in New York was using one or multiple out-of-state dealers to supply a variety of criminals in the city. Without the overall data, patterns like that may be missed."
Eleven national police organizations have sided with the mayors’ coalition to oppose the amendment and so have dozens of state and local groups, including the New York Association of Chiefs of Police, according to the coalition. New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has called the restricted data "critically important to the work of law enforcement as we seek to identify where illegal guns are sold and how they wind up in the hands of criminals."
If the amendment were defeated, the coalition contends, data could be shared among law enforcement agencies across state borders to identify those dealers whose weapons account for the majority of gun crimes in America. The last time such data was available, almost five years ago, 1 percent of gun dealers accounted for weapons used in 60 percent of gun crimes nationwide, according to the mayors' coalition.
Gun associations and some members of Congress argue opening up the data would deteriorate the Second Amendment's guarantee for a citizen to possess a firearm and an individual’s right to privacy.
“Mayor Bloomberg and the coalition have been lying to the American public,” said Tom King, president of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, which boasts 40,000 members throughout the state. “They have always had access to the trace data as long as there was an ongoing criminal investigation. What they are trying to do is get unlimited access to information that has been off limits for years. It’s an invasion of privacy.”
For weeks before the Senate committee vote last month, the mayors’ coalition ran commercials in influential districts in an attempt to persuade certain legislators to open up the tracing data. But in late June, the Senate Appropriations Committee rebuffed the coalition’s appeal and instead strengthened the amendment. It passed a measure, proposed by Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, that would make law enforcement officials subject to prison sentences if they used trace data from the bureau for anything but a specific investigation.
The House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to consider a similar amendment this week.
In a sharply-worded statement responding to the Senate committee’s action, Bloomberg said, “This version of the Tiahrt Amendment is worse than anything we’ve ever seen – and it’s a slap in the face to the men and women who put on a uniform every day and risk their lives to protect us.”
Gun control advocates see the committee vote as a decisive blow to the mayor’s campaign and as another sign of Washington’s long-standing resistance to taking on the gun industry and its lobbyists. For their part, gun organizations hailed the decision as a victory for what they view as their Second Amendment rights.
But Bloomberg has not been content to simply lobby on the issues. In the spring of 2006, he sent private, undercover detectives to five states to target gun dealers who had sold weapons allegedly used to commit crimes in New York City, officials said.
The dealers allegedly participated in straw purchases, or sales made to a third party representing someone who would not pass a background check because he or she is a convicted felon. The investigators, city officials said, wore hidden cameras. One investigator inquired about a gun, then the other individual filled out the federal paperwork for a background check.
The investigations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia resulted in lawsuits against 27 dealers filed in two rounds, one in May and the other in December of 2006. Nearly half of the dealers have since settled with the city and agreed to have their businesses supervised for federal compliance by a special master selected by the city and approved by the court. The special master closely monitors the dealers' sale activities and is paid for by the city.
The settlements, which found the dealers sold firearms in violation of federal and state statutes, also sets up a fee structure for future violations ranging from $1,000 for the first offense to $3,000 for the third and subsequent offenses, according to the city.
But some in federal and state government, in Virginia in particular, are fighting the sting operations. The Justice Department has requested the Bloomberg administration "cease and desist" with their covert criminal investigations.
To prevent more Bloomberg-backed lawsuits against local gun dealers, several states are considering allowing only law enforcement – and not private investigators – to conduct investigations of straw purchases. Virginia Governor Tim Kaine signed legislation in March that prohibits anyone but law enforcement from attempting to buy a firearm through illegal tactics. Violators could face up to five years in prison.
One organization in Virginia specifically held a gun raffle in defiance of the metropolitan mayor’s gun control initiative.
Back in New York, though, many applaud the mayor’s tactics.
"He is national leader on the issue, and he has stepped in where Washington has failed,” said Jackie Kuhls, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. “Going out to the source of gun crime is critical. If you only wait for someone to be dead from a gunshot, that's too late.”
But such acclaim is not universal. Some gun dealers in the five boroughs said Bloomberg’s efforts in and out of the metropolitan area inhibit law-abiding citizens from owning a handgun.
From his store in Staten Island, which has sold firearms for seven years, Dino Longueira said acquiring a handgun in the city is complicated and exhaustive (most of the time it takes more than six months for a permit to go through). “You have to be somewhat of a paralegal to even go through the process,” said Longueira. “It’s designed in my opinion to discourage people. … I can’t imagine how more restrictive licensing of citizens has anything to do with the drop in crime.”
Bloomberg’s crusade, Longueira said, has assisted the National Rifle Association’s argument: that more restrictions tear away, piece by piece, at the Second Amendment.
But Bob Derrig, a co-owner of West Side Rifle & Pistol Range in Manhattan, said despite the “sneaky” tactics, he agrees with Bloomberg in getting illegal handguns off the street. “Every time they put a new law in it annoys you sometimes, but you get used to it,” said Derrig. “No illegal guns are sold from dealers in New York City. However that doesn't say that a gun I sell to an individual isn’t used in a crime after it's stolen.”
Greater enforcement of the city’s already-established laws goes hand in hand with the gun regulations, he added.
Local political leaders have backed the Bloomberg agenda and readily passed initiatives further restricting access to guns. The City Council worked with Bloomberg to establish the first metropolitan registry of gun offenders, while it also condemned a proposed gun-themed restaurant in Times Square backed by the National Rifle Association. (The NRA eventually abandoned the idea.)
After Councilmember James Davis was killed at City Hall in 2003, the council was even more eager to support gun control initiatives and explored making gun manufacturers liable for gun-related deaths.
For his efforts, Bloomberg has been demonized on pro-gun blogs and chastised in conservative editorial pages.
But others have congratulated the mayor for his gun control crusade. “He gets five stars all the way across the board,” said Professor Eugene O’Donnell of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “He is a national leader. It’s really a disgrace that he has to be the leader that he has been.”
Bloomberg’s actions have helped fuel speculation that the mayor is seeking the White House. As he chastises a partisan Congress for not doing more to curb guns - among other things – some see him adding to his national profile and building support for a presidential run.
Back on the Lower East Side, residents who have seen the toll of gun violence for decades have more immediate concerns. They want more law enforcement, safer streets and quieter nights -- now.
The guns in their neighborhood, some residents said, are illegal and come from locations outside of New York, like New Jersey and Philadelphia. They want more police to halt the illegal activity.
Although Cheeseboro plans on getting out, he worries about his two brothers --– teenage boys surrounded by gunfire and at risk of joining the area’s gangs. "I fear for them constantly," said Cheeseboro. “Shootings happen often. I think everyone in the neighborhood is afraid.”
The violence may not mirror that of the 1990s. But advocates said the nation must do more to end the shooting. “There are still children that go to sleep to the sound of gunfire," said Kuhls of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. "We still have residents that live in fear. The mayor understands that.”
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Governor Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to greatly expand the state’s database of DNA samples along with the exoneration last week of a New Jersey man who served 19 years in jail for the gruesome murder of two children has reopened debate about the use of a technology that could fundamentally change how justice is administered in New York City.
Spitzer wants to require testing of all individuals found guilty of felonies or misdemeanors, in state prison or on parole or probation, while making it easier for defendants to use DNA sampling to prove their innocence. In attempting to pass legislation that has been blocked several times in recent years by the state Assembly, Spitzer seeks to emphasize the role that DNA testing can play in freeing the innocent, as well as in fighting crime. It’s a powerful combination, given recent high-profile wrongful conviction cases, such as Alan Newton of the Bronx, freed by DNA sampling after serving 22 years on a rape charge, and Scott Fappiano, erroneously imprisoned in 1983 for the rape of a Brooklyn woman, that have rocked New York’s criminal justice community.
The legislation includes measures that make it easier for defendants and judges to request DNA testing. It would also create a state office to examine wrongful conviction cases in New York State and propose reforms.
Spitzer’s bill has the support of Brooklyn Democrat Joseph R. Lentol, chairman of the Assembly’s committee on criminal justice issues. Other prominent players, such as Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld of the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to free 23 wrongfully convicted New Yorkers, have not yet announced a position. The New York Civil Liberties Union has come out against the bill, citing concerns about the state’s ability to set, and enforce, consistent rules for the storage and processing of DNA materials.
Passage of the legislation would have a dramatic impact on New York City, which has invested over $250 million in a state-of-the-art forensic laboratory in Manhattan. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, enthusiastically support Spitzer's proposal. In the past, Bloomberg has argued for expansion of the state’s DNA sampling program on the grounds that many people who commit minor crimes also commit more major offenses and so that having DNA from so-called “petty criminals” would help solve bigger cases. He and Kelly have argued that the state’s existing restrictions on DNA sampling restrictions hurt the city’s ability to use DNA to reduce crime rates even further.
Regardless of the bill’s prospects for passage, DNA testing – only a little more than two decades old – offers a potentially transformative crime fighting technology. What may be less clear to New Yorkers are its benefits and drawbacks.
Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a molecule that can be found in all cells and is left behind in blood, saliva, sweat, semen, hair and skin, biological evidence that can often be found at crime scenes. DNA testing was developed by geneticist Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University in England in the early 1980s. He discovered that DNA could be used to isolate a “genetic marker” unique to each individual.
Jeffrey’s new technique was employed almost immediately to help solve two notorious rape and murder cases in the nearby countryside. After a 17-year-old confessed to one murder but not the other, the police asked Jeffreys to conduct a DNA test of the suspect. It revealed that he had given a false confession – making him, in Jeffrey’s recollection, “the first man ever proved innocent by molecular genetics.” The police then took blood samples of over 5,000 men from the nearby community and stumbled on the real killer when he was overheard bragging about getting a friend to submit a substitute sample.
Launched in 2000, New York’s DNA database holds 250,000 samples. Spitzer's proposal would immediately add 50,000 samples from prisoners, probationers and parolees, while hundreds of thousands more would be added over time from a broader array of newly convicted offenders.
The database is currently divided into two sections, a Forensic Index, which contains DNA samples taken from crime scenes, and a Convicted Offender Index. Supporters of DNA testing hope to collect as many samples of individual DNA as possible to compare to DNA taken at crime scenes. According to their logic, the likelihood of a crime scene “hit” goes up if there are more DNA samples in the Convicted Offender Index. The testing itself is quick and simple: Just a cotton swab dabbed at the individual’s mouth
At first, sampling in New York was limited to individuals convicted of sex crimes and some other felonies, but the law has since been amended to cover many more offenses. Currently, about half of all individuals convicted of a crime in New York are required to contribute a DNA sample. Spitzer’s legislation would extend testing to all convicted felony and misdemeanor offenders, though it would not include individuals who plead guilty to lower-level violations such as disorderly conduct. In addition, 50,000 samples from state prisoners, as well as individuals on probation and parole, would be added to the database.
Since it was introduced in New York, DNA sampling has emerged as an important tool in hard-to-solve cases like burglaries, in which, according to the New York Times, arrests are made in only about 15 percent of reported offenses. In 2004, a pilot program launched in Queens called Biotracks, which netted 23 suspects tied to 34 burglary cases in a nine-month period, according to the Times. It led to the arrest of one man, Robert Medina, who pled guilty to five burglaries after DNA on a scarf he left at a crime scene was matched to a sample taken from him after a previous felony arrest.
The same procedure can be used with sex offenses, which are also difficult to solve. In a recent case, DNA from a Queens man convicted on a drug-related charge was matched to a sample saved from a rape kit that included a taunting note left for the victim. As a result, he was found guilty of first-degree rape and second-degree burglary.
Speaking in 2006, Police Commissioner Kelly asserted that DNA testing had led to the arrests of 210 sex offenders. New York City. The technology spurred the elimination last year of the state’s five-year statue of limitation for rape cases.
Perhaps the strongest case for expansive DNA sampling comes from England, which, in the last decade, has embarked on the world’s most aggressive DNA gathering effort. The country’s DNA database maintains over 4 million samples, covering about 6 percent of the population, more than ten times the rate at which DNA samples are collected in the United States. The database has yielded close to 3,000 crime scene matches per month, according to NewScientist.com, including “hits for 15 murders, 45 rapes and sexual offenses and 2,500 car, theft and drug crimes.”
At the same time, DNA sampling can help prove the innocence of individuals wrongly convicted of a crime. The Innocence Project, which uses DNA to try to win the release of the wrongfully convicted, has helped exonerate 201 individuals in the United States, and 23 in New York State. Most recently, DNA testing was used to exonerate Byron Halsey, the New Jersey man who had served 19 years in jail for the murder of the seven and eight-year old children of Halsey’s girlfriend. DNA testing instead implicated a neighbor who had testified against Halsey during the trial. In a statement that shows the powerful impact of DNA, the victims’ mother said, “I knew Byron loved Tyrone and Tina. It didn’t make sense to me that he could have done this. I always had my doubts, but I didn’t know what to do about them. I am thankful that the DNA testing has identified who really did this to my children and that Byron is being released today.”
But along with its promise, any tool as powerful as DNA is bound to raise concerns as well. Some fear the technology can be misused, that DNA sampling is a slippery slope that will inevitably extend beyond a relatively small number of convicted offenders.
For evidence, some civil libertarians point to Britain. While the Spitzer proposal extends testing only to those convicted of crimes, however minor, in the United Kingdom the police take DNA samples from all those arrested. Since 2001, they can retain those samples even when the arrest results in an acquittal. And in 2004, the police received the authority to collect DNA from suspects, an even lower threshold than arrestees. The country’s database also includes samples from children under the age of 16, including two 12-year-old children who gave a DNA sample after they were accused of damaging a tree they were using to build a tree house.
While the large number of samples makes it more likely that police authorities can make a “hit” to DNA recovered at a crime scene, keeping samples from innocent people arguably violates the legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” As one civil libertarian said, “If your DNA is on the database it means that you are forever an automatic suspect for any crime in the future.”
Those who tend to dismiss arguments often draw an analogy to fingerprints– the criminal justice antecedent of DNA sampling. They are widely collected in the United States, private companies and government agencies use fingerprinting for security purposes, and consumers may soon be able to “unlock” cell phones, laptops and even their homes with fingerprint censors.
Why should New Yorkers be any more concerned about DNA sampling than they are about fingerprinting? One argument is that the information in a DNA sample is much more detailed, containing clues about an individual’s health and ethnicity. In the future, it might offer clues to an individual’s propensity to violence and criminal behavior. In light of this, some critics fear a science-fiction world where DNA sampling could convict individuals before they even commit a crime. Even Alan Jeffreys, who created DNA sampling, has been quoted saying that “as a geneticist I would greatly value the potential enormous power of the database for research, but it’s a gross infringement of civil liberties.”
A less abstract argument raises the issue of whether the state’s already overburdened crime laboratories will be able to handle the increased numbers of samples. If not, evidence could be lost, mislabeled or used inadvertently to make false matches. In a press release critiquing the legislation, the New York Civil Liberties Union focused on what it calls the lax regulation of the state’s DNA laboratories. “Expansion of the databank will overload crime labs and undermine effective criminal investigation,” the statement said, and lead to “large backlogs in the processing of samples [that will] significantly delay the identification and apprehension of violent felons.”
In an op-ed published in June 2006 entitled “Think Before You Swab,” New York state Senator Thomas Duane raised a number of similar issues. He also asked whether an expansion the DNA database could lead to diminishing returns, citing statistics provided by the Division of Criminal Justice Services that fewer DNA “hits” resulted from expansions beyond a small number of felons. “Does [that] signal that adding genetic material from people convicted of lesser crimes has no positive impact?” Duane wrote. “Moreover, is it possible that increasing the number of samples will so overtax the system that the database will actually be less effective?”
It’s perhaps telling that the New York Civil Liberties Union centered its critique on the effectiveness of DNA sampling. The group may well have calculated that DNA sampling, which promises to solve crime and free the innocent at the same time, is too politically popular to take on directly. Or perhaps it shows an underlying confidence that the United States, which has a stronger tradition of civil liberties than Britain does, will be able to navigate the thorny trade-offs between exploiting the full potential of DNA sampling and protecting privacy rights.
In any case, one issue that DNA proponents and critics appear to agree on is the need to improve the state and city’s ability to process and analyze DNA, as well as other crime scene materials. Unfortunately, criminal justice authorities do not have a great track record on this score. Bronx resident Alan Newton, who served 22 years in prison for a rape he did not commit, is a good case in point. For a decade, police officials insisted that they could not find a rape kit that would allow for a test against Newton’s DNA. The kit, held in an enormous Queens warehouse along with over one million pieces of evidence, was finally found in its original 1984 storage bin.
Or take the example of Scott Fappiano, who spent 21 years in jail on a wrongful conviction for rape because key evidence was found only after an intensive two-year search. “It’s appalling that 21 states around this country have enacted preservation statutes for biological evidence, but New York has not,” the Innocence Project’s Peter Neufeld has said
Given that record, the key to ensuring public support for expanded DNA sampling may rest in more in New York’s ability convince the public it can use the technology effectively and responsibly than in the technology itself.
Aubrey Fox is project director of Bronx Community Solutions, aimed at changing the Bronx court system’s approach to low-level crime.
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The New York City Department of Education’s ban on cell phones in all public schools has been upheld in a decision of the state Supreme Court.
Regulations on discipline in schools, established by the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, forbid students to bring a variety of dangerous objects such as knives, guns, and box cutters into any school building; among the prohibited articles: cell phones.
Despite opposition efforts to limit the ban to the use of cell phones in schools rather than mere possession, an acting justice upheld the total ban as well as the department’s power to impose punishment including confiscation of phones. Students who attend schools the department considers particularly dangerous go through metal detectors that can find the phones. But all students, even those in schools with a rather low incidence of discipline problems, are subject to search by magnetometers and roving metal detectors that go to different schools every day.
The Chancellor’s Parents Advisory Council and eight parents contend in a lawsuit known as Price against New York City Department of Education, Mayor Michael Bloomberg et al, that their children’s safety is threatened by not being able to carry phones, which the parents characterize as a "lifeline" to call for assistance while traveling to and from school, at after-school activities or athletic events. or in case of a public emergency or disaster. The parents agreed that the use of phones in schools is undesirable, but argued that banning their use, rather than their possession, would adequately meet the chancellor’s objectives.
The petitioners had argued that the rule eroded the constitutional rights of parents and children to make family decisions. Because of that, they said, the rule’s purpose must be examined with heightened scrutiny.
David Leichtman, a partner at the law firm of Morgan Lewis, along with civil rights attorney Norman Siegal, is representing the petitioners pro bono, says, "This is not a case about cell phones. It is about who is responsible for the safety of our children before 9 and after 3. The chancellor’s authority ends at the school door," Leichtman argued. "The mayor’s policy that we are challenging deprives the 1.1 million most vulnerable kids of New York City of their safety."
Siegal, describes the rule as "an intrusion into the relationship between parents and their children," and argues that government must show that it has an essential interest, if they are going to be permitted to interfere with that relationship. The lawsuit contends that there has been no such showing to support infringing on "the care, custody, and control of petitioners’ children."
For its part, the Department of Education contented that that anything education-based is beyond the court’s powers of review. The court rejected that argument as “frivolous.”
But then when Judge Lewis Bart Stone went on to consider the challenges to the cell phone rule, he found that, contrary to the parents’ claims, the ban was neither arbitrary nor unconstitutional. The court concluded that its function was to determine whether the promulgated rule was rational, and found that it was.
The petitioners all have children in middle school or high school and live in various parts of the city. The students travel by subway and bus to distant schools, often in other boroughs. Court documents detail allegations of risks to children who do not have cell phone "lifelines," and problems averted when they did have phones.
Raven, the 9 year old daughter of Isaac Carmignagni of Queens, was locked out of school before her adult escort arrived to pick her up, but was able to call her father on her cell phone.
Named petitioner, Camella Price, a single mother who is chief of staff for a New York state senator, knows that her two young daughters are subject to school searches by roving metal detectors. Still, she has instructed them to continue to carry their cell phones to school, turning them off during class. Prior to enforcement of the ban, her younger daughter at 11 was beaten up on her way home from school and was able to use her cell phone to call for help.
Beth Berenbaum described in a letter to Chancellor Joel Klein, that her son, a high school freshman travels from Staten Island to Manhattan’s LaGuardia High School by ferry and train, calling his mother at work in New Jersey when he reaches his destination. Responding to her letter, the chancellor’s office said, "It is the experience of many of our principals and teachers that if phones are allowed into school buildings, they will be used inappropriately. ... Aside from simple disruption, students have used cell phones for far more serious offenses. In the past, for example, students have used cell phones to rally support during fights, to cheat on exams, and to take illicit photos of school work or people. ...All of these situations negatively impact the learning environment and cannot be tolerated."
Other examples of the usefulness of the phone include:
--a description of September 11, 2001, when cell phones provided the only means of communication.
--a 12 year old calling her mother from a cell phone because a man was following her from her bus stop.
--a student using a cell phone to find out how to get home after the youngster’s regular train station was evacuated due to fire.
Carmen Colon detailed her 10 year old son’s commute of one and a half hours each way from his Brooklyn home and the need for him to coordinate his travel arrangements with his two older brothers.
While the court did not take any position on the issue itself, other than his deciding that the Department of Education’s action is rational, the judge issued a lengthy decision containing expositions on procedural technicalities and personal philosophy along with a section labeled, "What is a cell phone?" Judge Stone, who normally hears criminal cases, made numerous references to infractions, discipline, security, magnetometers and cited his own experiences, commenting, "the Court has regularly observed that a ban on use does not always assure that cell phones do not ring in the courtroom at inappropriate times and cause disturbances. However, when they do, the Court, unlike a teacher in a classroom, has the benefit of armed court officers to enforce the use ban and to assure the restoration of order."
The decision rejected two amicus curiae briefs. These are offered to a court by interested groups or individual "friends of the court," who are not actual parties to the lawsuit, but seek to impress an expert point of view, or an argument not presented in the main litigation. But, the judge wrote, "Some of those claiming to be amici are really enemies posing in friend’s (sic) clothing. ... Each ill-considered amicus application puts an unnecessary and unwarranted burden on the Court, as such application must be read and addressed, if only to be rejected."
One of the rejected amicus briefs was offered by the United Federation of Teachers on behalf of classroom teachers, who said that, from their unique perspective, the phones are not disruptive.
In discussing the teachers’ role, the judge, who did eventually accept an affidavit from teachers union president Randi Weingarten, decided contrary to the teachers’ position. "Any enforcement system focusing on use, rather than possession, requires teachers, rather than only security personnel at the school door, to observe and enforce the ban and become involved in confronting students and punishment decision, in detriment of their pedagogical mission,” he said.
The petitioners have informed the education department that they would agree to have the phones parked in lockers. It appears, though, that most schools in this city do not have lockers for coats or sneakers, let alone cell phones. However, the city has issued a request for proposals from the private sector to install, commercially and off school premises, special lockers in which to place cell phones on a daily, paid basis.
In the meantime, lawyer Leichtman said , "We don’t see what the big deal is. Mayor Bloomberg is making a mountain out of a molehill." He said his clients "have a firm belief in the way they need to raise their children, and that it is not the schools’ business."
The petitioners and the lawyers are "seriously looking at an appeal," according to Siegel. Efforts to reach the attorneys who appeared on behalf of the city’s Corporation Counsel were unsuccessful.
Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court JusticeÂ
With four family members in prison, Andrea Johnson spends $100 every two weeks on collect phone calls from correctional facilities. So she was pleased that, soon after taking office, Governor Eliot Spitzer made changes that will cut her bill in half.
Johnson hopes this is an indication that Spitzer will look to make further reforms to the state's prison system where her husband, two brothers, and a brother-in-law are serving time.
"What happens when they get released? How do we approach that?" asked Johnson, whose husband comes up for parole in June. "Not through phone calls."
The governor has inherited a system that is in flux. There are about 63,000 men and women in the state prison system, down significantly from the peak of 71,000 in 1999. As crime has largely been brought increasingly under control, New York's prison system has shrunk. Experts across the political spectrum see a need to spend more time responding to the issues surrounding the 25,000 inmates being released each year than to locking up more and more people.
Spitzer's rhetoric echoes the tough on crime mantra that has become dominant over the last several decades, and he made it a priority to pass one of the country's harshest laws regarding sex offenders soon after taking office. But there are also signs that he is willing to challenge some of the pillars of the state's criminal justice policy, by rethinking sentencing, focusing on services and reentry, and even reducing the size of the overall prison system.
New York is not the only place that is changing course on policies regarding crime and punishment. But it is providing grist for advocates who want to move away from some of the dogma of the last several decades.
"We are the fastest shrinking prison system in the country by far and also happen to have the largest crime decline in the United States," said Michael Jacobson of Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice think tank. "Those are nice things to have go together. You can obviously have fewer people in prison and more public safety at the same time."
Thirty-four years ago New York State was at the forefront of a national shift that laid the basis for a decades-long trend toward harsh sentencing, an official rejection of "coddling" prisoners with rehabilitative services and a surge in the prison population. Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed legislation creating mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug crimes in 1973, the first such laws in the country. These Rockefeller Drug Laws were the first salvo in the War on Drugs, a campaign during which the worst thing a public official could be was "soft on crime."
This philosophy on criminal justice was bipartisan. New York State's prison explosion came under Democratic governor Mario Cuomo. The prison population more than doubled under his watch, then continued to rise under Governor George Pataki. Between 1982 and 2000, New York State opened 38 prisons, more than in the previous 150 years.
In recent years, however, growth in the national prison population has slowed as crime rates became significantly lower than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of prisoners re-enter society every year. This has been especially true in New York, whose prison population has shrunk 12 percent since the peak in 1999 (although the most recent numbers show a slight uptick fueled by rising crime rates upstate).
This shift in the shape of the criminal justice system has also changed the way that public officials think about the issue. Lower crime rates have brought down the fever pitch on being tough on crime. There has been a bipartisan push, for example, to re-evaluate drug sentences that punish offenses related to crack cocaine much more harshly than those involving powder cocaine.
Reentry and education programs that were once seen as the bastion of softheaded liberals are now being championed by officials across the political spectrum. Senator Sam Brownback is a particularly striking example. Brownback is preparing a 2008 presidential run as the voice of the conservative wing of the Republican Party; in 1994 he called Newt Gingrich's Contract With America too moderate. But last year he spent a night in a prison and addressed inmates as he pressed for the passage of the Second Chance Act, a bill that aims to ease prisoners' re-entry into society.
People in the criminal justice field in New York felt the ground shifting from the moment Spitzer took office.
For years, the state has made millions of dollars from phone service between prisoners and their loved ones through a deal in which it charged a commission for each call. In 2005 alone the state made $16 million from these charges. These calls, meanwhile, have tripled in price since 1996. Spitzer's decision to have the state stop collecting its fee the will reduce the price of a 20-minute call from $6.20 to about $3.
In addition to the financial effect this will have on the families of prisoners, the symbolic import of Spitzer's move left advocates of a new approach to criminal justice feeling optimistic that more profound changes are on the way. While many are withholding judgment, they see indications that the state is changing course.
Sentencing
There have been calls to reform or repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws since the administration of Mario Cuomo. Most other states have tempered their own drug sentencing laws. New York did not make any changes until 2005, and even then the reforms were seen as relatively minor.
Spitzer has called for a panel to broadly re-examine sentencing. It has yet to be seen whether the commission's recommendations will be, or whether they will have any teeth. But some see an opening to reconsider the inequities they see in the state's drug laws.
"We clearly think the Rockefeller Laws will be in there," said Jeffrion Aubrey, the head of the State Assembly's corrections committee.
Closing Prisons
In a clear indication that Spitzer sees permanent changes for the prison system, he has indicated that he wants to close some prisons.
"We acknowledge we've lost 8,100 inmates," said Brian Fischer, Spitzer's commissioner of corrections. "Perhaps we don't need so many prisons."
Advocates of closing prisons see such action both as recognition of lower prison populations and as a way to reallocate resources to other places within the criminal justice system.
"The more you can shrink the size of the system intelligently, the more money you have to reinvest in a variety of things, among those programs within prisons," said Jacobson of Vera. Some advocates suggest the money saved by reducing the size of the prison system could pay for experiments on programs aimed at helping people stay out of the penal system, saving progressively more money. Fischer declined to speculate on such a plan, saying, "you can't divert money you haven't saved yet."
Not everyone thinks closing prisons is a good idea, however. Strong opposition kept Pataki from doing so, even though he expressed interest.
Some say closing prisons is premature, given the recent increase in the number of inmates. But much of the argument against closing prisons revolves not around criminal justice, but around economics. The prison system is a $2.7 billion a year industry in New York State, and the economies of many struggling upstate communities rely on prisons. Furthermore, the job security of some upstate lawmakers would be threatened if prisons closed, since prisoners, wherever they came from originally, count as residents of the districts where they are incarcerated - even though they can't vote. Closing prisons would therefore shift political power away from the thinly populated regions where they operate.
In 2005, the state passed legislation that would make it harder to close prisons, requiring officials to give a year's notice, create an alternative use plan for the facility and find new jobs for displaced employees. The state corrections officers union, which makes large contributions to legislators' campaigns, says it opposes any closings.
Spitzer included a plan for a prison closing commission in his executive budget. The State Senate rejected the idea, however, and Aubrey says the Assembly will not push it. Aubrey says that Spitzer could create the commission by executive order, but it is not clear how this will play out.
After Prison
Regardless of what happens to the overall makeup of the system, tens of thousands of people leave New York's state prisons each year, many with little more than $40 and a bus ticket. Criminal justice experts agree that easing this transition is one of the largest challenges facing policymakers. Many believe the preparation should start the minute a prisoner enters the system.
Stanley Richards of the Fortune Society, an organization that helps prisoners readjust to life on the outside, said giving prisoners access to higher education while they are incarcerated is the best strategy for lowering recidivism. Richards spent more than one stint in prison himself; while serving a sentence for robbery he got his GED and a college degree in social work and has not been back to prison since. "It laid the foundation for me," he said.
Numerous studies show that education increases prisoners' changes of succeeding in the outside world. A report by the U.S. Department of Education found that those who attended school behind bars were 29 percent less likely to end up back in prison, and that "every dollar spent on education returned more than two dollars to the citizens in reduced prison costs."
Still, such programs face intense opposition, largely because of their symbolic significance: Many people do not think that money should be spent educating people who have committed crimes. In the mid-1990s both the federal and state governments cut off funding for higher education for prisoners. There has been no movement to reverse these actions in New York so far, but Aubrey says he hopes to have education programs back in the budget by next year.
Criminal justice issues have been overshadowed by Albany's big-ticket items: education, Medicaid, Spitzer's governing style. The exception has been a deal between the governor and the legislature to detain some sex offenders indefinitely, even after they have served out their sentences - a practice known as civil confinement.
Sex offenders have long been seen as particularly dangerous. Their crimes are considered to be among the most abhorrent of anti-social behaviors, and recidivism rates among them are high. Across the country, officials have sought ways to crack down, by requiring public notice when a sex offender moves into a neighborhood, or forcing some offenders to wear GPS devices for years after their release. Ohio is currently considering legislation to require the issuance of bright green license plates for convicted sex offenders, mirroring similar legislation in other states.
The first civil confinement legislation was passed in 1990 in Washington State, and many states have passed such laws since. In New York, the Republican-led Senate passed civil confinement legislation every year for more than a decade, only to have it shot down by the Democratic-led Assembly. Governor Pataki had gotten around this deadlock by using the state's mental hygiene laws to keep some sex offenders in mental hospitals as involuntary patients. But a state court rejected this practice last November.
In March, Spitzer signed a far-reaching law that he hopes will become a "national model." New York's law - the 20th in the country - ranks among the harshest. Under the law, mental health experts will identify offenders in prison who are candidates for civil confinement. These offenders will then be given a jury trial. Those who are deemed a continued risk will be transferred to treatment centers indefinitely, instead of being released. Prisoners who are eligible include those who were under 18 when they committed their crime and those who gave minors indecent material.
Civil confinement legislation is widely popular. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld its constitutionality, on the basis that such programs constituted treatment, not punishment. But there is evidence that the programs are not providing treatment to help people re-enter society, but serving instead as ways to detain sex offenders indefinitely.
Advocates who finally feel that they are getting some traction in other areas of criminal justice say that they see the current atmosphere regarding sex offenders mirroring the earlier panic surrounding drug dealers.
"What's going to happen is sort of like drug laws. The net is going to get cast way too wide and too far. People will be afraid to step back from it for fear of political backlash," said Marsha Weissman of the Center for Community Alternatives, a group advocating alternates to incarceration. "It's easier to get people worked up into a frenzy than it is to take steps back."
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The aftermath of the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell in November both mirrors and contrasts with the case of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant killed in the Bronx in 1999.
New York City was quickly gripped by the Diallo case, in which police officers shot at an unarmed man 41 times. A racially charged atmosphere led to protests that resulted in over 1,000 arrests, including those of several high-profile politicians. Lawyers for the police officers asked a state appeals court to move the trial to Albany. The court agreed. There, a jury in which eight of the twelve members were white acquitted the four white police officers of wrongdoing.
Bell's case is similar: 50 shots were fired at Bell and two friends, all unarmed. Protesters have raised questions of racial profiling and police brutality. And talk has turned to whether there will be a change of venue. Defense lawyers have not yet asked for a change of venue in this case, although they may still do so. They owe their clients the best defense possible, and if a change of venue would help the defense, they should make a case for it.
But many, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, say that this trial should be held in New York City. I agree that moving the trial was a bad decision in the Diallo case, and it would be a bad decision in this case. Instead, there are obvious steps that can be taken to ensure a fair trial in Queens.
Changes of venue are rare. A lawyer who makes the application has to submit compelling reasons for it. Among the factors are convenience for witnesses or overheated publicity or religious or racial prejudice in an area that would convince a judge that a fair trial could not happen in the county where the crime has occurred.
Sometimes this is appropriate. Let's say you have a large rural county with a population of 10,000, and a case came up involving the local high school principal who had been there 40 years. Everybody might know that person, or even have a relationship with him or her. In that situation, a change of venue may be appropriate.
In most cases, though, the American justice system is based on the idea that if a crime occurs in a certain jurisdiction, the jury should come from the same area. A jury trial is supposed to be a trial by one's peers, such as their neighbors. Local juries are also preferable because, in theory, people in the same physical area form a community, and they have a particular interest in making sure that justice is served.
In New York, changing venue becomes an issue not because everyone personally knows the people involved, but because everyone knows about the case. Media attention does not preclude the possibility for a fair trial, however. New York City has always had high profile cases, from the 1930s when Tom Dewey was prosecuting Lucky Luciano to the big drug cases, to the organized crime in federal court, to the trial of the police in the Abner Louima case. All of those cases were tried in New York City without difficulty.
In the Diallo case, defense lawyers were of the opinion that given the publicity, circumstances, and emotions in the Bronx, their clients could not get a fair trial. Based on a poll of prospective jurors, the Supreme Court Appellate Division in New York agreed. The court never even made an attempt to seat an acceptable jury, even though they would have had to find only 12 jurors and six alternates out of the 1.3 million people living in the Bronx.
In addition to being unnecessary, the change of venue probably raised racial tensions even higher. The overwhelming majority of the judges who made the decision to move the trial were white, in an area where the majority of the population is black and Latino. As a result, a lot of minorities felt that the decision stunk to high heaven.
The Bell case raises many of the same issues.
One argument that has been made is that the jury pool was poisoned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's early statement that the shooting seemed unacceptable. Public officials should give such opinions; that is just good leadership. To suggest that a jury will not be able to make up their own minds because of that is insulting to the intelligence of New Yorkers.
The other argument is that the general publicity and the politics around the case have made it too heated. But consider the alternatives. In Queens, you have a population of 2.2 million people from which to choose a jury. Yes, many people have been exposed to media coverage of the Bell case. But given the far reach of the news media, who hasn't heard of it? If the trial were moved out of Queens, it would likely take place in a jurisdiction where the jurors knew just as much about the case, and where there is smaller jury pool than Queens.
Short of changing the venue, there are things that can be done to safeguard a high-profile trial. State courts have sequestered juries during deliberations or throughout trials in the past, although for budgetary reasons that is rarely done today. The court could also bring in more potential jurors, and spend more time in jury selection.
In short, there is no reason that a fair and impartial jury cannot be selected in Queens. It might take a bit longer. But to administer justice, you take the time.
Kenneth Ramseur is an attorney in New York City who often works on police cases. He represented the family of Timothy Stansbury, who was killed by a police officer in 2004.Â
The tragic shootings of Auxiliary Police Officers Nicholas Pekearo and Yevgeniy Marshalik have raised questions about a lesser known part of the New York City Police Department, a 4,500-member, all-volunteer force that conducts foot patrols, inspects subway platforms for suspicious packages and helps with crowd control at major public events such as the New York City Marathon.
The auxiliary officers wear uniforms almost identical to those worn by regular police officers and are assigned nightsticks and police radios. However, they are not issued bulletproof vests and are not allowed to carry weapons, unlike the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which issues a gun to its 700 Reserve Deputies (who are also unpaid volunteers). The auxiliary police also do not have the power to arrest anyone. Instead, they are trained to report crimes in progress on their police radio and wait for reinforcements to arrive.
After the shootings, New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced the creation of an in-house committee to study ways of improving the auxiliary police force. City Councilmember Hiram Monserrate announced that he would introduce legislation requiring the city to purchase bulletproof vests for auxiliary police officers. Councilmember David Weprin proposed a "10-point Auxiliary Officers Assistance Plan" which calls, among other things, for increased penalties for attacking Auxiliary Officers. In testimony before the City Council, Commissioner Kelly said the police committee on auxiliary police will seriously consider Monserrate’s proposal.
This is just one of a number of issues the committee will explore, involving how auxiliary police officers are trained, deployed, supervised...and protected.
The auxiliary police force grew out of Cold War fears about nuclear war and was created in 1951 in response to the federal government’s call for a cadre of civil defense volunteers who would usher citizens into fallout shelters and help calm public panic.
In 1967, full responsibility for the auxiliary police was given to the New York City Police Department. The force’s mission shifted to crime control during a time of historic crime highs for the city.
Today, auxiliary police officers, who must be between the ages of 17 and 60 (older volunteers are still eligible to perform light office duties), complete more than 50 hours of training and are required to work at least 10 hours a month. For the most part, they patrol in squad cars, on foot and on bicycle, serving as a visible police presence.
In some police precincts, the auxiliary police serve a critical role as a liaison between the police and the community. For example, the Fifth Precinct in Chinatown has a thriving auxiliary police unit with 143 officers, more than any precinct, led by longtime volunteer Shuck Seid, who started the unit in 1969 because of his concerns that Chinatown residents were afraid to report crimes to the police. “When I started the auxiliary unit, there was only one Chinese police officer in the precinct,” Seid explained in an interview with the Downtown Express in 2004. “In Chinatown, there were robberies, rapes, all kinds of crimes happening to immigrants, and the Chinese didn’t want to be witnesses or to report things to the police.”
The New York City Police Department also turns to the auxiliary police when it needs help with large public events or training events. At Shea Stadium in 2004, about 1,000 auxiliary police officers and Fire Department cadets served as fake victims during a mock terrorist attack. Fears of a terrorist attack have also re-focused the mission of the auxiliary police: two weeks after the London subway bombings, a new transit auxiliary police program was created to assist the police in periodic inspections of subway platforms.
On the night of the shooting, Officers Pekearo and Marshalik were fulfilling the bread and butter mission of the auxiliary police, walking along Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village when their police radios crackled with reports that a gunman had just exited DeMarco’s Pizza on Houston Street, only a few blocks away.
Nineteen year-old Marshalik, a sophomore at New York University who enthusiastically worked several weekly six-hour shifts at the Sixth Precinct, and 28-year old Pekearo, an aspiring novelist, spotted David Garvin coming toward them and ordered him to stop. Garvin responded by punching one of the auxiliary officers in the face and then crossed to the other side of Sullivan Street, running north and reloading his gun. Marshalik and Pekearo gave chase from across the street, with Pekearo in the lead and Marshalik behind him. Blocked at West Third Street by three regular police officers, Garvin turned and shot both Pekearo and Marshalik and then engaged in a running gun fight with officers before he was killed.
The obvious policy issue that Commissioner Kelly will confront is safety. Including Officers Pekearo and Yevgeniy, eight auxiliary police officers have been killed since the program’s creation.
Some auxiliary police officers, like Officer Pekearo have used their own money to purchase bulletproof vests, which cost between $600 and $700. (After a year of service, auxiliary police officers receive a uniform allowance of around $300, according to the New York Times.) In Pekearo’s case, the vest stopped one of the six bullets fired at him, but could not save his life. Commissioner Kelly indicated they he would consider purchasing bulletproof vests for auxiliary police officers, at an estimated cost of $3 million.
Clearly, the visibility of auxiliary police officers, whose uniforms and badges make them virtually indistinguishable from regular police officers, poses a safety risk. “The average street criminal on the run has no idea if an officer is auxiliary or not,” Steven Weiss, director of research for the Officer Down Memorial Page, told the New York Times. Yet high visibility, and the deterrent effect that goes along with it, is one of the main benefits of the program.
Outfitting the auxiliary police in vests, and even providing them with guns or mace as has been suggested, may seem like a solution to the safety problem, but it poses its own risks. With such equipment, auxiliary police officers, contrary to their training, could feel encouraged to engage in high-risk activities, such as pursuing suspected criminals.
There are practical considerations to consider as well. In Los Angeles, reserve deputies are fingerprinted and given an extensive background check, including a psychological exam, before being invited to join. Los Angeles Reserve Deputies are also given the authority to make arrests, further blurring the lines between a “volunteer” and “regular” police officer and eroding the justification for the program, which is to provide a low-cost boost to the New York City police force.
An alternative approach might involve making clearer distinctions between the appearance and duties of auxiliary police officers and regular police officers. For example, auxiliary police officers could be outfitted in a differently colored uniform, which might reduce the chance that they would be placed in harm’s way. A more radical solution would be to remove auxiliary police officers from foot patrol duties entirely or require that they be paired with regular police officers at all times. Of course, this might not only reduce the effectiveness of the auxiliary police, but also discourage volunteers from joining in the first place. Regular police officers might also resist the idea of being paired with auxiliary police officers, particularly if the auxiliary police are unarmed and unable to provide support in a dangerous situation.
As Commissioner Kelly weighs the tradeoffs between visibility and safety, effectiveness and limiting the program’s scope, the mourning for Officers Pekearo and Yevgeniy goes on. Both received an inspector’s funeral reserved for officers who have died in the line of duty, with hundreds of uniformed police officers in attendance.
A friend of Nicholas Pekearo remarked: “He would have gotten a kick out of getting full police honors.”
Aubrey Fox is project director of Bronx Community Solutions, aimed at changing the Bronx court system’s approach to low-level crime. Â
In his annual State of the City address last month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the city will begin to equip 911 call centers “to receive digital images and videos from cell phones… If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition you'll be able to transmit images to 911, or online to NYC.GOV,” making it easier for police to identify the criminal (or the landlord) later. The mayor envisions similar technology for non-emergency calls to 311, which would allow New Yorkers to document visually the quality of life concerns in their neighborhoods.
The mayor introduced this proposal as a way to “build stronger cooperation between the public and the police,” through “empower[ing] more New Yorkers to step forward and join the fight against crime.”
Following the speech, criminal justice coordinator John Feinblattt said this will be a “multi-year effort to bring law enforcement into cyberspace,” but there was no mention of a specific timeline, specific budget allocation, or a vendor.
Mayor Bloomberg claimed that “no other city in the world” offers residents the capability to transmit digital files to 911 centers. This is untrue. Small cities in states from Connecticut to Alaska are already working with a Connecticut- based company, PowerPhone, to provide such an enhancement to 911 service. State governments in Indiana, Tennessee and Vermont are also exploring this technology.
A more accurate formulation than the mayor’s might have been that no other big city is contemplating such digital improvements to 911 and 311 – except that Philadelphia’s City Council proposed such a system six days after Mayor Bloomberg’s speech. And the most famous use to date of cell phone images to aid the police is probably in London, where such images helped police in July 2005 identify the attackers in the bombings there.
One significant concern for New York is that, if this crime-reporting method proves popular, the volume of photos and videos could overwhelm the 911 or 311 systems. Feinblatt is not worried; he says that 911 operators are “managing information all the time,” implying that how operators receive information does not matter.
Assuming that Feinblatt is correct, and that the technical infrastructure proves capable of handling the volume of photos and videos, other questions remain. For example, how exactly will people transmit them? The current assumption is that callers will dial 911 as normal, and then receive instructions from an operator about how to send the photo or video. This would allow operators to manage the flow of digital images, but force callers to go through another step. Alternatively, people could transmit digital files to 911 operators directly, without needing to call first.
Even if the technical and logistical concerns were resolved promptly, the legal status of cell phone photos and videos is not clear. Civil rights attorney Norman Siegel believes that the digital files would be legal, because “private persons -- not the state -- [are] taking pictures of criminal behavior and forwarding it”. But Adina Schwartz, professor of law at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, cautions that such photos or videos may not be admissible in court unless their creators are willing to “authenticate” the material on the witness stand. In New York City and elsewhere, governments seeking to enhance the technological capabilities of their emergency response systems are forging new legal ground.
Well before Mayor Bloomberg announced this initiative, New Yorkers had begun to use their cell phone cameras to bring criminals to justice. In 2005, Thao Nguyen took a picture of restaurant owner Dan Hoyt exposing himself on the R train, and posted it online. Hoyt, who had been convicted of public lewdness previously, surrendered to police .
Holla Back NYC offers another flavor of cell phone justice. The site allows women to post the pictures of people who harass them in public online. Their goal is shame, not jail. Holla Back NYC has companion sites in cities throughout the United States.
John Feinblatt seems to see these grassroots approaches as a model for the law enforcement community, which has not kept up.
Others are not so sure.
“You have to wonder what kinds of hoaxes or vendettas a 'creative' individual armed with Photoshop might be able to put over on the city,” remarks Digital Smarts blogger. “Only time will tell.” “Jamais Cascio” of Open The Future writes: “As much as it has the potential for frivolous or malicious use -- just as regular 911 calls do -- it has the potential to give first responders a better idea of an emergency situation, allowing the professionals and the civilians to work together to evaluate conditions” but then suggests it also “raises uncomfortable questions.”
“I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories but there certainly seems to be a trend for increasing state surveillance,” writes “I-eclectica” in a blog post entitled Crime Fight Or Big Brother. Citizens “seem to be more frequently enlisted as informers, from... sharing their security footage with relevant authorities to now using mobile phones and computers. One would think that our long collective experiences with authoritarian and suppressive regimes would make us more sensitive to and critical about measures that, on the surface, look harmless and sensible.”
But writing in the Daily News, digital security expert Bruce Schneider pronounced the ability to send photographs and videos to 911 “a great idea that can make us all safer. Often the biggest problem a 911 operator has is getting enough good information from the caller. Sometimes the caller is emotionally distraught. Sometimes there's confusion and background noise. Sometimes there's a language barrier. Giving callers the opportunity to use all the communications tools at their disposal will help operators dispatch the right help faster.
“Still images and videos can also help identify and prosecute criminals. Memories are notoriously inaccurate. Photos aren't perfect, but they provide a different sort of evidence - one that, with the right safeguards, can be used in court.
“The worry is that New York will become a city of amateur sleuths and snitches, turning each other in to settle personal scores or because of cultural misunderstandings. But the 911 service has long avoided such hazards. Falsely reporting a crime is itself a serious crime, which discourages people from using 911 for anything other than a true emergency.”
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