NYC NOW - July 1, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

Starting this Monday, police are required to document low-level stops, including when an officer asks someone for their ID or where they’re going. Meanwhile, New York City is ushering in an 8.5% water bill hike for property owners, the largest increase since 2011, effective immediately. Plus, a new WNYC analysis shows ambulance response times in New York City have been the slowest since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. WNYC’s Matt Katz breaks down the numbers.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm NYC now producer Jared Marcel. Starting this Monday, police are required to report low-level encounters with citizens. WNYC's Tiffany Hanson has more. The City Council passed the How Many Stops Act in December. The measure requires the NYPD to document low-level stops, including when an officer asks a person for their ID, where they're going, or for voluntary consent to search them.

The NYPD is already mandated to document stops where officers detain people even briefly, including stops, frisks, and arrests. The department will also have to post quarterly data on level one and level two stops on its website. Council Speaker Adrian Adams said in December, the move was meant to provide, quote, broader data on policing that helps inform public safety policy.

New York City is ushering in an 8.5% water bill hike for property owners effective immediately. The increase will add $93 to the average city property owner's water bill each year. It's the largest since 2011. The city water board begrudgingly approved the new rates last month. The group also passed a resolution saying they were forced to approve such a steep hike due to a budget maneuver by Mayor Eric Adams. The resolution said the increase will make it more difficult to justify water bill hikes in the future. Up next, a new WNYC analysis shows ambulance response times in New York City have slowed tremendously in recent years. That story after the break. WNYC has learned that ambulance response

times in New York City are getting longer, reaching the highest levels since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago. My colleague David First spoke with reporter Matt Katz to break down the numbers and to explain what this means for people having medical emergencies. You reviewed the data on ambulance response times going back several years. What did you find? Yeah, so beginning with the most recent week that I could access from city data, this is the week of Memorial Day this year, it took an EMS an average of 12.8 minutes to respond to life-threatening medical emergencies

and almost a half an hour, 28 minutes to show up to non-life-threatening situations. And by those two measures, that's the longest count on both counts since the middle of March 2020 when, you know, as you know, we were in the beginning of the COVID pandemic and response times then averaged about 17 minutes for life-threatening situations. Memorial Day week is not an anomaly. Lengthy response times to medical emergencies seem to be mirroring annual trends in the city going back several years, just to give you a sense of how that compares to other cities. We found a study from 2017 that showed EMS response in urban areas averages out at just about seven minutes, much shorter than New York right now. So New York isn't doing well here. And the concern, of course, is that studies show for serious incidents like cardiac arrest, longer response times simply can mean death. Why is this happening?

What are the factors that are leading to such dangerously long response times? I got different answers to this. First, let me tell you what Michael Fields, who runs EMS operations for the FDNY, what he told me, first he brought up traffic. There are just too many cars on city streets right now, more than there have been. That's a fact. And it's harder and harder for ambulance crews to get to where they're going. Fields also said that new speed limits slow down the city, which slows down ambulances. And then bike lanes have actually narrowed streets, which makes it harder for ambulances to, like, blow past traffic.

The other issue is just call volume. There were a record high 1.6 million calls for EMS services last year. Mind you, there's only about 4,300 or so EMS members. And that number that EMS calls to 911, that could be $1.7 million this year. And the last thing I'll say is EMTs and paramedics are spending longer at the hospital these days after they drop people off. This is what Fields told me. And that's because there's just not enough staff at the hospitals to help take over care of the patients quickly enough so that the EMS members can get back on the road.

Okay, this is what Fields told you. This is the view of city officials explaining these delays. What about EMTs and paramedics who ride the ambulances? Do they have a different explanation? Yes and no. They agree that traffic has gotten worse and more people are calling non-one-one-one-s, sometimes unnecessarily. But they also say they're just understaffed, that they have to crisscross the city to go to calls

because there just aren't enough EMTs and paramedics. And the reason for that, they say, is money. They want the city to spend more on staffing. Their contract is actually expired by a couple of years. So negotiations with the city just started a week or two ago. So they're hoping for big increases in EMT salaries, which now their salaries start at less than $40,000 annually. That's less than the pay for an app delivery worker making the new city minimum wage and working 40 hours a week. And the EMTs and the paramedics say the,

these low salaries lead to high turnover and just not enough people applying for the jobs. I want to play you a bit of what Anthony Amagera, who's vice president of the union that represents EMS officers, what he told me. He says the call volume has almost doubled since he started decades ago, and it can literally take hours in some cases

for an ambulance to show up because there's just not enough crews to get to the emergencies. So Anthony's based in Brooklyn, and his crew got dispatched all the way to Rikers Island last week for a sick detainee, which is just too far for an ambulance to get there in time for a serious situation. People are dying. People are dying because we're not getting there.

We want to get there. It's not like we don't want to. No, the people that can actually save you are the EMS people. And it's just not enough of us. And they're not staying. Even the ones that are here, they're not staying. They're not staying. They're leaving in troves. I also spoke to an EMT who left because of pay, like literally quit because of it. Maggie Hope quit in May. She was making such little money.

She couldn't afford rent in New York City and was commuting from almost two hours away all the way up in Orange County. And then one day she looked at her bank account and she had just $17 in it. So she said she just couldn't afford to remain an EMT. It's hard because I loved what I did so much. I loved going into work and knowing that I was helping. It made a difference to them and it made a difference in my day knowing that I could change somebody's day even a little bit.

Well, Matt, What's being done about all of this to deal with what some say is a staffing problem and the long response times? So for the record field, the EMS chief told me that EMS does not have a staffing issue. He said, sure, he'd take more EMTs and paramedics, and that would reduce response times, but they do have what they're budgeted to have. So in the meantime, he said they're planning public service announcements that would tackle the call volume. The announcements would explain to New Yorkers, when to call 911, when to make. maybe, you know, visit an urgent call center instead. He also has plans for more telemedicine from the street.

So maybe instead of taking time to transport patients to hospitals, EMTs, and the patients can communicate electronically with a doctor and get prescribed any medication that they may need. And he wants to work with hospitals to get EMTs out the door from ER is faster than they are now after dropping off patients. But in the meantime, he's really expecting call volume to continue to go up. What do New Yorkers say about the long-reforms? response times. Are they noticing this? Yeah, I was talking to our colleague, Brittany Craigstein,

who covers a lot of breaking news and breaking crime for us. And she said that invariably when she shows up to the aftermath of a shooting, people complain how long it took for an ambulance to get there to provide life-saving care. And, you know, what happens then is people end up driving victims of shootings or people having other emergencies to the hospitals. And that just delays the time that it takes them to get the care they need. So to me, what she told me, kind of summed up the problem. That's my colleague David First, speaking with reporter Matt Katz. Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC.

Catch us every weekday three times a day. I'm Jared Marcel. See you tomorrow.