NYC NOW - June 15, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

We tally New York City’s air quality crisis a week after Canada wildfire smoke billowed over the five boroughs. Plus, Mayor Eric Adams is considering nixing a recent package of legislation meant to address homelessness. Also, classrooms are being served as cells at NYC’s troubled juvenile detention centers. And finally, we continue our celebration of Pride Month by sharing personal stories from people in the LGBTQ+ community.

Good evening and welcome to NYC now. I'm Jene Pierre for WNYC. Air quality in New York City is back to normal this week. And normal air here is the equivalent to smoking about a cigarette a day. But last week when Canada wildfire smoke billowed over the five boroughs, air quality levels were more than 20 times worse than usual. That's according to a new environmental analysis published on got the miss.com. Baseball fans at that spooky Yankee game on June 6th

inhaled the equivalent of five cigarettes. And laborers working outside the next day, under those orange skies, inhaled the equivalent of more than a pack and a half in Queens and Brooklyn. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has only vetoed one bill during his first 18 months in office.

But he's considering nixing a recent package of legislation meant to address homelessness. WNYC reporter David Brand has more. A couple weeks ago, the City Council passed four bills meant to make it easier for New Yorkers to get rental assistance vouchers and issue more vouchers to people in need. One of the bills would eliminate a rule that makes people wait 90 days in a shelter before they can get rent help. But Adams says the package will cost too much and make it harder for people to get out of shelters. The mayor is floating a plan to eliminate the 90-day rule through executive action, but might veto the rest.

That's setting up a potential showdown with fellow Democrats in the council. They're planning to override a veto with a two-thirds majority. They say the city's already spending billions on shelters. Money better used for permanent housing. Stick around. There's more after the break. Classrooms in New York City's juvenile detention centers are being used as cells for detainees. And violence between detainees at the facility has gotten so bad that staffers have no choice but to lock the kids in classrooms in order to maintain security. It's a regular occurrence.

one that employees at the facilities say contributes to educational failures in the city's juvenile detention centers. For more, my colleague Sean Carlson talked with WNYC reporter Bahar Ostadon. Talk about this practice of holding juvenile detainees in classrooms. What does it look like? And why do they do it? It's really what you said. Violence inside the juvenile detention centers is getting really, really bad with kids threatening to attack each other, with them having access to more weapons, potentially than ever before. So staffers are basically saying they have to pull kids off of their residence halls and lock them inside classrooms.

Because of their age, they are always in there with a staffer. But essentially, one staff member in Brooklyn told me that this is happening, you know, every day where kids are confined in classrooms as a security measure from 5 a.m. through 11 p.m. or even later into the early hours of the morning. So they'll be falling asleep basically on desk chairs with a bed sheet. at most. Basically, staffers will wait for the other kids on the hall to fall asleep and then shuffle one of the detainees to a random other hall to prevent detainees from threatening to attack or kill one another. So you talked about this happening every day. We wanted to ask you about that. How frequently is this kind of thing happening? So it does seem like it's happening every day. Part of what's tough is that the staff inside these centers play this sort of dual role of mentor slash counselor and also guard essentially.

They're called youth development specialists or YDS. And the city agency that oversees these sites, the administration for children's services, says those staffers are supposed to provide, quote, safe and secure supervision while also serving as a role model and mentor for these kids. It's difficult, as you can imagine, to get information. of these sites. Staff are not allowed to speak to the press. There is a federal monitor that oversees one of the two juvenile detention centers. That's the one in the South Bronx called Horizon. Their report in April said that violence that left kids with quote unquote serious injuries doubled last year. So we're talking about detainees using metal shanks, scalples, razor blades. There's just, there's a lot going on.

Sources told you that this practice contributes to the educational shortcomings that are so prevalent at these facilities. Can you talk more about that? So the first thing is that the kids who are locked in the classroom, like I said, from say 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. Those kids don't go to school that day. So that's number one. Number two is the classrooms are used by a school called Passages Academy. That's run by the Department of Education. But what I'm hearing from sources is that more and more kids are refusing to go to class and they're being allowed to stay back and skip school. And so instead they're getting these sort of like homework packets to complete on their own time. Generally speaking, safety is the number one priority over education, according to staffers.

So I'm told that the kids who do show up to class are actually divided by gang affiliation rather than grade level. So you might have kids, you know, spanning three or four different grades in one room just to keep people who can get along together. An educator at one of the cities to juvenile detention centers says that this practice of of putting these kids in these classrooms just started this school year. So what's the deal? Is that the result of worsening conditions at the facilities? What brought everybody to this point? Well, one major semi-recent change is a piece of legislation called Raise the Age. New York was the second to last state in the country to ban sending 16 and 17-year-olds to adult jails, in our case, to Rikers. That legislation was passed in 2017. And so one of the One of many outcomes of that has been the population at these two juvenile detention centers is actually the highest it's been in 10 years. ACS says that part of that is because kids are locked up for longer periods of time given the nature of their crimes. I'm also hearing that the types of weapons that are coming into these sites are getting more and more dangerous.

We reported in March that that's largely thanks to a staff smuggling network that is bringing in drugs. drugs, cash, cell phones, and weapons inside. You mentioned the agency that oversees these facilities. It's the administration of children's services. What did they have to say about this when you asked them about it? Well, they said regarding the practice of keeping kids in the classrooms as a security measure, that classrooms are actually just one of the places that the agency uses to separate one detainee from the others. In terms of the violence, they've told me that, you know, they are trying to implement

stronger checkpoints at the entrances, stronger key holds on the uniforms because, you know, detainees were stealing staff keys and, you know, taking control of the sites. And it's something that, you know, we're going to keep looking into. That's WNYC reporter Bahar Oestadon talking with my colleague, Sean Carlson. June is Pride Month. And to celebrate, we ask some older New Yorkers to reflect on their journeys in the LGBTQ plus community and share a memory. message for today's generation. My name is Chris Smith, and I currently live in New York City. I identify as a trans man. I am 63 years old and very, very happy. I am somewhat of what you would call a late bloomer, because I didn't transition until about six and a half years ago,

and I lived most of my adult life as a very miserable lesbian. Yeah, because during my time when I was in my 20s and 30s. Going through transition just didn't seem feasible. There weren't any options for me. It just didn't seem possible. It was too expensive. It was always those things that people talked about, but not a lot of people I knew personally that actually went through the process.

And then all of a sudden, I see that, yeah, it's here. It's available. My insurance covers it. So let's go. Let's do it. I always felt and knew that I was different. And it wasn't part of my family because my family was very religious. It was always about going to church every Sunday, not only Sundays but Saturdays and different days like that.

So it was never an option and I never knew anyone personally that was different like me. So it wasn't until I went away to college and started meeting other kids that were. LGBTQ that I started considering it. And I was like, wait a minute, so maybe I, there's a life for me being so different. I feel like a brand new person. I feel so open, so happy. I feel like I am finally comfortable in my skin. My advice for the younger generation is to keep going.

There are possibilities out there. And I am so proud of the young people because you give me hope. Be strong and just be patient. Be patient because it gets better. That's New York City resident Chris Smith, sharing his journey and a message for today's generation as we celebrate Pride Month. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC.

Catch us every weekday. Three times a day. We'll be back tomorrow.