Tag: bill de blasio
Silence From City Review Board Despite 750 Abuse Complaints Against NY Police

Silence From City Review Board Despite 750 Abuse Complaints Against NY Police

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

This story was co-published with THE CITY.

It was one of the most brutal police responses to last year's Black Lives Matter protests.

As hundreds of demonstrators were marching peacefully in the Bronx on the evening of June 4, New York Police Department officers blocked their way from in front and then behind, trapping the protesters in an ever-tightening space that footage shows ultimately spanned about three car-lengths.

Officers soon waded into the crowd, pepper-spraying, kicking, punching and swinging their batons. "People were being stampeded, they would try to get up and they'd get hit again," recalled Conrad Blackburn, a criminal defense lawyer who was there as a legal observer. "People were bleeding from their heads, with cuts all over their bodies. People couldn't breathe. They couldn't see."

About 60 protesters and bystanders were injured, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. Video footage the organization compiled captures the terror in people's voices. "We're being crushed!" one person screams. Another voice pleads, "Mommy!"

At the demonstration, overseeing the NYPD's response, was the top uniformed officer, Chief of Department Terence Monahan.

A recent federal lawsuit by New York State Attorney General Letitia James says that Monahan "actively encouraged and participated in this unlawful behavior." Other reports on the protests have also offered scathing criticisms of the NYPD's response.

But one voice has been conspicuously quiet: The agency whose sole responsibility is to investigate NYPD abuse of civilians.

The New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, or CCRB, received about 750 complaints of officers abusing Black Lives Matter protesters across the city last year. But it has not yet released any findings from investigations into those complaints.

The CCRB declined ProPublica's request for an accounting of the status of its investigations. It won't say how many investigations have been closed and how many are still open. Most critically, it won't disclose how many officers have been charged with misconduct.

The NYPD also did not respond to ProPublica's questions about any discipline stemming from abuse of protesters.

The lack of disclosure comes as New York City has moved toward more transparency in police discipline. A federal court recently cleared the way for the city to make NYPD officers' disciplinary records public. Both the CCRB and NYPD have now published officers' disciplinary records, though critics have noted the limitations of the databases.

Created nearly 70 years ago, originally as a part of the NYPD, the CCRB has long been cautious about crossing the department it is charged with investigating. It is currently overseen by a 15-member board, with members appointed by the mayor, city council, public advocate and police commissioner.

Internal CCRB communications about its investigations into the NYPD response to the protests give a glimpse of the dynamics involved: They show progress on the investigations has been slowed in part because of the NYPD's recurrent lack of cooperation — which ProPublica has previously detailed — and the CCRB leadership's own caution about confronting it.

In October, the then-deputy chief of the CCRB's investigative unit, Dane Buchanan, emailed the agency's executive director, Jonathan Darche, to say that investigators were "ready to schedule Chief Monahan for an interview." Buchanan asked Darche whether he'd like to discuss it first "or should we just have an investigator reach out to his office to get his availability?"

Darche, who reports to the board, responded that he would handle it himself and raise it in a meeting with the NYPD the next day.

Buchanan continued to check in, but the issue went unresolved for months. Monahan was reportedly finally scheduled for an interview to be conducted last Friday, just after he had announced he was retiring from the NYPD after 39 years. The move means Monahan would no longer be subject to departmental discipline.

As Monahan said he was retiring, Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed him to help run New York's COVID-19 response. At a press conference, de Blasio deflected a question about choosing an officer under investigation, saying, "I think the message this sends is that we're moving the recovery forward."

In a statement, the CCRB told ProPublica it was "not prepared to interview Chief Monahan in October" and that "it intends to release a report detailing the factors that complicated its investigations into the police response to last summer's protests." The CCRB said it will share the results of investigations once they are closed and once federal litigation, such as the attorney general's suit, is over.

Emails show CCRB staffers had repeatedly raised red flags about the NYPD's failure to produce evidence. "We continue to be plagued with false negatives in protest cases," one staffer emailed in the fall, referring to instances where the NYPD claimed it had no body-worn camera footage of an incident only for the CCRB to later discover footage exists.

Another email cited an example where an officer mentioned in an interview she had activated her body cam during a confrontation with a protester. The NYPD had told the CCRB that no such footage existed.

"Allegations of us not providing BWC footage is false," the NYPD said in a statement, referring to body-worn cameras. "We have spoken with senior executives at the CCRB who state they do not have any complaints and are pleased with the Departments response to providing BWC video."

Other records were also matters of contention. "We are hitting a critical point with the protest case documents," Buchanan wrote in October, referring to police records that could help the CCRB identify both officers and civilians. "Many of them have been outstanding for a long time."

The CCRB did decide to go public about one roadblock. Officers had been refusing to do interviews by video, which the agency was using because of the pandemic. Hundreds of cases were stalled as a result. After the CCRB announced an emergency hearing about it in August, the NYPD ordered officers to participate in video interviews.

But the CCRB stayed quiet on other impediments, and staff were sometimes discouraged from raising them even with the NYPD itself. The agency's then-head of policy, Nicole Napolitano, wrote in a September email that she had been barred from asking the NYPD about its policies for retention of protest footage. "I just spoke with Matt, and he's not a fan of me asking TARU any questions," Napolitano wrote, referring to the CCRB's general counsel, Matthew Kadushin, and the NYPD's Technical Assistance Response Unit.

In the same email, Napolitano noted that she had proposed writing a public report on the NYPD's response to the summer protests but that Kadushin had instructed her not to, saying it was too early.

Napolitano, Buchanan and two other senior staffers, who together had more than 50 years of experience at the agency, were abruptly laid offin November in what the CCRB has described as a needed cost-saving restructuring. (The four staffers declined to comment for this article.)

Emails show Buchanan had continued to follow up about the status of interviewing Monahan until the day he and the others were let go.

The four former staffers filed a lawsuit in January claiming that they were fired in part for "demanding greater accountability and transparency with respect to the handling of complaints of police misconduct against NYPD officers." The suit, which asserts the four were illegally retaliated against for raising concerns, says Darche "often skewed CCRB policies with a view towards currying favor with the NYPD and/or the Mayor's Office."

In one example from 2019 described in the suit, Darche objected to the term "bias based policing" and warned that any employees who used the phrase would be disciplined or fired.

The CCRB declined to comment on the former employees' lawsuit and did not make Darche or Kadushin available for interviews. The agency pointed to a previous statement by the chair of the CCRB, who was jointly appointed by the mayor and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. "The difficult but necessary restructuring the CCRB went through last year was motivated by a need for change during this difficult financial time for the City," said the chair, the Rev. Fred Davie.

A City Hall spokesperson also said at the time that the mayor "supports that step forward."

The CCRB's lack of independence has long stirred friction within the agency and with City Hall and the NYPD. Its powers have expanded over the years, most notably when it was given subpoena power in the early 1990s. But the agency, which has about 215 staffers and a $20 million budget, does not have direct access to body camera footage and other NYPD records. Instead, it effectively has to rely on the cooperation of the NYPD, which has a budget of nearly $6 billion and is the most powerful agency in city government.

The NYPD has repeatedly been cited for overly aggressive responses to large protests. "It is deja vu all over again in some ways," said the head of New York City's Department of Investigation after issuing a scathing report on the NYPD's response to the Black Lives Matter protests.

During the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, an NYPD commander on the scene told hundreds of peaceful protesters, "Have a safe march," then a few minutes later ordered them arrested.

A federal judge later ruled there was "not even arguable probable cause to make those arrests." The city eventually settled a lawsuit over the NYPD's RNC response for $18 million.

The commander at that scene? Terence Monahan.

Do you have information to share about police oversight in New York City? Contact eric.umansky@propublica.org. You can also reach him securely via Signal at 917-687-8406.

Mollie Simon and Zipporah Osei contributed reporting.

Who Are The 3.2 Million New Yorkers Who Can’t Vote Today?

Who Are The 3.2 Million New Yorkers Who Can’t Vote Today?

Today is one of the most important days on the primary calendar: New York is finally voting! The stakes are high for candidates in both parties, but especially so for the Democrats, each vying for part of the 247 delegates up for grabs.

However, millions of New Yorkers will be unable to take part in today’s voting: aside from the scores of independent voters who are ineligible to take part in closed party primaries, in which only party members can vote, many thousands more reportedly discovered recently that their voter registrations had been changed.

Both Ivanka and Eric Trump missed the October 2015 deadline to change their voter registrations to Republican so they could support their father, and they’re not alone: around 3.2 million New York voters can’t vote in today’s primary, and many of them favor the anti-establishment candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

According to Vice News, political minorities are disproportionately affected by the state’s election laws. Around 37 percent of New Yorkers under 30 don’t identify with either party, and 15 percent of African American voters and 22 percent of Latino voters were also politically unaffiliated.

Furthermore, recent revelations of voter roll purges show that even some committed party voters may be shut out of voting: the names of 126,000 Brooklyn registered Democrats have been removed from voter rolls since November 2015, resulting in a net loss of 63,500 registered Democratic voters. Executive director at the NYC Board of Elections Michael Ryan told WNYC that the drop was the result of the removal of inactive voters and the address changes of those leaving the borough.

But such a dramatic loss is still suspect, even to New York City’s Brooklynite mayor Bill de Blasio, who told WNYC “I admit that Brooklyn has had a lot of transient population – that’s obvious. Lot of people moving in, lot of people moving out. That might account for some of it. But I’m confused since so many people have moved in, that the number would move that much in the negative direction.”

The Election Justice USA, which describes itself as “a national organization advancing election integrity, transparency, and the protection of voting rights,” filed a lawsuit yesterday on behalf of “all disenfranchised and purged voters,” alleging that the unapproved registration changes deny affected voters equal protection under the law. The organization has called for a blanket order allowing “tens of thousands” of potential plaintiffs to vote in the primary today.

“We were seeing an alarming number of voter affiliations changed without people’s knowledge or consent, people who were registered listed as not registered,” said Shyla Nelson, a spokeswoman for Election Justice USA, to local New York City publication Gothamist. But, given that the lawsuit was filed just yesterday, it is unlikely that a decision will be made before polls close at 9 p.m. tonight.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought up that fact, which will undoubtedly impact his support levels in the state, during a campaign rally in Washington Square Park last week. “We have a system here in New York where independents can’t get involved in the democratic primary,” he said. “Where young people who have not previously registered and want to register today just can’t do it. So this is going be a tough primary for us.”

Of course, New York’s primary has been closed to independents for decades.

For Hillary Clinton, the absence of independent voters skews the Democratic vote for her, given she has polled poorly among Democratic-leaning independents. And while Donald Trump remains nearly unchallenged in the state, his argument that the party systems are “corrupt” has focused squarely on primaries and caucuses that he can paint as “undemocratic.”

“I hope it doesn’t involve violence. I hope it doesn’t. I’m not suggesting that,” he said Sunday, referring this time to the Republican National Committee’s delegate system. “I hope it doesn’t involve violence, and I don’t think it will. But I will say this, it’s a rigged system, it’s a crooked system. It’s 100 percent corrupt.”

Photo: A demonstrator dressed as U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump protests outside the Trump Tower building in midtown Manhattan in New York March 19, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

How Big Cable Makes New Yorkers Pay More For Slower Internet

How Big Cable Makes New Yorkers Pay More For Slower Internet

As 40,000 Verizon employees clog New York’s streets with one of the nation’s largest strikes in years, and with no end in sight, it’s worth mentioning one thing those strikers are incontrovertibly right about, among many others:

The availability, speed, and cost of New York City’s internet are all pretty dismal.

Take FiOS, Verizon’s high-speed, fiberoptic broadband internet service that, if made available to every home in the city, would finally catch New York up to its most technologically advanced peers around the world.

In fact, Verizon made a deal with the city in 2008 to wire any of its 3.1 million households that wanted an alternative to Time Warner and others, with a completion date set for June 30, 2014. Two years behind schedule, Verizon has no intention of fulfilling their end of the agreement, and large parts of New York City are still without FiOS, even where demand is overwhelming.

Last June, the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications released a report excoriating the slow implementation of Verizon’s promises. In 2012, it found, 1.7 million homes were in areas where FiOS could be installed. By the end of 2014, that number was just under 2 million, an increase of less than 300,000.

“Through a thorough and comprehensive audit, we have determined that Verizon substantially failed to meet its commitment to the people of New York City,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio on NY1 in June of last year.

The seemingly intentional slowdown of bringing FiOS to New York falls squarely on protesting workers’ list of grievances. Verizon already wants to cut operational costs by decreasing worker benefits and outsourcing jobs, and any large effort to expand FiOS beyond the current bare minimum of coverage (which happens to be concentrated in wealthy areas) would require hiring new employees, strengthening the union with whom they currently refuse to negotiate.

This is not the Verizon New Yorkers were promised in 2008.

In comments to the New York Times after the deal with the city was made eight years ago, Verizon Telecom president Virginia P. Ruesterholz bragged that “No other provider has said it will build in all of New York […] The other competitors haven’t built everywhere, but just taken their turf.”

Well, that’s all it was: talk.

The practice amongst internet providers of “carving up” service areas, as Ruesterholz described to the Times, is used to minimize competition and keep costs high.

As a result of the increased consolidation brought on by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the city operates with a handful of large cable providers: Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T, and Comcast, who are widely reviled by New York’s residents, and a small handful of others.

And while all of these companies repeatedly claim that their various expansions have resulted in increased competition, the reality has been far different. Rather than citywide coverage by — and competition between — all the major providers, New York resembles a mosaic of provider strongholds.

These same companies have led the fight against net neutrality, the notion that Internet service providers should allow open access to any IP address on the web regardless of its source. Without that, one of the governing principles behind the creation of the internet would be lost, and providers would charge customers more for visiting certain websites.

It was a battle Big Cable almost won, with a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission that proved the nation’s tech administrators are woefully under equipped to govern the internet, Comcast Corp v. FCC.

While that decision ended the commission’s use of ancillary jurisdiction, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation described as “a catchall source of authority that amounts to ‘we can regulate without waiting for Congress so long a the regulations are related to something else that Congress told us to do,'” it also opened the door for further challenges to the FCC’s power.

A second challenge, Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC, led to the brief death of net neutrality, as the D.C. Circuit court ruled that the FCC chose the wrong legal framework to enforce it. The result was a months-long public commenting period which resulted in 4 million comments by Americans, a triumph of civic engagement in support of net neutrality. The corporations turned petty — Verizon’s response was written in Morse code.

Nevertheless, the cable companies have continued to try to turn the tables in their favor with lobbying efforts and campaign donations. In the 2014 election cycle, Comcast spent $5 million on political donations and $17 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, whose website OpenSecrets.org tracks money in politics. Verizon spent over $2 million in donations and $13 million on lobbying, AT&T spent $4 million on donations and $14 million on lobbying, and Time Warner spent just over $1 million on donations and a further $3 million on lobbying.

In 2012 in New York state, Verizon spent $850,000 on lobbying efforts, according to numbers collected by Long Island publication Newsday,

In Paris, Zurich, Hong Kong, and Seoul, people pay as little as $30 a month for high speed internet that can download high definition movies in under 10 seconds. It’s high time the city’s residents paid less for more, too.

Photo: Flickr user jseliger2.

Hillary Clinton And Bill de Blasio’s Racial Joke Didn’t Go Over Well

Hillary Clinton And Bill de Blasio’s Racial Joke Didn’t Go Over Well

Sometimes politicians make dumb jokes.

Sometimes politicians make dumb racist jokes.

Sometimes politicians get called out on the cover of the New York Daily News for making dumb racist jokes.

This time it was Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

It’s a quick bit — and purely scripted, as de Blasio told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

Clinton made a joke about how long it took for de Blasio to endorse her. (He endorsed her back in October, but months earlier he was noncommittal.)

De Blasio then responded with a quick line; Leslie Odom Jr., a black performer who plays Aaron Burr in the Broadway phenomenon Hamilton, was in on the joke, which plays off of an old, stupid racial stereotype.

There was an added bit of irony, too: De Blasio is married to Chirlane McCray, an African-American woman.

Screengrab of Leslie Odom, Jr., from Hamilton, Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, trying to tell a joke. tomm2thumbs via YouTube