Overview

Five years ago, the City Council enacted the Community Safety Act, which took aim at discriminatory policing practices and instituted a new and more robust accountability structure in the City surrounding policing. When my colleagues and I pushed for these reforms, critics and detractors shunned this legislation, and claimed our proposals would end the drop in crime our City had seen through the ‘90s and ‘00s. We were told that aggressive policing was the only way to keep crime down, and stop-question-and-frisk was an absolute necessity for police; that arrests would deter crime and “Broken Windows” and quality of life enforcement was the way to clean up streets.

I knew those claims weren’t true, and for the past five years, since we passed the Community Safety Act, New Yorkers have experienced the lowest crime numbers in the “seven major index crime” categories (e.g., murder, assault, robbery, etc.) than at any time since the 1950s. While sex crimes are unfortunately up in the city, these low numbers happened alongside plummeting reporting of stop-question-and-frisk by police (with reported use of the tactic falling more than 90% since 2011).

But our work isn’t done, because New York is at a crossroads in criminal justice. I want to take our successes at pushing the police to be better stewards of public safety and make real changes to the larger system that sits on top of policing: our criminal legal system.

While crime continues to drop, that hardly tells the full story of how the system of incarceration, bail, sentencing, and dealing with precursors to crime are still hurting so many in our communities. Our communities are suffering from gun violence that we can reduce; from laws and bureaucracy that incentivize mass incarceration instead of crime prevention and community empowerment; and from sentencing guidelines and bail requirements that tie judges hands and force people into jail for absolutely no good reason, with no conviction, and without any hope of escaping a punitive system.

I will fight to make real changes in this system so that public safety is not automatically equated to policing, and push New York to be a model for all cities that want to emphasize restoring and empowering communities and protecting families from violence and state action. I will stand up for all New Yorkers and fight for a fairer criminal legal system that moves away from punishment just to punish; that de-emphasizes mass incarceration and stresses restorative programs; and that targets gun violence with tried and tested approaches that have nothing to do with over-policing and everything to do with holistically looking at what can be done to prevent it.

The Big Picture for our work in the Public Advocate’s Office: End mass incarceration and the unequal treatment of people of more color in our criminal legal system

The problems inherent in the criminal legal system we have are many, but we can make a real difference right now.

I will advocate for rethinking how the courts end up forcing people into jail; how to change the paradigm of criminal justice spending and turn it towards investment in neighborhoods, jobs and community infrastructure; how to expand community support and community intervention tools; and how to build on the improvements in policing that were driven by the Community Safety Act in order to keep bettering how police can be held accountable for their actions and how police interact with our communities.

Reforming what happens pre- and post-trial: ending cash bail and enacting real sentencing reform

Our City’s prisons, most famously Riker’s Island, are packed with persons who haven’t even been convicted for a crime: thousands are in jail awaiting a trial and stuck there because they can’t post bail. While the Brooklyn and Manhattan District Attorney’s voluntarily stopped asking for bail in misdemeanor cases, that’s not the law and there’s no guarantee that practice continues. Jail time before conviction costs our city upwards of $100 million a year. The commercial bail industry, which is alive and well even though arrests are falling and DA’s offices are pushing for less bail, costs persons who are jailed and their families tens of millions of dollars each year in non-refundable costs--that leaves a massive criminal justice burden in the form of financial debt for families.

Pre-trial practices aren’t the only problem. Judges are often forced to sentence persons convicted of non-violent crimes, such as low-level misdemeanors, to jail for no other reason than certain misdemeanors still leave judges no choice: no chance to use alternatives to jail or let judges exercise discretion based on a person’s lack of criminal record, how jail time will impact family members, or how jail time will affect that person’s community. Moreover, some misdemeanors that carry a potential sentence for up to one year in prison, regardless of whether a judge actually sentences a person to a full year, automatically trigger the involvement of the federal government if that person being sentenced is an immigrant: under federal law, an immigrant convicted of select crimes that are classified by the state as misdemeanors but carry a possible sentence of one year in prison can lead to deportation. This has hurt so many families and oftentimes leads to adults being deported even though they were convicted of minor offenses as teenagers and never even served a single day in jail.