NYC NOW - July 17, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Mayor Eric Adams says subway crime has decreased in the last six months, attributing the decline in part to the deployment of the National Guard into the system earlier this year. Meanwhile, Montvale, New Jersey Mayor Mike Ghassali plans a federal lawsuit to exempt certain communities from building new affordable housing. Plus, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine has created a new map to help you find the nearest bathroom. Finally, as we mark ten years since the choking death of Eric Garner by a Staten Island police officer, WNYC analyzes a decade of police misconduct data to see what’s changed and what hasn’t. WNYC’s Michael Hill speaks with reporter Bahar Ostadan to learn her findings.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. New York City Mayor Eric Adams says subway crime has decreased in the last six months, and he says the drop is in part due to the deployment of the National Guard into the system earlier this year. The mayor says the subway has been especially safe to ride since the start of the summer. We are breaking the cycle of crime in our subway. system. If you look at the numbers alone, over the last four weeks, it has decreased by 26.6%. Adam says there have been fewer robberies on the subway since the start of the year than any

comparable period since the NYPD began keeping track of the category. He adds, police will roll out new metal detectors in some stations over the next few days to help keep guns out of the transit system. Now to New Jersey, where a Bergen County mayor wants to end an exemption that led certain communities off the hook for building new affordable housing in the garden state. Nearly all municipalities in New Jersey have state requirements for new housing, but there are exceptions for places with high unemployment rates or lots of population density. Montville Mayor Mike Gasoli says he's recruited officials from 100 towns to help bank roll the federal lawsuit he's planning.

Maria Hope is for Trenton to say, hold on, why are all these towns all of a sudden banding together, what have we missed. It's just unrealistic, the timeline and the pressure that they're putting on us, towns like ours. The potential challenge comes as New Jersey looks to prepare new mandates this fall for how much affordable housing it wants towns to build over the next 10 years. If you find yourself in Manhattan and you got to go, Borough President Mark Levine has a new way to help you find the bathroom nearest you. In a video posted to social media, Levine says,

Manhattan residents are receiving a map in the mail. It's got a list of all public bathrooms in the borough of Manhattan, organized by neighborhood, and inside you've got a map of where they're all located, so keep it on hand. You never know when you'll need it. You can also download it at bit.ly slash NYC bathrooms. It lists public bathrooms at local parks, playgrounds, and subway stations. Levine says his office will also be handing out physical copies of the pamphlets at events around Manhattan over the summer.

As we marked 10 years since the choking death of Eric Garner by a Staten Island police officer, WNYC analyzes a decade of police misconduct data to see what's changed and what hasn't. That story after the break. Ten years ago, video of an NYPD officer choking Eric Garner to death on a Staten Island sidewalk sparked nationwide protests about police abuse. In 2014, Garner was confronted. by officers on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes or Lucy's. Maya Wally is the former chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board,

the organization that investigates police misconduct. She says the offense should have never resulted in a police intervention in the first place. There were so many other ways for the city to manage an issue that was a poverty issue, that was an issue of unemployment. Wiley says the CCRB still lacks the independent power to investigate police abuse effectively. Daniel Poncello was fired from the NYPD nearly five years after the killing. Garner's final words, I Can't Breathe, have become an international rallying cry against police abuse. The reverberations from those protests continue today.

But some scholars and activists say when it comes to policing, many things have not changed. WMYC's Baja Ostodon examined 10 years of data on police misconduct and accountability in New York City. She spoke with my colleague Michael Hill about what she found. First, let me say, chokeholds have been banned by the NYPD really since at least the 80s. So I looked at complaints of police chokeholds through the years and found that in 2014, there were 244 complaints of chokeholds by citizens. And last year, there were roughly the same number, 230. So just to note, these are just allegations of illegal chokeholds. Only 3% of these complaints were substantiated by the city's police watchdog agency.

In the six years after Garner was killed, the complaints of chokeholds by citizens went down year by year. But slowly they've crept back up under Mayor Eric Adams. There could be a few reasons for this, right? One is arrests are up under Adams, so there are more interactions with the police. And also, officers have told me that they were more cautious after Garner's death and that now, the police force is more emboldened under Adams than they were under de Blasio. How about people who are killed by NYPD officers? Has anything changed there? The NYPD by our count has shot and killed at least 95 people in the last decade.

Police shootings, as you can imagine, are sort of the easiest to analyze, but when it comes to asphyxiation, beatings, medical emergencies and holding cells, fatalities. from high speed police car chases, that's harder to evaluate and determine, you know, who's the arbiter of blame. In 2014, the year Garner was killed. The NYPD shot and killed eight people. So far this year, they've shot and killed nine. So we're on track to surpass the numbers we saw a decade ago. I looked at race data and found that from 2012 to 2022, black New Yorkers were seven times more likely to be shot and killed by the NYPD than white New Yorkers. And when police arrest people, they're twice as likely to use physical force while arresting a black person. That's

according to the NYPD's own data. Yeah, I'll just add that, you know, remembering the scale we're operating at, the NYPD says they got 7.1 million 911 calls in 2022, right? And just about 0.1% they told me or about 8,000 incidents resulted in the use of force. They also told me that the 13 people shot and killed by police in 2022 had a weapon that appeared to them capable of causing death or serious physical injury. I'm going to ask you what I think a lot of people want to know. Where do we stand on accountability? That's obviously a huge question, Michael, and, you know, different people have different answers. Here's what I can tell you. It's almost unprecedented. for police officers to be criminally charged for killing someone while on duty.

That was true 10 years ago, and it's true today. Like I said, of the, you know, NYPD has shot and killed by our count at least 95 people in the last decade. At least eight officers in those cases were fired from their jobs. Three were criminally charged. In one of those criminal charge cases, the officers was acquitted, of all charges. In another, his sentence was reduced to probation and community service. and the third case is still ongoing.

And as many people may remember in Eric Garner's case, there were no criminal charges introduced, but the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, was fired by the NYPD in 2019, five years later. One thing that's changed, though, is access to body-worn camera video. What did you learn about that? That's right. The city's access to body-worn camera footage

in these misconduct cases has multiplied 15 times. It wasn't until 2019 when the NYPD finished rolling out body-worn cameras across the entire police force. That's over 20,000 cameras. So that combined with the spread of smartphones, the culture of people filming the police more often, means that the city has access not just to more body-worn camera footage, but citizen footage, right? Like in Garner's case and also surveillance footage from surrounding buildings. The city's police watchdog agency is called the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Here's what John Darsh, their executive director, told me.

Sometimes the footage finds us when people tag us in social media. But the other ways we find footage is by old-fashioned shoe leather doing investigation. So Darsh told me that access to video evidence, whether it be bodyworn camera, surveillance, or citizen footage, has helped the CCRB substantiate more complaints of misconduct, right? He told me that the agency's goal is to reach a determination about what sort of discipline, if any, the officer should face in an alleged misconduct case. He said that in cases where the agency had access to body worn camera footage, they reached a determination 77% of the time. In cases where they didn't have body worn camera footage, they reached the determination just 25% of the time. The one thing I'll say that it's

important to remember is just because the city's police watchdog agency says that an officer should receive some sort of discipline doesn't mean that that will happen. The police commissioner has the final say and he followed the CCRB's recommendation just about half of the time last year. That's my colleague Michael Hill in conversation with public safety reporter Bahar Osteron. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday three times a day. I'm Junae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.