NYC NOW - September 19, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Some New York City council members say budget cuts planned by Mayor Adams will be devastating and they're pleading with him to reconsider. Plus, a New Jersey mayor is among a dozen people suing the federal government, looking to end the use of a secret watchlist they say denies Muslims due process. And finally, WNYC’s Michael Hill talks with reporters Bahar Ostadan and Charles Lane about the risks behind the rise in the NYPD’s number of drug arrests.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. This pattern of cutting from our city agencies gutting them is not new. We have seen this since the beginning of the Adams administration. Progressives in the New York City Council are pushing back against planned budget cuts by Mayor Eric Adams, calling them unnecessary and harmful. Last week, Adams ordered city agencies to cut 5% of their budgets, saying the cost of migrants will destroy the city. He also warned agencies to prepare for future cuts.

Council member Jennifer Gutierrez spoke at a rally Tuesday. She says there's not much the council can do to stop the mayor's first round of cuts. And so we either opt in to take a vote as a council, vote it down, or try to appeal to the mayor to come back and say, this actually is a bad idea. Lawmakers said the planned cuts exceed the actual cost of housing migrants, and that Adams failed to properly manage the crisis. A New Jersey mayor is among a dozen people suing the federal government, looking to end the use of a secret watch list they say denies Muslims due process. WMYC's Lewis Hockman has more.

Muhammad Karula is a U.S. citizen, a former teacher, and the five-term mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey. But this past spring, the Secret Service told him he couldn't attend an Eid celebration at the White House he'd been invited to. I discovered that if I don't do something now, my children and their children will probably be second-class citizens based on their ethnic and religious background. Krula's name appears on a leaked copy of a government watch list with 1.5 million others.

The Council on American Islamic Relations says almost all are Muslim are of Middle Eastern descent, and there's no way to get them removed. The FBI declined to comment. Stay close. There's more after the break. The NYPD is making nearly twice as many narcotics arrests per month than it did when Mayor Eric Adams took office. But after police killed a man last month during what they say was a drug arrest, some say the strategy comes at too high a cost. WNYC reporters Bahar Ostadon and Charles Lane talked with my colleague Michael Hill about the reasoning and risks behind the rise in drug arrests. Bahar, you started asking questions about drug arrest when you were covering this incident in the Bronx last month, where Eric Dupre was killed with a drink cooler.

Tell us about that case. That's right. So Eric Dupre was 30 years old. He was killed in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx when an NYPD sergeant detective in the Bronx Narcotics Unit threw a picnic cooler at him from very close range while he was driving a moped. said. Police say they were trying to arrest someone for a $20 sale of crack cocaine. They haven't yet said whether that person they were trying to arrest was Dupre or someone else. But the incident raised a lot of questions for us, right? First, how does narcotics enforcement work? What's changed under Adams? And importantly, what is the police department's top priority right now?

Is it arrests at the misdemeanor level? You know, that's something for maybe less than a half gram of cocaine? Is it arrest at the felony level, which is, you know, a higher charge for the intent to sell, for example, no matter how small the amount of drug is? So a $20 sale of crack cocaine could get a felony charge. And that's where we sort of started digging into data. Charles, you crunch the numbers here. Tell us what you found. We looked at arrest data from the NYPD and court data from the state court system and both show an increase. City police were making about 700 rests a month when Adams first came into office in January 22, and compared to about 1,300 rests a month this summer,

that's an 84% increase. The data shows a pretty steady increase month over month. There was, however, some variation between boroughs. In Staten Island, for example, there wasn't so much of an increase compared to Lake Brooklyn or the Bronx where there was much more of an increase. Also, for all the boroughs except the Bronx,

the increase is a mix of both felonies and misdemean. However, in the Bronx, most of the increased is driven by misdemeanors, the lowest level of rest. Bahar, I know you asked Mayor Adams and police why they're making more arrests. I'm curious, what did they tell you? So a lot of this has to do with a shift in policing in recent years. Law enforcement officers have told me that the feeling under de Blasio was sort of that, you know, police officers were under scrutiny. They didn't have backing from the city. But Adams, you know, a former police captain himself ran on an answer. anti-crime campaign. And he's since maintained with the NYPD that cracking down on these low-level drug arrests helps reduce other sorts of crime because the drug trade is connected to gun violence. They also say that they're cracking down because of 911 and 311 calls they're receiving from

different neighborhoods. The other piece of this is that officers are often rewarded for their arrest numbers that they bring in. Police will call this enforcement or proactive policing. And what this is translated to under Adams is twice the number of quality of life tickets. That's for things like public drinking, public urination, and three times as many noise complaints. I actually asked Mayor Adams directly about his drug strategy, and he was very resolute. We're not doing the games of yesteryears where we ignore it. We know attached to illegal drug trade is violence. And we're zeroing in on that.

We're going to keep doing that. You both spoke to public defenders and experts who had some real concerns about this shift in policy. Charles, would you tell us more about what they said? Legal advocates see these arrests as possibly a precursor to so-called broken windows policing, where police arrest people for low crimes like turnstile and jumping in order to possibly find and prevent other crimes. This style of policing has become very hot button, and people try to even stay away from using that phrase, broken windows. And we should emphasize here that we are nowhere near the level of drug arrests that we saw in the era of broken windows policing. We're only seeing about a third of the number of drug arrests that we saw in like the 90s or 2000s.

What do we know about whether this strategy is effective, Charles? Well, I mean, as Bahar mentioned, police say it is the reason that violent crime is down. But experts say it doesn't do much to combat the larger problem, which is drug use, right? And when we looked at the data, we saw that a lot of these charges didn't appear to stick. And so when we looked at the number of felonies or serious charges, we saw that many of those are reduced at arraignment, who misdemeanors. In other words, police make the rest and they say it's a very serious drug crime, but prosecutors immediately say, no, it's not.

And then those where the DA did say, yes, it's a serious crime, between 40 and 50 percent of those are dismissed. So in the end, only around 20 percent of the felonies. any arrests that police make are actually convicted. So last month, the police arrested, we were trying to make an arrest of Eric Dupre when an officer threw the water cooler at him. Only about 20% of those type of arrests actually result in any type of conviction. Fahar, you just covered that tragedy involving drugs in the same precinct where Dupre was killed. Tell us about that. And what it tells us about the problem of illegal drugs themselves in the city?

This was a really awful incident. A one-year-old boy died after being exposed to fentanyl at his daycare in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. The daycare was run out of someone's apartment and three other young children were hospitalized. We learned the police found one kilogram of fentanyl near the gym mats where the babies took their naps. That's an almost unbelievably lethal amount of drug that could kill, you know, up to half a million people, according to officials. I went up to Kingsbridge and I spoke to longtime residents. Within just a few minutes, I met a few people who said they'd lost loved ones to fentanyl overdose and that it's gotten so bad that they actually carry around Narcan to help reverse overdoses that they might see happening on the street. The city's health commissioner said last night that fentanyl is actually, it's just completely stressing the city's response to the overdose crisis, right?

because people are dying who are casually using opioids and fentanyl, but also people are dying who are using non-opioids that are contaminated with fentanyl. It's a drug that's found in 80% of the city's overdose deaths. And this neighborhood in Kingsbridge, which is, like you said, the same neighborhood where Dupre was killed, reported one of the highest overdose death rates in the entire city in 2021. But I think just to, you know, remind us something that Charles mentioned, arresting people for drugs on the street level, It doesn't slow down drug use, drug sales, or overdoses, according to lots of research. It doesn't address the larger patterns of drug trafficking. And these sort of small-time street-level drug dealers are really quickly and easily replaced. That's WMYC reporters Charles Lane and Baha O'Sidon talking with my colleague Michael Hill.

Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you.