All our communities need and deserve safety. The rising levels of violence that cities all across the country have seen through the pandemic jeopardize that safety, amplify the trauma of this crisis, diminish public health, and demand a thoughtful and strategic response.
But the answer is not more policing. New York City already spends more on the NYPD than we do on the Departments of Health and Mental Hygiene, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined. In our streets and in our communities, we are seeing the consequences of spending more on policing than on healthy neighborhoods, mental health services, affordable housing, and youth programming.
Brad has been a long-time advocate for safe and thriving communities. When he moved to NYC in 1992, at the peak of the era of abandonment and violence, he immediately rolled up his sleeves as the executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC). Brad organized residents to win investments in housing, jobs, youth services, and small businesses to replace abandoned buildings and blocks, and launched FAC’s “Developing Justice” program to support residents returning to the community from prison or jail. As chair of the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD), Brad helped lead community groups across the city in helping communities recover. As sociologist Patrick Sharkey has shown, the work of community development nonprofits played a strong role in the declining crime rates from the 1990s to the 2010.
In the City Council, Brad has continued to fight for community safety and police accountability. In 2013, he partnered with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to pass legislation -- over Mayor Bloomberg’s veto -- to curb stop-and-frisk, strengthen the city’s prohibition on racial profiling, and create the office of the NYPD Inspector General. He has also continued to fight alongside communities to support efforts to achieve better public safety by shifting many social service and community support functions to non-policing alternatives (e.g. responding to people in mental distress, homeless outreach, street safety enforcement, and much more), and pushing for more resources for “violence interrupter” programs that have been proven to reduce violence.
In June 2020, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, when the City Council failed to listen to the cries of Black New Yorkers against abusive policing, Brad voted against the City's FY21 budget because it did not meaningfully shift at least $1 billion away from the NYPD and toward communities. Last year, the Council cut summer youth jobs, parks and sanitation services, CUNY, and more -- while the NYPD continued to wildly overspend on overtime.
As Comptroller Brad will demand budget justice, dig in on the numbers through aggressive audits as the City’s chief budget watchdog, hold the NYPD accountable for violence and misconduct, and advance a public health approach to public safety that centers community support rather than policing and incarceration. That’s how we can achieve a safer city, with less violence, and less abusive policing.
Fighting for Budget Justice
New York City spends far more per capita on policing than most American cities. We have 1 NYPD officer for every 162 people. Los Angeles only has 1 officer for every 203 people, Houston every 360, and Phoenix every 380. Last year when the City was on the precipice of fiscal crisis at the outset of COVID-19, the Mayor imposed a hiring freeze on teachers, counselors, parks workers, and nearly every other City agency - but not the NYPD. An NYPD hiring freeze -- or even the “1-for-3” replacement policy that eventually took place at most other agencies -- would have saved the City hundreds of millions of dollars during the pandemic fiscal crisis.
+ Fiscal Year 2021
An unprecedented movement for racial justice took to the streets in the spring of 2020, pushing for fundamental change in how we approach public safety. A clear demand emerged from longtime police accountability advocates, led by Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition of more than 30 organizations, to shrink the NYPD’s budget by at least $1 billion and use those resources to prioritize investments in communities of color who have endured abusive policing, historic disinvestment, and a disproportionate toll of the coronavirus health and economic crisis.
Brad therefore approached New York City’s Fiscal Year 2021’s budget with the goals of divesting from policing to preserve the social safety net, prioritizing public health, investing in a just recovery, taking a smart, long-term approach to our City’s economic health, and beginning the process of transforming public safety, so we can keep all communities safe. Brad voted no on the City’s FY21 budget because it failed to meet those principles.
Mayor de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson presented phony promises of $1 billion in budget cuts to the NYPD. However, as Brad revealed in his questioning of Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan at the Council’s Preliminary Budget hearing in March, City Hall and the NYPD delivered on less than a quarter of that promise, spending $760 million more than they claimed in press releases and on social media. Other City agencies, Parks, Sanitation, CUNY, and the Administration for Children’s Services, had to be cut more, because the NYPD was cut less.
More than $300 million of the so-called $1 billion reduction to NYPD was claimed simply by proposing to move school safety agents from the NYPD to the DOE, even though it will be the same agents doing the same jobs, in the same places, with no savings or reinvestment or transformation of approach. Under this approach, children as young as five years old continue to experience police interactions at the doors of their school, and students returning to high school for their first days during the pandemic were forced to wait in long lines to go through metal detectors. The proposal even counted as a “cut” the $134 million spent on fringe benefits for those school safety agents, ’which won’t be cut or even moved at all. Meanwhile, the Administration presented those “cuts” as though they were part of its FY21 budget announcement, even though it was not proposing the transfer until FY23.
As has been widely reported, there was no good reason to believe that the NYPD would abide by the $350 million on overtime reductions. And as it turned out, they didn’t. The NYPD had already exceeded its $254 million overtime budget for FY2021 by $74 million just 10 months into the fiscal year. By the end of June, the NYPD will likely exceed their overtime budget by upwards $100 million.
+ Fiscal Year 2022 and future
Last year, reducing NYPD spending was not only a necessary first step toward transforming our approach to public safety, it was also a fiscal necessity, given the pandemic.
This year, we face a new reality: despite a policing budget larger than the GDP of many nations, crime has gone up in New York City. Shootings in March 2021 were up 77% from last year. Business as usual isn’t working; it’s failing to keep New Yorkers safe. Yet de Blasio’s Executive Budget further increases NYPD’s funding and resources by $195 million from FY2021.
We must ensure the City’s budget paves the way to a just recovery -- to build a city that dramatically expands proven public health and community solutions rather than policing and incarceration to keep our communities safe. In his final budget in the Council, Brad will continue to hold the Mayor and the Council accountable to the promises they made but failed to deliver on last year. Building on the work already done by advocates and organizers, Brad has a plan to genuinely move $1 billion from the NYPD in FY2022 to pave the way toward transformational changes to the City’s approach to public safety that will invest in real community safety.
Beyond Budgeting: Strategies to Improve Public Safety and Police Accountability from the Comptroller's Office
By freeing up those resources from policing, New York City can choose instead to invest more in our communities -- both for effective public health approaches to particular public safety problems (see below), and for investments in the jobs, housing, small business, arts and nonprofit programs that build strong communities over time. As Comptroller, Brad will continue to partner directly with organizers, activists and communities--as he has done for over a decade--to win true accountability and transformational change.
+ Auditing for Transformational Change
The urgent challenge we face is to strategically shift spending from over-policing to effective community investments and programs that take a public health approach to achieve community safety. That requires in-depth analysis of current spending, and its results and consequences, a review of alternative programs to meet community safety goals, and a commitment to track spending and results over time. To support this process, Brad will take a comparative approach, to identify the outcomes, costs and benefits of policing and compare them with alternatives that center community support and investments in social services. Brad will examine why the department is failing to deliver improved safety outcomes despite decades of budget increases and overspending on overtime and then compare that analysis with alternatives, in order to identify the approaches that are most effective and deliver the best outcomes to New Yorkers. With a comparative data-driven approach to audits, Brad will make the case for civilianization and reinvestments into community strategies that are proven to be more effective than policing and incarceration. Potential areas for these audits include:
- Violence interruption: Cure Violence and other violence interrupter programs have been shown to reduce violent crime. The City is currently increasing invesment in these programs, from $37.4 million in FY20 to $80.1 million in FY22 and $90.1 million in FY23. These are good increases, though this is still 0.017% of the NYPD budget. As these programs grow, it will be important to evaluate their impact, and compare efficacy to NYPD programs.
- Mental health response: All across the country, when people are in a mental health crisis, police are usually the first ones called. Only a very small percentage of calls (less than 5%) about mental health emergencies result in EMS responding without police. But police are not trained to be social workers or crisis counselors. And as we saw with Kawaski Trawick, an armed police officer responding to someone in crisis can be very triggering; escalating situations rapidly and far too often with deadly results. Anywhere from 50-75% of people killed every year in this country have a mental illness. After many years of pressure from advocates, NYC is launching a pilot program in three Harlem precincts, where EMTs and social workers will respond to mental health distress calls, instead of police.
- Gender-based violence: The NYPD Special Victims Division has been repeatedly cited as a a locus of problems, including in a devastating audit by the NYC Department of Investigation in 2018. Brad will follow up to audit the division to investigate compliance (or lack thereof) with those recommendations. Separately, Brad will also work with intimate-partner violence organizations to explore alternative approaches to policing to keep survivors safe, and help them escape harm. A 2015 survey by the National Domestic Violence Hotline found that about 75 percent of survivors who called the police on their abusers later concluded that police involvement was unhelpful at best, and at worst made them feel less safe.
- Traffic safety: Brad has proposed a comprehensive strategy, Transforming Traffic Safety: Safer Streets, With Less Policing, a data-driven, problem-solving, restorative approach to reducing traffic violence with less policing, with potential to save lives, prevent injuries, save money, and make our streets safer. As Comptroller, he will audit implementation of the Reckless Driver Accountability Act, as well as the new DOT unit for crash investigations, and compare the efficacy of these approaches to the ongoing work of the NYPD Transportation Bureau.
- School safety: The Dignity in Schools-NYC Coalition is campaigning to divest the $332 million New York City spends each year on NYPD officers in schools, and spend those resources instead on guidance counselors, social workers, nurses, and restorative justice programs to keep school communities safe and help all students to thrive. On average, if we redistributed this funding, each NYC public school would receive about $195,000 each year that they could devote to resolving conflicts and keeping students safe.
+ Contract Registration and Checkbook NYC
The NYPD goes to great lengths to keep its contracts for consultants, equipment and technology sealed and confidential even from the Comptroller, raising serious transparency and accountability concerns. As chief fiscal officer for New York City, Brad will hold the NYPD accountable to the standards imposed on all other City agencies to ensure the NYPD’s contracts are with responsible vendors and that such purchases are not exposing New York City to avoidable risks. Brad will build on Checkbook NYC to fight for greater disclosure of NYPD contracts, especially for technology and surveillance equipment that too often infringes New Yorkers’ civil rights and liberties. Brad will use the contract registration process as an opportunity to demand greater transparency over NYPD spending.
+ Police Misconduct Monitoring System
NYC spends upwards of $252 million in taxpayer dollars every single year on police misconduct judgements and settlements. Those funds are paid out from the City’s general funds rather than the NYPD’s massive $5.5 billion budget, giving NYPD leadership little incentive to prevent and appropriately discipline officers for police misconduct and violence. Brad has a long track record of using data in innovative ways to build new accountability systems and will bring that same approach to his oversight over the NYPD. As Comptroller, Brad will build a Police Misconduct Monitoring System which will pull together anonymized settlement data, publicly available disciplinary records, and civilian complaints in coordination with the City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) to build a more complete picture of police misconduct for New Yorkers and policymakers. Through that tracker, Brad will work to discern patterns and warning signs of police misconduct including the identification of particular units and precincts that present higher risks of police misconduct, violence, harassment, discrimination, and settlement payments to fight for early intervention, more accountability, and new policies to better incentivize NYPD leadership to prevent police misconduct from occurring in the first place, including the payout of settlements from NYPD coffers.
+ Oversight and organizing in partnership with New Yorkers
For over a decade, Brad has stood with families of loved ones killed by police violence time and time again, at press conferences, in civil disobedience, to design and pass the Community Safety Act, and in oversight hearings to demand accountability and he will continue to do so as Comptroller. Leveraging the tools of the Comptroller’s office, Brad will use the new data made available thanks to organizers’ work to repeal state law 50-a as well as comparative cost-benefit audits and a data-driven approach to measuring outcomes and misconduct to demand accountability and make the case for spending more on community solutions for public safety and less on policing.
CONCLUSION
Budgets are moral documents -- and tests of character. As NYC’s budget watchdog and chief accountability officer, the Comptroller has powerful tools to help shape a better way forward on public safety -- one that moves away from using policing as a response to every problem, that demands racial justice, and that invests in community services, resources, and capacity. The choices we make now about how to invest in community safety will determine whether New York City’s families and communities can thrive more equally.