NYC NOW - Midday News: NYC Boosts Food Aid Ahead of SNAP Cutoff, NYPD Misses Bodycam Deadlines, and Harlem Group Tackles Racial Trauma

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Mayor Eric Adams is directing $15 million to community kitchens and food pantries ahead of Saturday’s cutoff for SNAP benefits, as the Trump administration halts November payments during the ongoing government shutdown. Meanwhile, City Comptroller Brad Lander says the NYPD is falling short on deadlines to release footage of police encounters. And in Harlem, the Harlem Family Institute is working to train psychoanalysts who understand how the lasting trauma of slavery continues to shape Black communities today, part of a broader conversation sparked by author Lee Hawkins at the Schomburg Center.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Friday, October 31st. Happy Halloween. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Mayor Adams has given community kitchens and food pantries a $15 million boost in anticipation of the cutoff date for SNAP benefits tomorrow. The mayor this morning said the money is part of an all-hands-on-deck approach as available. SNAP funds run out. The Trump administration instructed states earlier this month not to give out November benefits as the government shutdown drags on. The White House says there are insufficient funds for the program. New York and 24 other states are suing the Trump administration for

refusing to use emergency funds for SNAP. A full list of resources for SNAP recipients is available on the city website. New York City's controller says the NYPD is failing to meet deadlines for turning over video of police encounters. WNMAC's Ben Fewer heard has more. An audit by the Comptroller's Office looked at requests submitted through the freedom of information law for body camera footage from 2020 through 2024. The audit found the police department did not respond to more than half of the requests within the standard 95 business days. In many cases, the department did not turn over footage until a requester filed an appeal. After an appeal was filed, 97% of the requests were granted.

In response to the audit, the NYPD said it would take steps to improve responses by adding employees to the Legal Bureau. The response also noted the department takes issue with some of the audit's findings and its methodology. It's a windy, windy Halloween. 54 were clouds down with the wind advisory from noon until midnight, mostly sunny today, mid-50s for high temperatures and breezy, but the wind gusts up to 50 miles an hour. Tonight mid-40s in breezy, wind gusts, 43 miles an hour. Stay close. There's more after the break. Beatings that are used to force submission or punishment.

It's a painful vestige of slavery in America and one of the many traumas rooted in the black experience that mental health experts say continue to affect communities of color. Now, the Harlem Family Institute is taking on this legacy. The nonprofit is looking to train a new generation of psychoanalysts, mindful of the connections, between the past and present. That was the focus of a discussion hosted by the Schaumburg Center in Harlem earlier this year. The adventure of locals interested in hearing best-selling author Lee Hawkins. He described the belt beatings he received at the hands of his father,

an experience he captured in his book, I Am Nobody's Slave. I was five years old. He literally beat the child out of me. Hawkins traced the harsh beatings to colonial America. So we can't just put this Negro in the workhouse. He's got to have the match. He lacks the intellectual capacity to be reasoned with. He says generations applied the same kind of punishment, including his father.

My father couldn't talk about it because he was afraid to talk about it because he couldn't find the language to talk about it. Hawkins says that has to change. We have to understand the unique situation. of descendants of slavery and Jim Crow. Because America hasn't gotten the language right, what has happened is black people have been through our own Holocaust without any ability to even process it as such because we're living on the site of terror where it happened.

We don't have separation from it. As it turns out, it was Hawkins' father who encouraged him to seek professional help to finish writing the book. Hawkins started sessions with psychotherapist Lee Jenkins in Harlem. Jenkins endured and survived a segregated America. He was a college roommate of the late Congress member and civil rights icon John Lewis, who coined the phrase, Good Trouble.

The movement taught me to take the hard look, the lone look, that our struggle is not just a struggle for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months, a few years. It is a struggle of a lifetime or maybe many lifetimes. That was Congressman John Lewis on WNYC in 2012 about ridding the country of its segregation laws known as Jim Crow. And let me tell you, having a Jim Crow survivor as a therapist is the ultimate example of cultural competency in real life. And it's so important, we need all. of our people to be trained to understand the unique set of issues that black people are coming in.

Hawkins is now helping the Harlem Family Institute recruit culturally competent people to train to become psychoanalyst, with an eye to ward, eventually practicing in the Institute's affiliated new mental health clinic, the Margaret Morgan Lawrence Child and Family Development Center on East 110th Street set to open in November. The Institute says it cannot quantify the specific need for mental health in Harlem, but federal data shows black Americans are more likely to experience a mental health concern and less likely than other groups to receive treatment. This, as the suicide rate for black Americans, rises.

There's so much pain in our community, and we know how to transform that pain, into power. The Institute's deputy executive director is Sheila Johnson. She will run the new clinic. Johnson says it'll have a hyper focus on generational trauma, systemic inequality, and structural racism. Johnson is black. We're the only ones that can heal us.

I'm sorry. That might be controversial. But why is it that when you have a black physician, like survival rates are stronger when you have young, you know, black Mothers. Behavioral therapist, Rachel Booker, is one of two recruits. Booker is Johnson's assistant. She's enrolled in a clinical psychology program and eager to learn more and do more. I don't want to focus on fixing people with just strategies, but helping people understand themselves at a more deeper core level. One early challenge is looming cuts to Medicaid.

The Institute estimates roughly a third of Harlem residents have health insurance through Medicaid, Institute President and Executive Director, Michael Connolly. That's going to be deeply problematic for us and especially for those individuals. We will do all that we can to help them. Johnson says the clinic has signed up 22 private insurance companies, has applied for grants, and will outsource human resources in other departments, and will have a small staff of permanent employees on the payroll. In the audience that night at the Schaumburg, Bonnie Harrison,

Born in the South, she's run a psychotherapy practice in Harlem for decades. Harrison says she advocated in the 1960s for what the Institute is pursuing now. But... I was informed that, well, you know, you can't do that. You can't focus on just something for healing black people because, you know, it's going to turn white people up and you're going to need white people. Six decades later, author Lee Hawkins says his book writing a journey cast doubt on just any thing. being able to help him finish, I am nobody's slave. That could not be addressed by a therapist who doesn't have this background.

It couldn't. I would just be ending up counseling the therapist. Michael Hill, WNYC News. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day. your top news headlines and occasional deep dives and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you this evening.