NYC NOW - September 23, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Councilmember Sandy Nurse says a four-month-overdue report on homeless encampment sweeps, promised by Mayor Eric Adams in 2022, is key to helping the public understand their impact. Meanwhile, jaywalking is common in New York City, but hundreds of people are still cited each year. WNYC’s Ramsey Khalifeh reports on who is getting ticketed. Plus, the share of Black students admitted to top universities, including Columbia, has dropped significantly since the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions. WNYC’s Arun Venugopal explains the impact. Finally, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office is funding a program called Neighborhood Navigators to connect homeless individuals with services before they enter the criminal justice system. WNYC’s Samantha Max reports.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Sean Carlson. Mayor Adams made clearing homeless encampments a top priority when he first took office at the start of 2022, but he's disclosed very little information about the sweeps. The mayor's office was supposed to issue a report detailing encampment clearance data back in May under a measure passed by the council last year. It's nearly four months late. Council member Sandy Nurse says the report will help the public better understand

the impact of the sweeps. Simply sending a bunch of personnel, dumping people's stuff, and busting up an encampment just for them to come back a day later is costly and it's certainly at the cost of us investing in long-term solution. The spokesperson for the mayor says it's taking a while to compile all of the required data. Jaywalking is so common in New York City, sometimes it might not feel illegal. But hundreds of New Yorkers are still cited every year for the violation. W.N. I.C. Ramsey-C., Caliphate reports on who is getting ticketed for jaywalking. Along Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn,

pedestrians are everywhere. Plasasas wrap around shopping centers, storefronts are plenty. The roads are narrow and buses drive along the street every few minutes. In a city known for gridlock traffic, this is an area that's very hospitable for pedestrians. According to NYPD data, it's also one of the neighborhoods where

New Yorkers are most likely to get ticketed for jaywalking. They find any small reason to to lock anybody from non-white communities up. I grew up in Brooklyn. I've seen people get ticketed and arrested for jaywalking because a jaywalk turns into a stop and frisk, which turns into a whole criminal charge.

That's downtown Brooklyn resident Gladys de Santiago, who just picked up groceries and is walking home. And city data supports for point, black and Hispanic New Yorkers bear the brunt of the enforcement. Pace University constitutional lawyer, Bennett Gershman, says the statistics are damning. This just strikes me as a re-emergence of stop and frisk under a new pretext. That's how it sounds. You've got to think that this is discriminatory.

Still, Gershman says the tactics to enforce jaywalking these days are nowhere near the sweeping stop-and-frisk tactics used by police in the 1990s and 2000s. Remzi Khalifa, WNYC News. The share of black students admitted to some of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities, including Colombia, has dropped significantly. A look at what's behind that after the break. The debate over affirmative action entered a new chapter last year when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities. We're now seeing the effect of that landmark decision. I recently spoke with WNYC reporter Arun Venigapal to talk about the

data and hear how experts are making sense of it. Okay, so Arun, a number of experts predicted that the Supreme Court decision would reduce access to the country's most prestigious schools, particularly for black students and other historically disadvantaged communities, what does the latest data tell us? Well, in a number of cases, that's exactly what happened, Sean. At Columbia University, the share of black students in the incoming class fell from 20% last year to just 12% this year. There was a steep fall at Amherst College as well in terms of the number of black students.

Same with MIT, where the Hispanic. representation also fell. At the same time, when we're talking about Asian American representation, that increased at Columbia from 30 to 39 percent, pretty sharp rise. It also rose at Brown University. But in a few cases, we had different results. It stayed flat at Harvard, and it slightly fell at Dartmouth and Princeton. And at Yale, it declined somewhat significantly from 30 to 24 percent. So it feels a bit all over the place. How is it affecting how colleges and universities are doing their jobs. Well, I sat down with Oyan Poon. She's the author of Asian American is not a color conversations about race, affirmative action, and family. And she says we're in this

stage right now where a lot of institutions are just lawyering up and they're trying to protect themselves from litigation. I think they're second guessing. I think some of these colleges are so afraid of getting sued. They have really rolled back their target recruitment efforts to visit and build relationships with communities with talented black and brown students, low-income students. At the same time, she says more black students are applying to HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities, which she says are gems, but they're underfunded.

They're under-resourced gems. Arun, what is her advice for families who are entering the admissions process right now? She recounted this funny story about how her young daughter has already started worrying about getting into a premier high school in Chicago where they live, basically the equivalent of Stuyvesant for New Yorkers. Her daughter is just in third grade right now. My daughter has a privilege as a daughter of two highly educated professionals. So when I think about middle class and educated parents, I really want to tell them like, let's calm down here. But I think about my daughter's classmates and their parents, a lot of their

children if they go to college, this will be their first person in their families to go to college. And so that anxiety, I recognize and respect. She says more families need to broaden their choices when it comes to picking a school. Still, she says the research suggests there are real material benefits for black, Latino, and indigenous students who get into the most selective schools, less so for white and Asian students. What is next in the affirmative action debate? Well, the data is still coming in.

Oyan Poon says, you know, we're going to see a lot more of it by mid-October, and that could really shape our understanding of how the Supreme Court has reshaped higher education. Also, the group that brought the issue to the Supreme Court is called Students for Fair Admissions. It has complained to Yale, to Princeton, to Duke, which are three schools where Asian-American representation dropped this year. The president of that group, Ed Bloom, said, those. numbers are not possible under true neutrality, that's his phrase, and told them that they're now on notice. So we could see yet more litigation. That's WNYC reporter Arun Vanekapal. Whether you're

riding the subway or walking along a busy stretch of sidewalk in New York City, you're likely to cross pass with someone who has nowhere to sleep. They might also need mental health or substance abuse treatment. Now the Manhattan District Attorney's Office is funding a new program called neighborhood navigators to connect these people with services before potential interactions with the criminal justice system. WMIC's Samantha Max reports. Neighborhood Navigator Z. Liu knows the benches where his client sleep and the delis where they panhandle. He's memorized their whereabouts and their routines. Otherwise, it can be nearly impossible to track them down because they don't always have an address or a cell phone.

Usually I feel like when you make an appointment, you know, like at this time, this day, I'm going to this person at this location. Things don't work like that with our clients. Lou spends his days walking around areas of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, where lots of people need housing, mental health care, and substance abuse treatment. I approached them, I ask him how they're doing. Then Lou will offer them a snack, a water bottle, a bag of toiletries. He'll ask what they need. And if they're open to it, he'll make a plan to connect them with services. I think sometimes you you just need that person to build that bridge between service and the individual. Today, we're in Sarah Roosevelt Park.

A couple high-profile acts of violence, both by and against homeless New Yorkers, have recently happened in this area. Lou and I are just feet from an apartment building where a homeless man with serious mental illness snuck in and stabbed a resident to death in her apartment in 2022. We're also about half a mile from where a homeless man was a victim of violence when he was choked to death on the subway last year. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg says one goal of the Navigators program is to prevent violent crimes. But he says it also aims to help people who aren't violent,

who many New Yorkers may cross the street to avoid. What the navigators do is they cross the street to that conduct and they engage with people in distress and they build relationships. The DA's office has committed $6 million to the nonprofit The Bridge, which is hiring and training navigators to work in four Manhattan neighborhoods with high rates of chronic homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. They've already provided resources to more than 400 people since the program launched earlier this year.

Many of the navigators have their own personal connections to the neighborhoods where they're working, or even their own experiences with homelessness, mental illness, or substance abuse. It's definitely a step in the right direction. Philip Yanos is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and also a psychologist who provides intensive treatment to people on the street. He says this type of work can have its limitations if there aren't enough services to offer people. For instance, he says there just isn't enough housing, and that can make it difficult for him to treat his homeless patients.

There are cases where these navigators are going to counter that as well. But I bet there's a subset of people that they will be able to assist. In Washington Heights, neighborhood navigator Alexandra Alma has already gotten a sense of the incremental nature of this work. We're talking that you were to a place. For weeks, she's been trying to help this man named Juanito to get into detox for alcoholism. But she says he often forgets about their appointments or has already started drinking by the time they meet up. I just tell him whenever you're ready or whenever you get your situation settled, then you contact me. Alma knows firsthand how long it can take to change your circumstances.

She's from this neighborhood and says she grew up in shelters. She and her mom moved into an apartment during the pandemic and now split the rent. When I see that they're getting discouraged within their own process, an application goes through and is not successful, or when they're just not ready to, you know, see a goal or establish a goal, I say, hey, look, I didn't have a goal either. And this is what happened to me, and this is how it ended up. Alma says she'll keep walking around Washington Heights looking for anyone who's ready to work with her.

And she'll let them tell her what they need. That's WNMI's, Samantha Max. Before we go, we have some sports news. the Yankees are on the verge of an AL East title after Sunday 7 to 4 win against the Oakland A's. If they beat the Baltimore Orioles at home on Tuesday evening, they will clinch the division. Also on Tuesday, the Mets currently in a playoff spot, are trying to hold off the Atlanta Braves for a wildcard position. They head south for a crucial series against the Braves. Lastly, after defeating the Atlanta Dream, 83 to 69 in the first round of the WMBA playoffs,

the New York Liberty can take the best of three series with a win at home Tuesday. Game three, if necessary, will be Thursday in Atlanta. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNMIC. Catch us every weekday three times a day. I'm Sean Carlson. We'll be back tomorrow.