Advocates, parents question NYPD-NYCHA policies

NYPD Capt. Edward F. Britton, C.O. PSA-4; Capt. Bentivegna, 10th Precinct; Miguel Acevedo, director of Fulton Youth of the Future; and Maria de La Rosa, from the New York County D.A.’s Office listen intently to participants in last Thursday’s police-community forum held at the Chelsea Recreation Center.

By Chris Lombardi

An increase in stop-and-frisk operations in public housing projects may be an unforeseen side effect of a recently unveiled New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) policy banning drug arrestees from NYCHA property, according to parents and tenant representatives who met with police officials last Thursday at the Chelsea Recreation Center.

Jimmy Pelsey, president of the Fulton Houses Tenants Association, spoke wearily from the back of a room: “A lot of parents come to me, and they say, ‘We have a problem with most of the officers outside.’ They say that with their sons, ‘They just coming up and saying, “Up against the wall! Bam bam bam!”’”

Young people in Fulton and Chelsea Houses, already sensitive to being targeted by police searches if they match the description of a wanted suspect, now report being stopped simply for going outside their own buildings and asked for identification, even if, at age 13 or 14, youths might not be carrying official ID. Police confirm that there’s been an increase in stops, but say they only do so if they suspect a crime is being committed.

Tenant representatives, who conceded at the meeting that the policy was partly a response to their complaints about dealers in their buildings, told Chelsea Now this week that it nevertheless puts law-abiding young people in a Catch-22, subject to being seen as “suspicious” because simply because they have left their homes. As parents at the Recreation Center asked police to show more respect for “good kids” and all attending pledged to work together to stem youth crime, local civil liberties groups and legal experts raised questions about whether the new policy banning drug arrestees from NYCHA property was constitutional in the first place.

The meeting, an effort to improve community-police relations in the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, was held amid growing tension in such relations, the day before three police officers were indicted for the Sean Bell shooting and less than a month after a study revealed that half a million pedestrians—more than half of them persons of color—were stopped and searched by the NYPD in 2006. In addition, the New York Times reported, complaints to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, especially about stop-and-frisk operations, were up 66 percent since 2002.

Kicking off the meeting were Pelsey and longtime Fulton Houses resident Miguel Acevedo, who spoke about profiling at a Feb. 28 police-community forum sponsored by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Acevedo said that parents, who are concerned about increased hostility between youths in the two developments, needed more help from the police. Then he, Pelsey and numerous police officials asked for suggestions from the audience, trying to sort it all out “before someone gets killed,” said Acevedo.

Maria de la Rosa, of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, then brought up a new element in the mix. Tenants had long complained about crime in their communities, she said, and requested more policing. “Because of your complaints,” she said, “the policy was changed.” The result, she said, was NYCHA’s Trespass Notification Policy.

Under the NYCHA policy, instituted in February in Manhattan after two years in the outer boroughs, anyone arrested—but not yet convicted—on felony drug charges is permanently excluded from all Housing Authority property. This includes persons not living in public housing; those who do are confined to their own apartments and the common areas and grounds of their building. When arrested on a felony drug charge (possesson or sale of narcotics, or sale of marijuana), arrestees have to sign an affidavit that they understand the exclusion. If they return to NYCHA property, they can be arrested for criminal trespass, said Captain Edward Britton of Police Service Area (PSA) 4, who was at the Chelsea meeting. (PSA 4, as it’s commonly called, polices the downtown NYCHA developments.)

In some ways, the policy is an extension of 36 years of NYCHA anti-drug initiatives, which have over those years yielded both successes and a string of lawsuits, including the Supreme Court decision Escalera v. NYCHA, which created a system of due-process hearings for evicted NYCHA tenants. System-wide programs, designed to clear buildings of organized crime, have included Operation Safe Home, initiated in 1990, which paired drug treatment programs with in-house transit police located in the developments themselves, and an “Anti-Narcotics Strike Force” directed at dealers.

The tactic of excluding anyone arrested for such offenses on NYCHA property is new, said Britton, and seems effective. “It’s an important tool for us,” Britton said, explaining that when the same policy went into effect in Brooklyn and Queens, in 2005, “we took down a major drug organization in Red Hook, and shut down dealers in Queens” that had colonized the developments and terrified residents, Britton said. “We hope for similar results here in Chelsea,” Britton told a Fulton Houses Tenants Association meeting last Wednesday, the night before the parents meeting at the Chelsea Recreation Center.

In addition, Britton said, the NYPD has begun to conduct “vertical patrols” of buildings, where they can pick up violators of the policy. Pelsey told Chelsea Now that residents had requested such patrols for a long time, and only wanted to be sure they were conducted thoroughly.

But the issue of police behavior toward youth “swept up” in such operations is quite real, said Pelsey, though it may also be the young people’s perception. “You have young men just out and about, they may be on their way to the market to buy something to eat - a soda, a piece of fruit—and they get picked up, because they fit a description,” he said. “They come and tell me they’ve been profiled.”

Such perceptions may be fueled not just by NYPD’s figures on last year’s stop-and-frisk operations, which showed that the more than half of the 500,000 people stopped were black or Latino, but by a long history of such stops, whose rationale has at times seemed hazy.

Law professor Jeffrey Fagan, of Columbia University, has been studying NYCHA’s anti-drug measures for years, most recently in the landmark 2005 Columbia Law Review piece “The Bustle of Horses on a Ship: Drug Control in New York City.” In 1999, Fagan and colleagues studied thousands of stop-and-frisk records over 10 years, and found that a full 15 percent were clearly in error—based on no evidence or wrong evidence—and that 35 percent more were simply marked as “too little information.”

“If you say that even half of those might also be in error,” said Fagan, “then we had a situation where one-third of the stops were clearly unconstitutional.”

In the case of the trespass notification policy, his initial response was mild shock: “The fact that someone may be on a list and banned, based on a charge that has yet to be proven, is really outrageous.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union, upon a quick look, agreed: ““While the City of course can and should take reasonable measures to protect those living in public housing, the mere fact of an arrest should not be a basis for banishing people from public housing areas,” said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Chris Dunn.

NYPD officials stress, however, that the policy has been vetted by the NYPD and NYCHA law departmens. Told that, Fagan said gently that, at the very least, “the police are casting a broad weapon of suspicion here,” and that “they seem to be operating on a general theory of someone being out of place.”

Even when not picked up because they’re out of place, young people are vulnerable to difficult encounters with police, according to parents at the Chelsea House forum.

Dana Loban, a Queens resident who grew up in Chelsea Houses, described an incident last month after her son, who still goes to school in Chelsea and plays basketball at the Hudson Guild, was assaulted by a youth from Fulton Houses. “We had eight cops present from the 10th Precinct. And I mean to show respect for the police,” she said, “but the things they were saying, the tone they took with the kids…there’s a way in which you speak to these children, because they’re not all bad!” Her son and his friends were first told to “handle the incident” themselves, she said, and then were dismissed out of hand when they tried to describe what had happened.

“Most of these are good kids,” said Loban. “They go to school, they get good grades, and the kids who play ball down at the Beacon program, they have to do an hour of community service. So, these kids are engaged and involved. What else do they want from our youth?”

Ultimately, said Loban, the parents of the young man who had assaulted her son found out and told him to apologize, which he did. Officer Michael Patrillo, of the 10th Precinct, encouraged by that outcome, said the next step was to sit down with both kids and both sets of parents—and to try, little by little, to break down the barriers that were encouraging Chelsea Houses and Fulton Houses youths to be at each others’ throats.

Until that happens, said Acevedo, even the numerous afterschool programs will be of little use. “Right now you have kids from 17th Street who are scared to go to 25th Street. We have all these activities run by Hudson Guild and YMCA, but kids are scared to participate,” he said.

Thursday’s meeting was called in part, then, to “get community affairs involved, get police involved, and to educate parents that the police are here to work hand in hand with us so it doesn’t lead to a tragedy,” said Acevedo.

Suggestions for community-building strategies to link the two complexes, from ballgames to barbecues, were then offered by all, including representatives of the Museum School and Friends of the High Line, who had run a successful summer pizza party at Chelsea Houses last year and offered to have another to which both complexes would be invited. Officer Patrillo said mildly, “If you invite us to anything like that, you know we’ll be there!”

Maria de la Rosa, from the DA’s office, gave a strong plug to her office’s Legal Bound program, which goes into schools to explain how the legal process works. “This way, young people get a stronger idea of what the police can and can’t do, and what they themselves can and can’t do.” The “jewel in the crown” of the program, de la Rosa said in an interview later, is their summer internship program, which receives applications from all over the city.

When asked in a follow-up interview about the trespass-notification policy, de la Rosa deferred all questions to the NYPD, and to Captain Britton at PSA 4. Tenant representatives, asked the same question, seemed less concerned by the policy’s civil liberties implications than about whether it would be effective—and whether the police would, after so many meetings with them, begin to be clearer and more sensitive in their investigations.

“People living in NYCHA have been asking for [this trespass policy] for years,” said Acevedo. “The tenants feel the complex is not policed, that they, the drug dealers, take advantage of the weakness of the residents.” Still, as director of Fulton Youth for the Future, he says there’s a Catch-22 in the policy for young people who might be just wandering from one building to the next.

“The police take advantage,” said Acevedo. “They use this as a way to say, ‘Hey, what you doing? Do you have any ID?’ How do you get a 13-year-old to carry ID? What does he do? What does a 14- or 15-year-old do if he doesn’t have ID – even school ID? Should his parents take him to the police station to get one?”

Pelsey feels similarly. The trespass policy and vertical patrols have long been needed he says, but his people are wary. “I’m telling the people, we have to give [the policy] a chance,” he said while decrying the slowness of evictions of drug dealers. Such slowness means fewer tenants are willing to talk to police about drug activity, he said, “because they’re scared.”

Pelsey added that since the last round of intensive police-community meetings, he has seen progress on the targeting issue. “They’re profiling less now,” he said. But he still finds himself too often, he said, “trying to tell the police: ‘Young men on a street corner, they’re not always out for trouble. Sometimes they’re just standing there.’”

And Pelsey’s advice for the police is simple, as he said at the meeting at Chelsea Recreation Center. “If you see [young men] on the corner, don’t jack them up. Talk to them!”