NYC NOW - March 8, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

New York City's Department of Corrections says it's still working toward closing Rikers by 2027. Also, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin reports that the state is seeing record breaking numbers of hate crimes and other bias incidents. Plus, A coalition that's suing the Mount Sinai system to stop Beth Israel hospital from shuttering alleges the hospital has violated a court order. And finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin about a new report which shows record breaking numbers of hate crimes and other bias incidents in the state.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City. From WNYC, I'm Jenae Pierre. New York City's Department of Corrections says it's still working toward closing Rikers by 2027 and transition to smaller borough-based jails, despite an admission this week by a senior Adams administration official that it would likely not meet the deadline. Alex Maldonado is the agency's assistant commissioner for strategic initiatives. At a hearing Friday, she assured City Council Speaker Adrian Adams that they were still working to have the new jails ready on time. We are working tirelessly, I will assure you, with our partner agencies,

the Department of Design and Construction and Correctional Health Services, and the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice to ensure that this program remains on track. Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly expressed skepticism that the city would meet its deadline to close Rikers by 2027, even without the possibility of a federal takeover. In a conversation before the Friday hearing, WNYC's Matt Katz talked with my colleague Michael Hill about the challenges city officials face ahead of the mandated closure. The city says that the plan approved under the prior administration has created, quote, serious challenges for our ability to keep New Yorkers safe. And that's because the 2019 city council law, supported by the de Blasio administration, it created jailbeds for 3,300 people in these four new jail. jails in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens. And as you know, Mayor Adams has taken

an aggressive law and order posture, crime ticked up during the pandemic. There were more arrests. There are now more than 6,000 people at Rikers. So 6,000 versus 3,300. And to deal with this, we reported last month that the administration quietly added more beds to the designs of the jails under construction so that they can now house about 4,000 people in total, but still the does not add up. There is not enough beds in the new jails to house the current jail population. So that's why Mayor Adams has long hinted that this plan to replace Rikers by 2027 was not going to work as envisioned. Matt, I'm wondering, is that the only challenge finding space for these detenties or are there other problems leading to the potential delay in replacing Rikers? Yeah, there's other problems. I mean, first construction was fully delayed a year and a half during COVID.

So that moved to everything back. And like the jail in downtown Brooklyn is now not slated to be open until 2029, two years after the law says Rikers must stop holding people. Now will the three other jails be ready by 2027? It's a little hard to imagine since Brooklyn is actually ahead of the other boroughs in terms of the construction process. But the city hasn't yet released timelines for those facilities in Manhattan, Bronx, and Queens. And another potential option, since we have to consider all these at this point, is just change the law and go to a phased closure of Rikers. No one has formally proposed that yet. And of course, this is the big thing hanging out there.

There could be a new mayor by 2027. So it could end up being someone else's problem anyway. That's WMIC's MacKETs. A coalition that suing the Mount Sinai system to stop Beth Israel Hospital from shuttering, alleges the hospital has violated a court order. WMYC's Caroline Lewis has the details. A group called the Community Coalition to Save Beth Israel sued the hospital last month to stop its planned closure. A Manhattan judge then issued a temporary restraining order saying the hospital could not close any beds or services without approval from the state and the court.

Now, Mount Sinai says it will allow its certifications to treat stroke and heart attack patients to expire this month and argues in court documents that because of, consulted with the state, that's okay. The Community Coalition has filed a new motion. It wants the court to deny Mount Sinai permission to end those services and is asking for the judge to hold Mount Sinai in contempt of court. New Jersey is seeing record-breaking numbers of hate crimes and other bias incidents. We'll dive into the findings of a new report from the State Attorney General. That conversation after the break. In New Jersey, bias incidents continue to trend in the wrong direction. That's according to preliminary figures from state attorney general Matthew Plattgen. What the report shows is frankly an alarming rise in bias activity across the board.

The findings show reported bias incidents rose last year by 22 percent and has overall been sharply increasing since 2016. For more on the report, WMIC's Sean Carlson talked with Placken about the most common types of bias incidents reported in 2023. Can we define our terms a little bit here. We're talking about bias incidents. It's not just crimes that your office or others prosecute. Is that correct? That's correct. A biased crime is a crime that is committed for a biased purpose. So somebody assault somebody because they are a member of a protected class. And we prosecute those. We've arrested 217 people for biased crimes over the past three years. But a bias incident can be broader than that and doesn't have to rise to a criminal act. It can be

targeting somebody in any way because they're bias against them for because they're a member of particular race or gender or religion or nationality and many other protected characteristics. And those we can hold you accountable for under civil rights laws. But just understanding the trends in bias incidents helps us stop biased activity from occurring in the first place. And so this report covers a broader range of conduct than just what amounts to a criminal act. Which types of incidents are we seeing most often and which groups are being targeted? Unfortunately, pretty much every group, a demographic group, is experiencing a rise of biased activity.

And that's reflected in the fear and anxiety that too many New Jerseyans feel right now. Anti-Black bias was the highest race-based biased activity that we saw. And anti-Jewish activity biased activity was the highest religious-based biased activity that we saw in 2022 and 2023. but the reality is every group in the state is experiencing an increased level of bias. And as the chief law enforcement officer, to me that is unacceptable. And we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to hold accountable those who commit bias acts and prevent them from occurring in the first place. Well, given what you're saying and that you're seeing this rise across the board, what do you see as the thing driving that rise overall? I think there are several factors, and we lay this out in our report.

The first, and this is good news, is that we've invested heavily in our reporting systems to make it easier to report. You can report online on our website. You can report anonymously. You can report in multiple languages. You can report to law enforcement. You can report by phone. And we've done extensive trainings and outreach, particularly in communities that understandably have hesitation about reporting incidents to law enforcement. So the good news is there's increased confidence and there's increased reporting.

But the fact remains that bias is also on. on the rise, and there are several factors for that. We're seeing social media biased and hate spread on those platforms, and we've seen social media companies fail to adhere often to their own terms of service about keeping that content off their platforms. We've seen leaders, whether it be politicians or celebrities, at best condone and at worst promote or engage in themselves biased activity that has encouraged people on the ground to do the same thing. We know that in the wake of the pandemic and the wake of the racial justice movement after George Floyd's murder, that there was significant backlash against certain communities as a result of those efforts.

And certainly since October, we've seen following the attacks on October 7th and the conflict in Gaza, we've seen significant increase in biased activity targeting both the Jewish community and the Muslim community in our state. So there are a number of factors, but the fact remains. Far too many people are afraid right now simply because of who they are, how they look, where they're from, what religion they subscribe to, or, other characteristics that should be protected under our law. Can you talk more about what your office can do to tamp down on what seems like a runaway increase in these bias incidents? Well, the public should know every single report that gets filed. And I want to be clear, we want to hear about

anything. If you feel uncomfortable or that's something that's happened, please file a report. Let us be the judge of whether it rises to the level of something that's actionable. But every single report that comes in, and this is unique about New Jersey. My office looks at every single one of those, but first from a criminal angle, can we make a criminal case, then as a potential civil rights case. And importantly, we also use that data to see trends of what we're seeing in our communities. Are we seeing a rise of biased activity against a certain community in a particular town, for instance? On top of that, we are doing extensive targeted training, outreach, and other efforts to encourage people to report. We're launching a multi-prong and media campaign, no hate in the

Garden State to encourage people to report and explain how to do that. We also have on our website now, I think the first of its kind in the country, a portal where people can go online and see just about in real time where bias reports are coming in, down to the town level, who's being targeted, what types of activity we're seeing so that they can help us respond to it. But the most important thing I want to convey is that if you see something or feel something that makes you uncomfortable, please tell us. It is almost never the case that somebody commits their first biased act as a violent act. It almost always starts at something smaller. And if we know about it, we can help stop it before our escoids. That's New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Placken, talking with

WMYC's Sean Carlson. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Shout out to our production team, It includes Sean Boutage, Amber Bruce, Ave Carrillo, Audrey Cooper, Leora Noam Kravitz, Jared Marcel, and Wayne Schollmeister, with help from the entire WNYC Newsroom. Our show art was designed by the folks at Buck, and our music was composed by Alexis Quadrato. I'm Jenae Pierre. Have a nice weekend. We'll be back on Monday.