NYC NOW - October 19, 2023 : Evening Roundup

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

The Adams administration is ramping up efforts to help newly arrived migrants. Plus, new court documents provide a window into the legal case against a veteran accused of fatally choking a homeless man on the subway in May. Also, some civil rights activists are concerned about the NYPD’s use of artificial intelligence to analyze body camera footage. And finally WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with Dr. Sean Decatur, president of the American Museum of Natural History, about its decision to no longer display human remains.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. The Adams administration is ramping up efforts to help newly arrived migrants apply for asylum, get work permits, and potentially earn enough money to move out of the city's strained shelter system. A help center launched in July has aided more than 5,600 new arrivals with filing their asylum applications. That's about 75 applications a day. Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Manuel Castro says the city's striving to help these new arrivals find their way. Mayor Adams has left no stone unturn to ensure that these new New Yorkers get the legal support necessary to thrive.

Counsel and Immigration Committee Chair Shahana Hanif is applauding the center's work. She's long criticized the administration for not doing more to help new migrants. New court documents provide a window into both sides of the legal case against Daniel Penny. The Marine Corps veteran accused of fatally choking a homeless man on the subway in May. WMYC's Samantha Max has the details. Penny was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after he held Jordan Neely in a fatal chokehold while fellow passengers watched. Prosecutors say Penny's actions were reckless and unjustified.

And records show they've searched his phone and eye cloud to see if they reveal anything about his mental state that day. Defense attorneys say Penny was doing what any reasonable person would do. They say Neely was acting aggressively and that Penny was afraid. In a recently filed motion, Penny's lawyers cited the accounts of other strap hangers who told the grand jury they were also scared. Those people could be called as witnesses to support Penny's defense at trial. The NYPD has launched a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to analyze police-worn body cam footage. WNYC's Bihar O'Sodon has more. The NYPD signed a contract last week with a tech company called Trulio. It uses AI to classify officers as professional or unprofessional

by analyzing hours of police body camera footage. The software has a scoring system that flags when an officer voices an insult, a threat, or a simple explanation. Body-worn cameras record audio and video of anyone walking past an officer or talking nearby them, and civil rights activists say they're worried about how companies like Trulio protect people's privacy. Trulio has already partnered with 20 police departments across the country, and police officials rolled out the new tech in Patterson, New Jersey, just a couple months ago. Stick around. There's more after the break.

One of New York's biggest cultural institutions is changing the way it deals with its collection of human remains. The American Museum of Natural History will no longer display human remains in its many halls. Last week, officials announced that the museum will embark on a journey to better understand where the bones in its collections came from. For more on this decision, WNYC's Sean Carlson talked with the museum's president, Dr. Sean Decatur. When was this decision to remove the remains made? And how long has it been in the making? The decision was officially adopted by our Board of Trustees last Wednesday at our quarterly meeting. But it's been in conversation

at the museum for some time. The discussions had already started well before I arrived in April. When I was able to join in the discussion, I did feel this was an issue that we should take up with some urgency. And so there was work on this really throughout the summer in preparation for bringing it to our board in October. When will the human remains be removed from public display if that hasn't already happened? So the process will get started next week. And, And it will take some time. So we anticipate it being done by the end of the calendar year, so end of December. Now, at least some of the human remains currently a part of the museum's collection should have been returned years ago, right?

The museum has the remains of about 2,200 Native Americans in its collection. That's even though a 1990 federal law requires that they be returned to the appropriate tribes. So how specifically does the museum plan to handle those remains, especially when their origins can't be determined in a lot of cases? Since the law, the Native American Grave Protection Repatriation Act, the museum has worked in partnership with Native American communities for the return of about a thousand individuals. There's still a great deal of work to be done. Our new collections policy, which we adopted last week, create some alternative pathways for repatriation. In the past, we have waited until we received a repatriation request from a recognized tribe or community. Our new policy allows us to be proactive and internally start a conversation on repatriation without having to wait for an official request to start that conversation.

Dr. You said in an interview with The New York Times that you want to develop restorative action in consultation with local communities. What could that look like? I think the important thing is that this really does need to be a partnership with communities. The idea of return and repatriation is something much more complex and important, I think, than just shipping and returning skeletal remains that the, museum may have. I think it involves actually building a sense of trust and communication with the community. It involves a process of recognizing the sort of damage that was done by the separation of communities from the individuals. And one hopes that it can involve some education opportunities, both from our museum community and educational opportunities that we can take more broadly about the process itself and about the communities.

We wanted to talk about that process because part of what the museum will now do is put more resources into researching the origins and identities of the remains in its collection. What goes into that? How do you determine the origin of remains and what will the museum do with that information? Well, the first thing we need to do is to make sure we have a complete, understanding and accounting for everything that's in our archives. This is a collection that really was built over the course of more than nearly a century of activity. And so making sure that we have an accurate record in accounting for what we have here in the collection,

I think is an important starting point. And that will actually lead us to some possible contacts and connections to descendant communities. That's Dr. Sean Decatur, president of the American Museum of Natural History, talking with WMYC's Sean Carlson. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. I'm Jene Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.