NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Complaints Against NYPD on the Rise, Affordable Housing Units Sit Empty for Over a Year, City Aide Supports Trump’s Trans Athletes Ban and Brooklyn’s History with Slavery

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

A report from New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board finds misconduct complaints against the NYPD are on the rise, but many of those officers aren’t facing discipline. Plus, the New York Housing Conference finds the housing lottery system is making it hard for tenants to move into empty apartments. Also, the city’s sports director faces criticism for supporting President Trump's ban on trans athletes in women's and girls sports. And finally, WNYC’s Michael Hill and Arya Sundaram discuss Brooklyn’s role as a slave holding capital.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City. From WMYC, I'm Jene A. Misconduct complaints against the NYPD are on the rise, but many of those officers aren't facing discipline. That's according to a new police watchdog report. The city agency that investigates police misconduct also says it couldn't investigate more than 1,400 complaints last year because of staffing shortages. But even when investigators did,

find that officers violated policy, the department often chose not to discipline. Former investigator Daniel Boda says that could cause distrust of both the NYPD and the agency that investigates misconduct. For the complainant, that has to be incredibly demoralizing and create a sense of cynicism that the system is designed to ensure that the officers don't receive discipline. The NYPD says it always reviews serious cases, but it sometimes drops less serious ones when there isn't enough time. New York City's housing lottery system helps thousands of low-income tenants find new affordable

apartments every year. But a new report by the New York Housing Conference finds the same system can also make it hard for tenants to move into empty apartments. The policy group says owners and property managers often have to sift through hundreds of applications to fill their vacant units. It recommends letting owners list the units on the open market. Officials from the city's housing agency. agencies say the system is meant to make the selection process more equitable, but they say

they're working on ways to get people into apartments faster. A city sports director from Mayor Eric Adams is facing criticism for supporting President Trump's ban on trans athletes in women's and girls' sports. WMYC's Elizabeth Kim has more. In an Instagram post, Jasmine Ray wrote, quote, I stand with the recent executive order reinforcing the importance of fairness in women's sports. Ray is a director of the mayor's office of sports, wellness, and recreation. She invoked her title in her social media post. Her comments defy the city's rules for youth sports, which say students must be allowed to participate according to their gender identity.

Ray told WNYC that her now deleted post was, quote, an error in judgment. Critics of the mayor say Ray's remarks are part of a pattern under his administration. LGBTQ advocates have previously protested the mayor for, appointing people with a history of anti-gay remarks. A new book looks back at the history of free black Brooklyn residents and their struggle for freedom. More on that after the break. You're listening to NYC now.

Among New York City's five boroughs, Brooklyn is best known for its cultural diversity. But there are parts of Brooklyn known as venerable black communities. In fact, the borough used to be a slaveholding capital. A new book called Brooklyn Nights chronicles the history of free black Brooklyn residents and their struggle for freedom. It's by Prithi Kana Kamedela, a history professor at the Bronx Community College and CUNY Graduate Center. WMYC's race and justice reporter Aria Sundaram spoke with the author recently about Black history in Brooklyn. Aria shared a few takeaways from that conversation with my colleague Michael Hill. She starts by sharing some of the main highlights from Brooklyn's history with slavery.

In the 1700s, one in three Brooklyn residents was enslaved, and Brooklyn held onto slavery much longer than any other county in New York State. And that's even as slavery was beginning to decline in Manhattan. And also Brooklyn's even economic growth was really linked to slavery. Here's what Prithy said. It had its own economy, and that economy again tied it to slavery, which was sugar. You may know the Domino Sugar Factory today. That was previously the Habermaya sugar factory. and that really made Brooklyn, the third largest city in the United States, the profits from that.

And that's also where Domino Park is now and how it got its name. What did the black schooling system look like in Brooklyn in this era? We're talking about before the Civil War. Other cities had schools for black children, what were called African schools, so Manhattan, Philadelphia, Boston. But the big difference was that in Manhattan, the creation of those schools came from white philanthropists lending money. Whereas in Brooklyn, those schools were both created for and by black people. And by the mid-19th century, there were three different African schools in what would now be called downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and another in a free black settlement called Weeksville, which is on the border of modern day Bedford-Stuyveson and Crown Heights. And Prithy shared this staggering statistic.

There were more black children attending these schools than there were white children attending the district schools, which was not sort of a throwaway statistic because, of course, schooling was not compulsory, meaning families were making incredibly difficult choices about whether to lose an income, right, because children were in the workforce or whether to send them to school. So it was a serious choice for black parents to send their children to school, and it's remarkable that they did so in such large number. The author said Black Brooklynites were under constant threat of being kidnapped back into slavery. How did they work to address that threat? So for some context, Congress passed what was called the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, and it allowed federal special commissioners to cross into the north where slavery was largely abolish and kidnap any person they assumed might have been a fugitive slave. And on top of that, Prithy said the system was rigged against the accused fugitives because their testimony wasn't

allowed in court, and judges often received incentives in favor of the slaveholders. And the first person to get arrested under that law is a man named James Hamlet. He's a free black man living in Williamsburg, working in Manhattan, and the son of his alleged former slaveholder claims that he's an enslaved person who ran away from Maryland years ago. And James is arrested. He's taken to a Baltimore jail. And then he returns to New York a week later. And here's what Prithy said about how that happened, and how he returned. In order for that to happen, black New Yorkers, black Brooklynites are organizing, right? They are fundraising constantly.

And so they, quote, unquote, buy him out of slavery and return him. In Brooklyn, they form committees thinking about what radical interventions would look like in terms of people being kidnapped. And black Brooklynites do this for others who get kidnapped and are forced to live back in slavery. And in fact, others who have never been free. The draft riots really shook black New Yorkers during the Civil War. What happened in those riots and how did Black Brook Alliance recover? So at that time, there were longstanding tensions between what Prithee says were two of the most marginalized groups in New York, black people and Irish immigrants. And what happens during the draft riots is that those tensions just explode.

So wealthy people could buy their way out of fighting in the Civil War for about $300. So the fighting of the war was really left to working-class men. And Irish New Yorkers have huge resentment about fighting in a war over slavery because they argue they haven't benefited from slavery. Here's how Prithy described it. So in 1863, it's the summer, it's July. Again, it is hot. It is this city, which means everybody is crowded and living on top of each other. No air conditioning, nowhere to go cool down. There are rumors flying around that the draft is going to be called again. that another set of folks will get called into battle. And so it erupts into a really 19th century example of white domestic terrorism, in which white New Yorkers, some of them Irish, will go through

the streets of Manhattan blaming and murdering their black neighbors. And so during that time, black New Yorkers will flee, right, traumatized, severely traumatized, flee for their lives across the East River. But they don't just flee to Brooklyn. They leave for elsewhere. After the draft riots, the black population across New York and Brooklyn steeply declines. And we won't see the same number of black people living in the city until the great migration in the 20th century.

Ariya, this is fascinating to learn this history, more history about slavery in Brooklyn. I'm curious. Obviously, the professor is a scholar, but do we know what made her take on this subject and do this kind of research for a book? You know, she was really kind of interested in doing public history. And public history specifically around slavery. She had been working in coalition with a number of other black groups in the city and a number of other historic sites in the city that were working and doing work around slavery

in Brooklyn, and specifically around free black Brooklynites. And this came from her work doing this kind of public history work with other sites in the area. That's WNYC's ARIA Sondy, talking with my colleague Michael Hill. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.