May 11, 2021 • 53 mins
Alec talks with Michael Sisitzky from the New York Civil Liberties Union’s police transparency and accountability campaign as many cities around the country are considering police reform. The NYCLU is requesting police discipline records from around the state after the repeal of New York Civil Rights Law Section 50-a. The law previously shielded police personnel records. Then, Alec checks in with Kathryn Wylde, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City, about NYC’s post-pandemic outlook. In her role, Wylde serves as a liaison between NYC business leaders and the city government. The Partnership has focused the city’s pandemic recovery efforts by supporting small businesses and advocating for policies to restore jobs and keep people from leaving New York City.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from my Heart Radio. Today we're exploring issues here
in New York that connect to larger ones around the country.
Our guests are Michael Cecitski from the New York Civil
Liberties Union and Catherine Wilde. I spoke with Kathy Wilde
(00:24):
back in May when things looked dismal for New York City.
As the President and CEO of the Partnership for New
York City, Kathy is one of the smartest and most
connected people I know. She's in close contact with the
city's top CEO s, and now a year later, I
wanted to check in with her to get a sense
(00:45):
of what she's hearing, but first a closer look at
another issue closely related to New York City's finances and
city safety, police reform. Michael Cecitski is a lawyer at
the New York Civil Liberties Union. One of the nyc
l us top priorities is to ensure a more equitable
(01:07):
justice system by addressing systemic police violence, and Michael leads
its Police Transparency and Accountability campaign. The n y c
l U is in the process of requesting police discipline
records from around the state, requests made possible by the
state legislatures. Recently, peal of New York Civil Rights Law
(01:29):
Section fifty A, which previously kept the disciplinary records of
police officers hidden. Was this provision of the New York
State Civil Rights Law that put New York at the
back of the pack when it comes to transparency on
police misconduct. So this was a law that said that
(01:52):
records of police misconduct, whether their complaints against officers, whether
they're investigated, whether there's any kind of accountability, essentially a
state secret um and the public was not able to
know whether or not the systems that we have in
place to hold officers to account for that misconduct or
working because we just couldn't access any of those records.
(02:13):
So it first came about in the nineteen seventies. Why
why do you think so? The idea was that defense
attorneys were doing their jobs, so police officers were upset
at the fact that they were being called to testify
in cases, and defense attorneys would look at whether there
was a record of misconduct and that officer's history, had
(02:34):
they made bad arrests in similar cases before? Were they
ever accused of lying on the stand or on official reports,
and they would use those bad acts to question the
credibility of the officer testifying. Exactly. So, when fifty eight
was first passed, it was justified in that lens of
trying to prevent defense attorneys from going on fishing expeditions
(02:58):
in the course of doing their jobs and representing their clients.
But over time it morphed into something completely different, and
it became the go to excuse that police departments would
point to to withhold any kind of record of officer misdeeds. Now,
was there a person or an institution or both that
(03:19):
we're spearheading this back in the seventies, Was there somebody
ramming this down the legislature's throat. It was police unions,
police departments that were leaving the charge on this, and
it was with a very receptive legislature. There was not
a lot of organized opposition to this proposal when it
came about, and maybe in part that's because it was
(03:41):
envisioned as this narrower approach to dealing with the specific
case of officers on the witness stand. But it was
at a time where New York and other states were
starting to pass freedom of information laws. Freedom of Information
Acts to make more public records open and accessible, and
the was one of the first areas where we saw
(04:01):
police union start to push back on that trend of
making more government records available to the public. Where is
fifty A at now in New York? I mean it
was repealed, was repealed and then something happened or did
they did they litigate that? Or what? Fifty A journey?
It's a long and tortured one. Fifty A started to
get applied more and more outside the courtroom context and
(04:24):
as the blanket response to public records requests going into
the NYPD and other police departments, and we saw a
dramatic expansion of its use in the past five ten years,
largely under the Blasio administration, where the NYPD started to
withhold just summary redacted information on disciplinary outcomes for officers.
(04:47):
They used it to justify with holding data like use
of for statistics and more and more. They were fighting
these efforts in the courts to expand the scope of
fifty A make it impossible to get any kind of
access to those records. They wanted to just broaden the
scope of fifty as much as they could exactly. They
wanted to make the supply and context that were entirely
(05:09):
unheard of when this law was first enacted in the seventies.
So the case that ultimately led to its most dramatic
expansion back in the n y c l U submitted
to foil request with the NYPD. We asked for decisions
from the n y p d S trial room that
were redacted, didn't have officer names, are identifying information. We
(05:30):
just wanted to see what the reasoning was of NYPD
trial judges in reaching their recommendations on whether or not
to hold an officer accountable, recommend discipline against them, and
basically just understand what the process was. The NYPD said, no,
we're not going to give you these records because even
if we take officer names off of it, fifty A
(05:52):
prevents us from telling you any of this information. And
so if I'm not mistaken, what was originally wanting to
redact with the names of officers specifically who might do
fear retribution or their records might fairly or unfairly derail prosecution.
Then it became they expanded it too. We don't want
(06:13):
you to know anything, not just the names. We don't
want you to know anything, right, exactly as it was written,
applied specifically to personnel records used to evaluate performance, and
what they tried to do was take a very expansive
read of what counts as a personnel record. And because
of the way that the statute was written, they also
argue that there was no kind of out for them
(06:34):
to just take an officer name off the file and
release the underlying record or just basic summary information on
the cases. They took the position that no disclosure was permitted,
and that's ultimately what the State Court of Appeals held
in in our lawsuit. They said that fifty A, unlike
all of the other kind of exemptions that typically apply
in public records laws, actually blocks police departments from releasing
(06:59):
anything that's related to an officer's disciplinary or misconduct records,
and basically punted to the legislature to take action and said,
if you want this problem fixed, the legislature needs to
fix it. Once fifty A was repealed and the remains
repealed correct, Oh, there's lots of litigation. There was federal litigation.
(07:19):
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just a couple of
weeks ago tossed out of police union lawsuit from New
York city trying to block the publication of disciplinary records
were they published. So the city had planned to publish
those records until this litigation stopped them from doing so.
But before the litigation even began, the NYC l you
obtained a database of disciplinary records from the Civilian Compoint
(07:43):
Review Board, this independent entity in New York City that
investigates certain allegations of police misconduct. And we posted the
database that we received from that agency on our website,
so you can look up the three hundred thousand plus
complains dating back to the nineteen eighties that are in
those records. But you know, that's only a slice of
the records that exist, because that is just the ccrb
(08:04):
S files. We haven't seen the records from the NYPD
itself yet, but with this ruling from the Court of Appeals,
we now expect that hopefully within the next couple of weeks,
we'll be able to see that information go up online.
You have faith that you're going to be getting unedited
on redacted information. I'm assuming when they sense that the
fifty is going to be repealed that they try to
(08:25):
do all kinds of things to prepare for that, to
maintain the lack of transparency. What's happening in New York
the NYPD following the repeal of fifty A, they said
that they were going to create this database, they were
going to put the records up online. I don't have
confidence that it is going to be the full universe
of records, and I do think that they're going to
be selective about trying to find whatever existing exceptions in
(08:48):
the state free of information law. They're going to find
as much ground for themselves as they can to withhold
certain categories of records. But we're not just relying on
the department itself to make the records of llable. One
of the things that the ny c LU has done
in recent months is send a series of public records
request to police departments across the state, demanding that in
(09:10):
accordance with state law. Now these are public records, we
demand access to them, and the departments that are not
producing them. You know, we have a ton of law
firms that we're working in partnership with us on to
make sure that we have the ability to go into
court and make sure that now that you know fifty
as gone, we have a legal right to see these records.
(09:30):
What troubles me there is that Let's say there's a
piece of evidence like a tape or a photograph or whatever,
that the police themselves are the only ones with a
copy of that evidence. So what if the police turn
around and go, no, we're not going to release it
like like make us and there's no other copy of
its somewhere else that another entity could release. Does that
trouble you that they might just say, fuck you, We're
(09:52):
not going to release that. It's absolutely concerning. I think
what we have going for us as a starting point
is the fact that with fifty A gone, the rest
of the kind of framework for getting access to these
types of records, the law is very much on our side.
So if we have those disputes to end up going
to court, if the police department is saying we don't
want to turn over these records, we have really solid
(10:13):
legal footing to go in and argue for why those
records should be made available. But to the broader point,
I do think it needs to be part of a
broader conversation around how we're structuring police accountability systems to
be more independent of the department itself. So we're looking
at what it could take to have entire agencies that
are set up with real disciplinary power that are not
(10:36):
beholden to a police department structure that would exist in
an agency like a civilian review board, that would exist
somewhere else, so that we're mitigating the risk of putting
all of this information being kept in the hands of
people who have a real clear interest in not making
that information public. And that's true of disciplinary records. It's
one of our concerns with things like body camera footage,
(10:57):
like if you want to have officers wearing body cameras
and recording interactions to improve transparency, then you should have
someone who's not the police department be the one who
decides on when those records are being published and released.
It's as true for disciplinary records as it is for
body cameras and any other kind of tool meant to
improve transparency. You can't rely on the police themselves to
(11:19):
be transparent when they've been fighting against those basic measures
for as long as they have. Who are the people
in the legislature that helped bring about the repeal off
on the legislative side who took the lead on this
were members of the state, Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and
Asian Legislative Caucus, the b p h A. These are
legislators of color who have been really at the forefront
(11:42):
of criminal justice reform, police reform, and really helped make
sure that this legislation moved through the legislative process in
as strong reform as it did. But I would say
the real heroes of this movement, the people who ensured
that this repeal moved forward. We're are a lot of
the families of people who had lost loved ones to
(12:03):
police violence. The mother of Eric Garner, the mother of
Marley Graham. These were some of the champions who from
their own personal experiences, had been fighting for years to
get some basic measure of transparency and accountability from police departments,
and always saw fifty A as one of the main
obstacles being used to not even give them any measure
(12:26):
of closure knowing whether or not the police department had
thoroughly investigated these cases. And they led the charge on
this issue and on so many of the other issues
that the state legislature ended up passing last year in
the wake of the George Floyd protests. What about Cuoma
was he in favor of repealing so he hadn't taken
much of a position on it until we saw the
(12:47):
George Floyd protests really pick up momentum, and we saw
the instances of really horrific police violence directed against protesters.
But as as those protests were unfolding, we heard a
call from the Governor's office to say, the legislature needs
to pass something. They need to fix the statute. And
you know, in that maybe week two weeks of kind
(13:09):
of frantic negotiations putting together a police reform package, this
became the centerpiece of it. Michael Sisitski is a lawyer
at the New York Civil Liberties Union. If you like
conversations with people who are exploring ways to save America's
great cities, they would go to our archives and listen
(13:31):
to my conversation with Tom Wright from New York City's
Regional Plan Association. Right joined Corey Johnson and the Code
Alimas pre Pandemic to talk about ways to cut unnecessary
costs related to the subway. The entire system is broken
from front to end. The procurement process in New York
(13:53):
State is so ridiculous that contractors will be hired to
build a piece of the Second Avenue subway. They will
know that it's going to change, but it's going to
take a year for the procurement process to effectuate that change.
So they build something knowing that at the end of
it they're going to be told to rip it up
and rebuild it again under some new way. But they
(14:15):
have to do it and the contractors if they don't
do is happening Here my conversation with Tom Wright, Corey Johnson,
and Nicole Julinas at Here's the Thing dot org after
the Break, Michael Sisitski and I discuss whether the calls
to defund the police will help keep communities, especially communities
(14:38):
of color safe. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to
Here's the Thing. Activists around the country have been calling
(14:59):
for defund the police. As a result, more than twenty cities,
including Austin, Minneapolis, and Seattle, have made efforts to reduce
their police budgets and increase funds for social services. However,
Michael Sasitski says that's not really working anywhere yet. I
can say some of the places that you noted are
(15:20):
places that have made bigger strides than say New York,
and the kind of defunding that we've seen in those
departments there is a shift away from over reliance on
police as kind of the default solution to every societal ill.
But it's all very much a work in progress, and
I think part of what we're grappling with as we're
(15:42):
trying to identify, you know, how do you shift police
out of homeless outreach, out of mental health responses, out
of their kind of ever present presence in schools is
you know, we are not able to point to a
real model of the place that has done everything right,
but there are individual pieces that we're trying to replicate
(16:02):
and build on. And you know, you look outside the
US and you see that there are entire countries that
have fewer instances of police killings of members of the
public in an entire year than a police department here
would get through in the course of a week. And
you look at how they've structured these departments to have
less of a focus on officers playing the role of
(16:24):
kind of warriors against communities, of this war on crime
mentality where officers are heavily armed, they're given surplus military equipment,
And it's this idea that in most places of the
US police are so heavily militarized, and they incorporate that
militarization framework into every aspect of their work. You know,
(16:45):
one thing that always strikes me about this issue in
New York especially is this notion that, you know, the
President of the United States, the only individual who was
elected to office by all of the people in this country,
is the commander in chief of the military. We have
civilian control of the military, and I'm wondering if the
same thing applies to the City of New York, where
(17:07):
we have civilian control of the police department. Why does
someone like the Blasio and de Blasio, of course, has
a very troubled relationship with the police department, I mean,
turning their back on him at funerals and stuff, whether
in there. These are the things that they do on
the record, And I don't know why it is the
police have been allowed to achieve this kind of supra
(17:30):
regulatory status within the government of the City of New York.
There's a laws and regulations that apply to the fire
Department and to the Sanitation Department into other city services,
and none of that applied. The police are like the Kremlin.
It's it's its own fiefdom inside the city. Would you
agree with that, I would agree. I mean, in theory,
the Police Commissioner is an agency official of just like
(17:52):
any other executive agency in New York City in theory,
accountable to the mayor. In practice, what we've seen is
deference given to this agency unlike the difference shown to
any other New York City entity of government. The NYPD
has kind of unique among city agencies, basically been given
(18:13):
the authority to exercise a veto over city Council legislation
and other forms of oversight. You know, I think back
to one of the first campaigns that I worked on
at the end my c l U when I started
back in was this package of bills called the Right
to No Act, which were really basic measures in the
city Council. They were requirements that officers identify themselves, give
(18:37):
out business cards and encounters, let people know like what
the reasons are for stops, and to let people know
when they're being asked to consent to searches. Really basic stuff,
not actually changing anything fundamental about what officers can or
can't do, but being more transparent in interactions, which you know,
in theory could help improve police community relationship because you're
(19:00):
actually getting to know who these officers are. You're understanding
what these encounters entail. I wonder how frustrating it is
for the incoming chief of the New York City Police
Department to realize that the head of the union has
more power than you do, that the head of the union,
the police union, is that one really calling the shots.
What do you think the Blasio did or did not
(19:21):
do during his term? He's almost done with his second term.
What did you think he did or did not do
to help manage the police or did he not even
bother to try to manage the police? Yeah? I think
there was maybe an opening where this is someone who
ran on a platform about ending the tail of two
cities in New York, on reigning in unconstitutional stops, on
(19:45):
having a police department that would take a fundamentally different
approach than what we saw under Giuliani and Bloomberg. And
maybe that was the intention for a while, but it
didn't last long. If that ever was the case. The
point at which officers turned their backs on the mayor
at that funeral seemed to be the moment where this
administration gave up on trying to get control of the
(20:07):
police department and We saw from that point forward efforts
to block the City Council from passing really basic police
transparency measures. We saw the administration basically object to any
attempt at legislative oversight of the department, and we saw
the administration take its new interpretation of fifty A to
start blocking and withholding more records of police accountability. This
(20:30):
is a mayor who, as his first police commissioner, brought
in the architect of broken windows policing from the Giuliani
era and has stayed committed to that approach, which just
proportionately leads to more police contact and criminalization of poor
people in communities of color, and has never really diverged
from that track. So, you know, there's not been really
(20:53):
much of a solid effort from the administration that we've
seen here in New York City to actually fundamentally transformed policing.
A lot of it ended up being more of the same.
I want to get back to something, which is I'm
not one of these liberal Democrats who thinks that Obama
is the lyricist for all of our anthems here in
the world. But at the same time Obama and I
(21:15):
agree with him that the phrase defund the police's bad
optics for this idea of reform. Do you think to
fund the police is the best wording for that movement?
I think defund is important as a message, and I
get that there are concerns about the optics, concerns about
how it lands when you're trying to convey what it means.
(21:35):
But I think the focus on defunding the police is
critical because it keeps the focus on the fact that
police departments have dramatically expanded their budgets, their functions as
other agencies that are better equipped to handle things like
public health, education, housing. As all of those agencies have
(21:58):
been defunded, we have been in consciously putting that money
into police departments, expanding their scope, expanding their powers. And
that is at the root of a lot of these problems,
is how much we're over investing in police. But you
and I get it, But so many Americans, have you
defund the polices, You're going to abolish the police? Have
(22:18):
you found that to be true. I've certainly heard that,
and I think you know it's a complicated call, and
it's one that does merit really in depth discussion public education,
and that's on advocates to do the hard work of
explaining what defund means and why it makes sense, why
it's going to lead to the types of improvements we
(22:40):
want to see in other areas and other services. So
I don't disagree that it is complicated, that it takes
a lot to move the public needle on this, but
it is. You know, we talk about defunding the police
because of the active harm that police are causing and
inflicting on communities because they have been given such outsize power,
outsize reese forces, and gets to a point where a
(23:02):
lot of the calls that come back to reform or
fixed or all of these things, they've been kind of
the call for years, and we've seen that they haven't
produced the types of change that are really needed to
protect communities from the worst excesses of police violence. Some
of the reforms that have long been called changes to
things like use of force policies. You know, if we
(23:23):
just better document force, if we better regulate tactics like
chokeholds and banned chokeholds, that we're going to see a
reduction in their use and against communities. But that hasn't
borne out. Now. Let me ask you this, in the
work you do do you cast an eye at other
countries and other areas of the world and who's getting
(23:45):
it right in terms of their policing. So we haven't
done a kind of in depth or I haven't done
at least an in depth review of how other countries
structure their police departments. But you know what does kind
of jump out is the fact that most places outside
the US don't have as heavily armed and militarized police forces.
They're not sending in someone who's training is to think
(24:08):
of themselves as basically a soldier going in to get
control over a neighborhood or population. You know, you're not
seeing the level of shootings, the level of force used
against communities because you're not you know, you're not arming
the cops in these other places as if they are
actually part of a military force. Sometimes I only have
(24:30):
cliches and my fingertips here. But the idea that you know,
when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail may
apply to that whole idea of the para militarization of
the police. But do you believe there are cops out
there who they want to see those reforms too. I'm
sure like there are a lot of people who go
into their profession thinking that, you know, they can make
(24:51):
a positive difference, that they want to see many of
the reforms that are called for. But the problems, you know,
are less a about individual officers are though, there are
problems who have individual officers, but it's more about the
systems that are in place that block that type of
movement from happening. You know, you hear a lot about
(25:12):
the blue Wall of silence. There are these disincentives and
retaliation against officers that point out when the system is
not working the way that it supposedly should. What role
do you think racism plays in the maintenance of police
practices that we have today. I think it's inescapable. Racism,
(25:34):
if you look back at the history of policing in
this country, has been at the core. Policing in the
US traces its origins back to slave patrols, groups of
white citizens that came together to control disorder in communities,
and that disorder was to crack down on black people
(25:56):
who were kept as slaves and to capt runaway slaves.
And from those slave patrol origins you started to see
the template for how many of the country's early police
forces developed policing following the Civil War was largely focused
on enforcing Jim Crow restrictions. You see the role that
(26:17):
police departments have played in suppressing labor movements, suppressing the
civil rights movement, in enforcing segregation. It's largely been a
core function of police departments as part of this idea
of maintaining order and control, that they are there to
maintain order and control on behalf of white people and
(26:38):
targeting black and brown people. Do you think it's necessary
for something as sensitive as the police department to reflect
the color of the community. I think the what we've
seen is a pattern of police departments not reflecting the
makeup of their communities, and I think it's important that
they make strides to better reflect the communities they come from,
(26:59):
the communities they patrol. I don't think it's anywhere near enough.
It's good to have diversity, diversity itself cannot be the
end goal if you're not changing the underlying purpose and
mission of the department. And what we've seen is as
the rank and file has gotten more diverse in the NYPD,
you're still not seeing much in terms of senior leadership
of the departments concern the people calling the shots setting
(27:22):
the policy people in charge. Yeah, the people in charge
are not actually reflective of most New Yorkers. I'm always
mystified as to not that we need quotas, but I'm
always mystified about the optics of that that the population
of New York is a plurality of people of color,
at the police department looks pretty whitey white, white at
the top. To me, the city is a mess. The
(27:46):
city is on the precipice of this horrible reckoning in
terms of its finances, and and I'm assuming just logically
that's gonna have a tremendous impact on the tech space
of the city right when they need money most. The
city is in a free fall economically right now. What
do you think the impact of that is going to
be on police reform? Because crime is going up. So
(28:10):
I think it's it's central to the discussions around what
to do with the city's budget with the state budget.
And we saw the first part of these conversations around
how to handle the fallout of the pandemic in city
budgeting last year, when the kind of center piece of
the debate around New York City's budget was what to
do with the NYPD which there were calls last year
(28:33):
to defund the NYPD by one billion dollars, which incidentally
is about the amount by which the NYPD's budget has
expanded since de Blasio took office. So still returning to
some realistic level. So do Blasio, who was elected in
two thoust and you're saying that during de Blasio's term,
the budget of the police department is going to one
(28:54):
billion dollars, That's right. The expense budget when he took
office was around five billion dollar dollars and it got
up to six billion dollars when we were having this
conversation last year. Why there was more hiring of thousands
of officers added to the police force. There is really
hard to grasp like number because so much of it
was kept secret of new surveillance technologies and equipment that
(29:18):
the NYPD was acquiring, new units that were put together.
You know, we saw the NYPD has touted their Strategic
Response Group, which is a new unit that was created
under the Blasio that brought in really expensive and alarming
to look at military equipment and gear. These are the
counter terrorism officers who incidentally are also tasked with policing
(29:39):
protest because for some reason the NYPD has decided that
First Amendment protected protest is similar enough to counter terrorism
responsibilities that they're going to put the same militarized officers
out of the force. But we saw this investment of
resources into the police department in terms of their budgeting,
and we saw this real dramatic expansion of just how
(30:02):
much funds we're going into the department. So the call
last year was to say, you know, as a starting point,
we need to look at how this rapid growth of
spending on the police department can be reset a bit
and take some of that billion dollars that was called
foreign savings, put it into things like the Department of Health,
which was struggling, the Department of Homeless Services, which was struggling.
(30:25):
You know, you look at the NYPD's budget and it
is more than the budget for the Departments of Health,
Homeless Services, Housing Preservation, Youth, community Development, and workforce development combined.
So the needs that are facing New Yorkers as we're
trying to, you know, look towards recovering from this pandemic,
are in those areas. That's where the most critical daily
(30:47):
needs of New Yorkers are not being met. So I
think we'll be having this conversation again heading into city
budget season this summer. I don't think the calls for
divesting from the NYPD budget and reinvesting in these other
agencies is going to go away anytime soon. I would say,
state level, a lot of the conversation now around what
happens with things like can we add state revenue with
(31:08):
marijuana legalization, for example, And it's certainly something that we're
advocating for, but with a very kind of specific purpose,
which is the legislation that's been around in Albany for
a while, the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act. It takes
a historical look at how policing has impacted communities of color,
devastated communities of color as part of the War on drugs,
(31:30):
and says that for the revenue that we're now going
to be generating from this industry that just yesterday we
were locking you up for, we're actually going to take
half of it and reinvested in these communities, which I think,
you know, is one really critical way to repair harm done,
but it's also critical to COVID recovery because many of
the same communities that were devastated by marijuana police saying,
(31:54):
are the same communities that have been hardest hit by
the pandemic. Now you have been You've commented occasionally about
surveillance equipment. Give us some examples, if you will. What
are some of the developments in terms of the police
use of surveillance equipment that trouble you the most. So,
the most troubling thing for years was the fact that
(32:14):
we just didn't know what tools and technologies the police
department had acquired and was deploying against New Yorkers. The
NYPD would always fight requests for information on contracting, on
what tools they were buying, on what their capabilities were.
So last summer that started to change when the New
York City Council passed what's called the Post Act Public
(32:37):
Oversight of Surveillance Technology, And now we're starting to see
some basic transparency and reporting on just what the NYPD
surveillance infrastructure looks like. So if you look at the
NYPD's website, there's now thirty six different policies that are
listed that talk about what kind of surveillance capabilities they have.
There's a lot of lies and misrepresentations in those policies,
but it's the starting point and we've seen that the
(33:00):
n y p D has purchased an unknown number of
mobile X ray bands, for instance, which were developed as
military tools for deployment in active war zones, and they
would use it in New York for what They don't
really say. Their policy is that we may be able
to use it in counter terrorism purposes to look for explosives,
(33:21):
but there's not a lot of data on what that
translates to in practice. We also don't know how many
of them there are. We do know that they're very expensive.
Just one unit, it's about eight hundred thousand dollars. So
that's one technology that we've learned about through litigation. Through
recent disclosures, we know that the NYPD has space recognition,
(33:41):
which is hugely problematic. What troubles you about that so
based recognition. The way that it's worked in practice is
that it's reasonably effective at identifying white men and not
so great at producing positive matches on anyone else who's
subject to the technology. Why is that? Largely because the
(34:02):
technologies are developed by largely overrepresented groups of white men,
they're just not effective. They're not really trained to work
well when looking at other skin tones. What we see
the NYPD use this technology for it's some really questionable
practices where they've had a policy that allows them to
manipulate photos before they even run it against their databases.
(34:25):
You know, one thing that came out and reporting from
Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology was they uncovered that
the nyp D was uploading celebrity lookalike images if they
didn't have the best quality picture of the suspect that
they were trying to identify. They would say, and this
is a real example, well that guy kind of looks
like Woody Harrelson, So let's run a picture of Woody
Harrelson's face into our database and see who that might
(34:48):
produce as a potential match. They would manipulate faces. They
would edit someone's face, if someone was viewed in profile,
they would try to recreate like a full image of
that person's face. We'll gonna have a Meryl Race coming
up in the completely exhausted and innervated New York City.
Do you have any hopes that anybody who's assumed to
(35:10):
be running from there that resetting the police. I'm gonna
coin that phase now that resetting the police is on
their menu. I think it's been an issue that's come
up in a number of the candidates platforms. I've seen
some discussion of to use your term resetting, to use
my term defunding that have come up in some of
the candidate forums that have come up on their platforms.
(35:31):
But I think it's something where I don't know that
we'll see what fully needs to be done from my perspective,
to fundamentally change the way that the NYPD operates. I'm
not discounting the possibility, but I think a lot of
it will depend on whether New Yorkers maintain the current
energy and momentum that we started to see building from
(35:53):
the George Floyd protest last year when Albany repealed fifty.
When they passed the police reform bills that were part
of that package, these were measures that had existed for years,
they had been installed, there was no real legislative sense
of urgency to move them. Then you saw New Yorkers
by the thousands turnout protests demand that some action finally
be taken, and it's led to real sustained conversations beyond
(36:16):
that about what other kind of shifts we want to
make in the role, the powers, the scope of law enforcement.
And I think if that momentum is able to be maintained,
if that is carried forward into the next election cycle
and the one after that, you know we're going to
see continued calls for elected officials, for mayors, for city
council members, and for police departments to take a different approach.
(36:39):
But it really is going to be dependent on New
Yorkers elevating those demands and making the call to reset,
defund policing a continuous call. What do you say with
the work you do, which is to expose the wrongdoings
and to reform the system. I don't like that phrase
good cops, but what does the warrior from the a
(37:01):
c l U on behalf of police transparency? What message
do you have, if any, to the good cops out there.
I think the message is, we have, as you said,
often antagonistic relationships because it's our job to make sure
that the systems that are put in place by our
government are actually serving the people and benefiting the people.
(37:22):
And it's often not about attacks on individual cops, although
there are some individual cops who deserve as much scrutiny
as they as they can get. But this is about
making sure that the work that we do is to
hold government accountable to the ideals that they purport to follow.
And that's what it is. At the end of the day.
(37:43):
We have these systems, we are told because they are
meant to protect the public. They are meant to ensure
people's well being in safety. And if they're not doing that,
if they're not serving that purpose, it's our job to
call them out. Michael Sasitski as a lawyer of the
New York Civil Liberties Union. His work is focused on
(38:06):
police reform. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend
and be sure to follow Here's the thing on the
I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. When we come back, I'll check in with
Catherine Wilde, CEO and president of the Partnership for New
York City about the city's post pandemic future. I'm Alec Baldwin,
(38:39):
and this is here's the thing. In the early months
of the pandemic, New York City seemed to be on
the ropes. Storefronts and restaurants were closed, Broadway was dark,
unemployment claims skyrocketed. Now a year later, things look very different,
as New York City is slowly coming back to life,
how wanted to follow up with Katherine Wilde, CEO and
(39:03):
President of the Partnership for New York City. She's in
close contact with the heads of the city's biggest corporations
and as such she has an informed outlook on the
city's finances. Things are substantially better than people thought it
would be. A year ago in we had a gross
city economic output of eight hundred and nine billion dollars.
(39:28):
That is only shrunk by three point four percent during
the pandemic, which is far less than anybody thought was
going to happen. And that's for basically three reasons. Number One,
Wall Street and much of our office industry was able
to immediately transfer to remote operation actually improve their profitability
(39:53):
and productivity in the process. Number Two, we got tremendous
a from the federal government starting with the first stimulus,
and so that while in March and April last year,
consumer spending dropped dramatically. Today, while we're still in pandemic mode,
(40:13):
consumer spending is back up to normal levels. It's e
commerce spending more than ever, but that's kept the economy going.
And finally, we were well positioned for the digital economy
takeover our key growth sector has been in technology and
(40:34):
in the technology side of financial services and media. All
these industries that use technology have been our growth area
and represent most of our economy. So we've had all
those things going for us and going well. What we
lost was our brick and mortar economy, retail, travel, and tourism.
(40:59):
Direct service is small business that represents of our jobs,
but it's only nine of our economy. So the losses
there were severe and tended to focus on low wage
workers and small business. They were severe, but they did
(41:20):
not take down the whole economy, and our tax roles
kept growing, and every day were more surprised by state
and city government not being in a fiscal crisis. Everybody
was predicting, we're gonna have a fiscal crisis. We've got
a problem, We've got to raise taxes. We have no
fiscal crisis. Between the federal aid to the state and
the city over a hundred billion dollars, thank you, Senator Schumer,
(41:43):
and the macro economy that has kept going throughout the pandemic,
we do not have a fiscal crisis, and we had
no need to raise taxes, even though two weeks ago
Albany raised taxes for the people that were put out
of a job. I don't want to say time bomb,
but of their loom being problems for us in terms
of how to deal with those people in their loss
of income. I don't think time bomb is inappropriate because
(42:06):
what happened is the COVID accelerated what we knew was happening.
You know, work of the future going to robots replacing people,
et cetera. The COVID accelerated that by maybe as much
as two decades. So we find ourselves in a situation
we knew was coming in the distant future has come
within the last thirteen months. So we have a crisis
(42:27):
of six hundred and forty two thousand job losses. Those
are New Yorkers who are probably not prepared for the
jobs that are available. Ironically, in March, we had postings
of three hundred and sixteen thousand open jobs, but we
don't have the people to fill those jobs because of
(42:48):
this skills gap that we've been talking about for years,
but we've done nothing at scale to deal with. What
should we do about the skills gap? Well, I think
number one, I think employers have a big opportunity to
step up and they are beginning to do that with
a number of programs. JP Morgan has started a program.
There's other companies that are participating in starting programs to
(43:11):
one revisit jobs. You know, New York got spoiled. They
could hire an Ivy League b A for a job
that could be done by somebody with a community college degree,
especially in technology areas, and we haven't focused on making
those marriages with the City University and with others that
(43:31):
are producing people who could fill those jobs. Got to
change the criteria, and we've got to go to Albany
and get the state Education Department to change their classification
so that people can be credentialed in these jobs as
your organization lobbying for them. Absolutely, yes, we are working
on that and we have been for a couple of years,
and hopefully things are going to speed up now. So
(43:53):
this is a fixable problem. The other piece of this
problem is our immigration policy. Immigration has been cut off
in recent years, especially in one H one B s
and education scholarships and the ability for people to come
here and study, so we have lost a lot of
the talent pool that was filling those jobs. So it's
(44:15):
a combination of reforming our immigration policies at the federal
level and at the local level really going in there. Unfortunately,
there is a lot of education funding in the stimulus
package that the federal government has put out. Let's invest
in that education, and let's do it in partnership with employers.
This should not be Ivory Tower, get your bachelor's degree.
(44:37):
This should be get a job. Right. A friend of mine,
he's got two floors, two fifty employees on Park Avenue
and that Gold Coast. They're hovering around the fifties and
sixtie Street. They said, half of them home and then
up bringing them back, he told me, And he said
they're going to downsize their lease to half. Now I've
been told that the residential real estate market is bottoming out.
(45:01):
Its starting to come up again, because as as people
have said, in a kind of folkloric way, they've said, well,
you know, New York, no one can pay for one
bedroom apartment in a nice part of Brooklyn and Manhattan
or anywhere for that matter. And then the rents come
down below, some come down below two thousand and a
whole other crop of people that couldn't afford to live
(45:21):
in your they're coming absolutely, and that is the silver lining.
I talked to a similar Park Avenue guy last week
who told me he just bought two Upper east Side
apartments for his kids at fifty percent off what they
cost a year and a half ago, so he was
thrilled with the bargain. It's a long term investment, so
it's not for speculative resale. But I think, yes, this
(45:44):
has happened. Remember in the seventy of course, where everybody
got all those fancy Central Park views for a song.
New York is affordable to a new crop of people
now who are going to come, which solves a big
problem looking for jobs. Looking for jobs, absolutely, but it's
it solves the problem of gentrification, fear of displacement, and
(46:05):
if construction costs can come down. You know, it's been
a seller's market in the office market for years. They
now have a sixteen percent vacancy rate in Manhattan. That's
a good thing as far as businesses. Absolutely. People tell
me that the commercial real estate market that's in the
retail market that's still struggling, very weak, very weak. And
(46:27):
we've got another time bomb coming, which is May first.
The moratorium on evictions of small business in New York
ends and that's the point where thirteen fourteen months of
rent could come due for those small businesses and in
many cases small landlords of small businesses in neighborhoods throughout
(46:48):
the city, not just Manhattan, who have not had the
wherewithal to pay the rent. And that's particularly true, unfortunately,
as with much of the COVID, particularly impactful to black
and Hispanic, low income immigrant communities, where you've got small
building owners, you've got small businesses that weren't ready to
(47:10):
go online, didn't have a website, didn't have the capacity
to meet the demands of the COVID. So this is
going to be a serious problem. And this is where
those job losses really are going to become long term problems.
The federal aid will not last long enough. We have
to fix this through education and through upgrading the technology
(47:31):
and the skills of those small business owners. Now you
hear a constant, metronomic call to tax their bitch, tax
their bitch. And I believe that this is an opinion.
I'm under an economist, but in my opinion, there should
be minimum taxes that everybody pays. If I say to
you that you're in a fifty percent bracket and So therefore,
(47:52):
on an income of a million dollars, you oh half
a million dollars in taxes, and I can say to you,
you can knock it down by giving away to order
in fifty dollars to charity, but nothing below that, meaning
you must pay a minimum amount of tax. What do
you think has to happen in the city and in
the state in terms of tax policy, Well, two weeks
ago the state has made us the highest tax state
(48:16):
in the nation without looking at the equity arguments. Before
the pandemic, fifty six percent of the people in the
top bracket in New York State were non residents of
the state. Comes the COVID. Suddenly people are working remotely
from Palm Beach or Miami or Austin or wherever, and
(48:41):
suddenly that talent is telling their companies, we want you
to move our job to where we are because the
tax burden. If Biden's proposed tax increases on the wealthy
also go through, which they probably will to pay for
the next infrastructure bill. If those go through, then you're
going to have a situation where New York professionals at
(49:04):
the high end earning more than a million dollars a
year are going to have a tax burden of about
six of their income going in federal, state and city taxes.
And that is a kind of breaking point when you
found out that you can do your work from a
state where your taxes like Florida, will be your income,
so you keep more than you would both under Trump
(49:28):
and of course I one thousand percent view this that
he did this to kill major cities in blue states.
The deductibility on your federal income taxes if your state
and local Texas was disallowed. Is that going to come back?
Does your organization wanted to come back? Our organization is
split because it's tied to the corporate taxes. I would
(49:49):
say the vast majority of our members of the business
community of New York fields this was a discriminatory hit
at New York. It was designed to disadvantage our economy,
to create incentives to move to Florida and to Texas
and to other red states states with no income tax,
with no income tax. So absolutely, it is a hit
(50:10):
at New York and it is devastating. And we made
that argument in Albany to no avail. The feeling of
the politicians was that rich people will never leave New
York you really have to tread carefully because yes, they
will leave. I mean, I'm telling you right now. You
say a lot of people are going to leave, people
start to notice, and every tax accountant, every tax lawyer,
(50:34):
every private wealth advisor that I speak to tells me
that their business in people working on relocating their residents
for tax purposes has dramatically increased since the COVID. So
this is again another ticking time bomb. We're not going
to see it this year. We've got good tax revenues
(50:58):
coming in this year, but over the next couple of years,
as they're able to make those arrangements and people can
if their company opens an office in Florida and you're
working out of that office, you're no longer paying New
York City income Texas. Right. So, for example, if you've
left New York and you're in Connecticut or you're in
(51:19):
New Jersey and the office that you're working through is
in New York City, you're an employee of a New
York City company, and the moment that company opens an
office into the remote area you're in, you're out. Now
you're working for a Florida company. Correct, Bingo, That's exactly
the problem. That's what I said before. Fifty six percent
(51:39):
of the current highest taxpayers are already non residents in Connecticut,
in New Jersey, wherever, but their company resisted investing and
opening an office where they are Now the pressure from
the talent is so strong. A guy was telling me
last week, I've got four partners us in Florida. I've
(52:02):
ignored them for years. I haven't opened an office there.
And then a new recruit that's a superstar came along
and said, I will not pay New York taxes. You
have to open an office in Florida. And he said,
what am I gonna do? April one, I opened an
office in Florida. Well, listen. Thank you for doing this
with us anytime, anytime. Thank you. Catherine Wild, CEO and
(52:27):
President of the Partnership for New York City. My thanks
to her and Michael Cisitski. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the
thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio. We're produced
by Kathleen Russo, Carrie donohue, and Zach McNeice. Our engineer
is Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening. Don't make n
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from my Heart Radio. Today we're exploring issues here
in New York that connect to larger ones around the country.
Our guests are Michael Cecitski from the New York Civil
Liberties Union and Catherine Wilde. I spoke with Kathy Wilde
(00:24):
back in May when things looked dismal for New York City.
As the President and CEO of the Partnership for New
York City, Kathy is one of the smartest and most
connected people I know. She's in close contact with the
city's top CEO s, and now a year later, I
wanted to check in with her to get a sense
(00:45):
of what she's hearing, but first a closer look at
another issue closely related to New York City's finances and
city safety, police reform. Michael Cecitski is a lawyer at
the New York Civil Liberties Union. One of the nyc
l us top priorities is to ensure a more equitable
(01:07):
justice system by addressing systemic police violence, and Michael leads
its Police Transparency and Accountability campaign. The n y c
l U is in the process of requesting police discipline
records from around the state, requests made possible by the
state legislatures. Recently, peal of New York Civil Rights Law
(01:29):
Section fifty A, which previously kept the disciplinary records of
police officers hidden. Was this provision of the New York
State Civil Rights Law that put New York at the
back of the pack when it comes to transparency on
police misconduct. So this was a law that said that
(01:52):
records of police misconduct, whether their complaints against officers, whether
they're investigated, whether there's any kind of accountability, essentially a
state secret um and the public was not able to
know whether or not the systems that we have in
place to hold officers to account for that misconduct or
working because we just couldn't access any of those records.
(02:13):
So it first came about in the nineteen seventies. Why
why do you think so? The idea was that defense
attorneys were doing their jobs, so police officers were upset
at the fact that they were being called to testify
in cases, and defense attorneys would look at whether there
was a record of misconduct and that officer's history, had
(02:34):
they made bad arrests in similar cases before? Were they
ever accused of lying on the stand or on official reports,
and they would use those bad acts to question the
credibility of the officer testifying. Exactly. So, when fifty eight
was first passed, it was justified in that lens of
trying to prevent defense attorneys from going on fishing expeditions
(02:58):
in the course of doing their jobs and representing their clients.
But over time it morphed into something completely different, and
it became the go to excuse that police departments would
point to to withhold any kind of record of officer misdeeds. Now,
was there a person or an institution or both that
(03:19):
we're spearheading this back in the seventies, Was there somebody
ramming this down the legislature's throat. It was police unions,
police departments that were leaving the charge on this, and
it was with a very receptive legislature. There was not
a lot of organized opposition to this proposal when it
came about, and maybe in part that's because it was
(03:41):
envisioned as this narrower approach to dealing with the specific
case of officers on the witness stand. But it was
at a time where New York and other states were
starting to pass freedom of information laws. Freedom of Information
Acts to make more public records open and accessible, and
the was one of the first areas where we saw
(04:01):
police union start to push back on that trend of
making more government records available to the public. Where is
fifty A at now in New York? I mean it
was repealed, was repealed and then something happened or did
they did they litigate that? Or what? Fifty A journey?
It's a long and tortured one. Fifty A started to
get applied more and more outside the courtroom context and
(04:24):
as the blanket response to public records requests going into
the NYPD and other police departments, and we saw a
dramatic expansion of its use in the past five ten years,
largely under the Blasio administration, where the NYPD started to
withhold just summary redacted information on disciplinary outcomes for officers.
(04:47):
They used it to justify with holding data like use
of for statistics and more and more. They were fighting
these efforts in the courts to expand the scope of
fifty A make it impossible to get any kind of
access to those records. They wanted to just broaden the
scope of fifty as much as they could exactly. They
wanted to make the supply and context that were entirely
(05:09):
unheard of when this law was first enacted in the seventies.
So the case that ultimately led to its most dramatic
expansion back in the n y c l U submitted
to foil request with the NYPD. We asked for decisions
from the n y p d S trial room that
were redacted, didn't have officer names, are identifying information. We
(05:30):
just wanted to see what the reasoning was of NYPD
trial judges in reaching their recommendations on whether or not
to hold an officer accountable, recommend discipline against them, and
basically just understand what the process was. The NYPD said, no,
we're not going to give you these records because even
if we take officer names off of it, fifty A
(05:52):
prevents us from telling you any of this information. And
so if I'm not mistaken, what was originally wanting to
redact with the names of officers specifically who might do
fear retribution or their records might fairly or unfairly derail prosecution.
Then it became they expanded it too. We don't want
(06:13):
you to know anything, not just the names. We don't
want you to know anything, right, exactly as it was written,
applied specifically to personnel records used to evaluate performance, and
what they tried to do was take a very expansive
read of what counts as a personnel record. And because
of the way that the statute was written, they also
argue that there was no kind of out for them
(06:34):
to just take an officer name off the file and
release the underlying record or just basic summary information on
the cases. They took the position that no disclosure was permitted,
and that's ultimately what the State Court of Appeals held
in in our lawsuit. They said that fifty A, unlike
all of the other kind of exemptions that typically apply
in public records laws, actually blocks police departments from releasing
(06:59):
anything that's related to an officer's disciplinary or misconduct records,
and basically punted to the legislature to take action and said,
if you want this problem fixed, the legislature needs to
fix it. Once fifty A was repealed and the remains
repealed correct, Oh, there's lots of litigation. There was federal litigation.
(07:19):
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just a couple of
weeks ago tossed out of police union lawsuit from New
York city trying to block the publication of disciplinary records
were they published. So the city had planned to publish
those records until this litigation stopped them from doing so.
But before the litigation even began, the NYC l you
obtained a database of disciplinary records from the Civilian Compoint
(07:43):
Review Board, this independent entity in New York City that
investigates certain allegations of police misconduct. And we posted the
database that we received from that agency on our website,
so you can look up the three hundred thousand plus
complains dating back to the nineteen eighties that are in
those records. But you know, that's only a slice of
the records that exist, because that is just the ccrb
(08:04):
S files. We haven't seen the records from the NYPD
itself yet, but with this ruling from the Court of Appeals,
we now expect that hopefully within the next couple of weeks,
we'll be able to see that information go up online.
You have faith that you're going to be getting unedited
on redacted information. I'm assuming when they sense that the
fifty is going to be repealed that they try to
(08:25):
do all kinds of things to prepare for that, to
maintain the lack of transparency. What's happening in New York
the NYPD following the repeal of fifty A, they said
that they were going to create this database, they were
going to put the records up online. I don't have
confidence that it is going to be the full universe
of records, and I do think that they're going to
be selective about trying to find whatever existing exceptions in
(08:48):
the state free of information law. They're going to find
as much ground for themselves as they can to withhold
certain categories of records. But we're not just relying on
the department itself to make the records of llable. One
of the things that the ny c LU has done
in recent months is send a series of public records
request to police departments across the state, demanding that in
(09:10):
accordance with state law. Now these are public records, we
demand access to them, and the departments that are not
producing them. You know, we have a ton of law
firms that we're working in partnership with us on to
make sure that we have the ability to go into
court and make sure that now that you know fifty
as gone, we have a legal right to see these records.
(09:30):
What troubles me there is that Let's say there's a
piece of evidence like a tape or a photograph or whatever,
that the police themselves are the only ones with a
copy of that evidence. So what if the police turn
around and go, no, we're not going to release it
like like make us and there's no other copy of
its somewhere else that another entity could release. Does that
trouble you that they might just say, fuck you, We're
(09:52):
not going to release that. It's absolutely concerning. I think
what we have going for us as a starting point
is the fact that with fifty A gone, the rest
of the kind of framework for getting access to these
types of records, the law is very much on our side.
So if we have those disputes to end up going
to court, if the police department is saying we don't
want to turn over these records, we have really solid
(10:13):
legal footing to go in and argue for why those
records should be made available. But to the broader point,
I do think it needs to be part of a
broader conversation around how we're structuring police accountability systems to
be more independent of the department itself. So we're looking
at what it could take to have entire agencies that
are set up with real disciplinary power that are not
(10:36):
beholden to a police department structure that would exist in
an agency like a civilian review board, that would exist
somewhere else, so that we're mitigating the risk of putting
all of this information being kept in the hands of
people who have a real clear interest in not making
that information public. And that's true of disciplinary records. It's
one of our concerns with things like body camera footage,
(10:57):
like if you want to have officers wearing body cameras
and recording interactions to improve transparency, then you should have
someone who's not the police department be the one who
decides on when those records are being published and released.
It's as true for disciplinary records as it is for
body cameras and any other kind of tool meant to
improve transparency. You can't rely on the police themselves to
(11:19):
be transparent when they've been fighting against those basic measures
for as long as they have. Who are the people
in the legislature that helped bring about the repeal off
on the legislative side who took the lead on this
were members of the state, Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and
Asian Legislative Caucus, the b p h A. These are
legislators of color who have been really at the forefront
(11:42):
of criminal justice reform, police reform, and really helped make
sure that this legislation moved through the legislative process in
as strong reform as it did. But I would say
the real heroes of this movement, the people who ensured
that this repeal moved forward. We're are a lot of
the families of people who had lost loved ones to
(12:03):
police violence. The mother of Eric Garner, the mother of
Marley Graham. These were some of the champions who from
their own personal experiences, had been fighting for years to
get some basic measure of transparency and accountability from police departments,
and always saw fifty A as one of the main
obstacles being used to not even give them any measure
(12:26):
of closure knowing whether or not the police department had
thoroughly investigated these cases. And they led the charge on
this issue and on so many of the other issues
that the state legislature ended up passing last year in
the wake of the George Floyd protests. What about Cuoma
was he in favor of repealing so he hadn't taken
much of a position on it until we saw the
(12:47):
George Floyd protests really pick up momentum, and we saw
the instances of really horrific police violence directed against protesters.
But as as those protests were unfolding, we heard a
call from the Governor's office to say, the legislature needs
to pass something. They need to fix the statute. And
you know, in that maybe week two weeks of kind
(13:09):
of frantic negotiations putting together a police reform package, this
became the centerpiece of it. Michael Sisitski is a lawyer
at the New York Civil Liberties Union. If you like
conversations with people who are exploring ways to save America's
great cities, they would go to our archives and listen
(13:31):
to my conversation with Tom Wright from New York City's
Regional Plan Association. Right joined Corey Johnson and the Code
Alimas pre Pandemic to talk about ways to cut unnecessary
costs related to the subway. The entire system is broken
from front to end. The procurement process in New York
(13:53):
State is so ridiculous that contractors will be hired to
build a piece of the Second Avenue subway. They will
know that it's going to change, but it's going to
take a year for the procurement process to effectuate that change.
So they build something knowing that at the end of
it they're going to be told to rip it up
and rebuild it again under some new way. But they
(14:15):
have to do it and the contractors if they don't
do is happening Here my conversation with Tom Wright, Corey Johnson,
and Nicole Julinas at Here's the Thing dot org after
the Break, Michael Sisitski and I discuss whether the calls
to defund the police will help keep communities, especially communities
(14:38):
of color safe. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to
Here's the Thing. Activists around the country have been calling
(14:59):
for defund the police. As a result, more than twenty cities,
including Austin, Minneapolis, and Seattle, have made efforts to reduce
their police budgets and increase funds for social services. However,
Michael Sasitski says that's not really working anywhere yet. I
can say some of the places that you noted are
(15:20):
places that have made bigger strides than say New York,
and the kind of defunding that we've seen in those
departments there is a shift away from over reliance on
police as kind of the default solution to every societal ill.
But it's all very much a work in progress, and
I think part of what we're grappling with as we're
(15:42):
trying to identify, you know, how do you shift police
out of homeless outreach, out of mental health responses, out
of their kind of ever present presence in schools is
you know, we are not able to point to a
real model of the place that has done everything right,
but there are individual pieces that we're trying to replicate
(16:02):
and build on. And you know, you look outside the
US and you see that there are entire countries that
have fewer instances of police killings of members of the
public in an entire year than a police department here
would get through in the course of a week. And
you look at how they've structured these departments to have
less of a focus on officers playing the role of
(16:24):
kind of warriors against communities, of this war on crime
mentality where officers are heavily armed, they're given surplus military equipment,
And it's this idea that in most places of the
US police are so heavily militarized, and they incorporate that
militarization framework into every aspect of their work. You know,
(16:45):
one thing that always strikes me about this issue in
New York especially is this notion that, you know, the
President of the United States, the only individual who was
elected to office by all of the people in this country,
is the commander in chief of the military. We have
civilian control of the military, and I'm wondering if the
same thing applies to the City of New York, where
(17:07):
we have civilian control of the police department. Why does
someone like the Blasio and de Blasio, of course, has
a very troubled relationship with the police department, I mean,
turning their back on him at funerals and stuff, whether
in there. These are the things that they do on
the record, And I don't know why it is the
police have been allowed to achieve this kind of supra
(17:30):
regulatory status within the government of the City of New York.
There's a laws and regulations that apply to the fire
Department and to the Sanitation Department into other city services,
and none of that applied. The police are like the Kremlin.
It's it's its own fiefdom inside the city. Would you
agree with that, I would agree. I mean, in theory,
the Police Commissioner is an agency official of just like
(17:52):
any other executive agency in New York City in theory,
accountable to the mayor. In practice, what we've seen is
deference given to this agency unlike the difference shown to
any other New York City entity of government. The NYPD
has kind of unique among city agencies, basically been given
(18:13):
the authority to exercise a veto over city Council legislation
and other forms of oversight. You know, I think back
to one of the first campaigns that I worked on
at the end my c l U when I started
back in was this package of bills called the Right
to No Act, which were really basic measures in the
city Council. They were requirements that officers identify themselves, give
(18:37):
out business cards and encounters, let people know like what
the reasons are for stops, and to let people know
when they're being asked to consent to searches. Really basic stuff,
not actually changing anything fundamental about what officers can or
can't do, but being more transparent in interactions, which you know,
in theory could help improve police community relationship because you're
(19:00):
actually getting to know who these officers are. You're understanding
what these encounters entail. I wonder how frustrating it is
for the incoming chief of the New York City Police
Department to realize that the head of the union has
more power than you do, that the head of the union,
the police union, is that one really calling the shots.
What do you think the Blasio did or did not
(19:21):
do during his term? He's almost done with his second term.
What did you think he did or did not do
to help manage the police or did he not even
bother to try to manage the police? Yeah? I think
there was maybe an opening where this is someone who
ran on a platform about ending the tail of two
cities in New York, on reigning in unconstitutional stops, on
(19:45):
having a police department that would take a fundamentally different
approach than what we saw under Giuliani and Bloomberg. And
maybe that was the intention for a while, but it
didn't last long. If that ever was the case. The
point at which officers turned their backs on the mayor
at that funeral seemed to be the moment where this
administration gave up on trying to get control of the
(20:07):
police department and We saw from that point forward efforts
to block the City Council from passing really basic police
transparency measures. We saw the administration basically object to any
attempt at legislative oversight of the department, and we saw
the administration take its new interpretation of fifty A to
start blocking and withholding more records of police accountability. This
(20:30):
is a mayor who, as his first police commissioner, brought
in the architect of broken windows policing from the Giuliani
era and has stayed committed to that approach, which just
proportionately leads to more police contact and criminalization of poor
people in communities of color, and has never really diverged
from that track. So, you know, there's not been really
(20:53):
much of a solid effort from the administration that we've
seen here in New York City to actually fundamentally transformed policing.
A lot of it ended up being more of the same.
I want to get back to something, which is I'm
not one of these liberal Democrats who thinks that Obama
is the lyricist for all of our anthems here in
the world. But at the same time Obama and I
(21:15):
agree with him that the phrase defund the police's bad
optics for this idea of reform. Do you think to
fund the police is the best wording for that movement?
I think defund is important as a message, and I
get that there are concerns about the optics, concerns about
how it lands when you're trying to convey what it means.
(21:35):
But I think the focus on defunding the police is
critical because it keeps the focus on the fact that
police departments have dramatically expanded their budgets, their functions as
other agencies that are better equipped to handle things like
public health, education, housing. As all of those agencies have
(21:58):
been defunded, we have been in consciously putting that money
into police departments, expanding their scope, expanding their powers. And
that is at the root of a lot of these problems,
is how much we're over investing in police. But you
and I get it, But so many Americans, have you
defund the polices, You're going to abolish the police? Have
(22:18):
you found that to be true. I've certainly heard that,
and I think you know it's a complicated call, and
it's one that does merit really in depth discussion public education,
and that's on advocates to do the hard work of
explaining what defund means and why it makes sense, why
it's going to lead to the types of improvements we
(22:40):
want to see in other areas and other services. So
I don't disagree that it is complicated, that it takes
a lot to move the public needle on this, but
it is. You know, we talk about defunding the police
because of the active harm that police are causing and
inflicting on communities because they have been given such outsize power,
outsize reese forces, and gets to a point where a
(23:02):
lot of the calls that come back to reform or
fixed or all of these things, they've been kind of
the call for years, and we've seen that they haven't
produced the types of change that are really needed to
protect communities from the worst excesses of police violence. Some
of the reforms that have long been called changes to
things like use of force policies. You know, if we
(23:23):
just better document force, if we better regulate tactics like
chokeholds and banned chokeholds, that we're going to see a
reduction in their use and against communities. But that hasn't
borne out. Now. Let me ask you this, in the
work you do do you cast an eye at other
countries and other areas of the world and who's getting
(23:45):
it right in terms of their policing. So we haven't
done a kind of in depth or I haven't done
at least an in depth review of how other countries
structure their police departments. But you know what does kind
of jump out is the fact that most places outside
the US don't have as heavily armed and militarized police forces.
They're not sending in someone who's training is to think
(24:08):
of themselves as basically a soldier going in to get
control over a neighborhood or population. You know, you're not
seeing the level of shootings, the level of force used
against communities because you're not you know, you're not arming
the cops in these other places as if they are
actually part of a military force. Sometimes I only have
(24:30):
cliches and my fingertips here. But the idea that you know,
when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail may
apply to that whole idea of the para militarization of
the police. But do you believe there are cops out
there who they want to see those reforms too. I'm
sure like there are a lot of people who go
into their profession thinking that, you know, they can make
(24:51):
a positive difference, that they want to see many of
the reforms that are called for. But the problems, you know,
are less a about individual officers are though, there are
problems who have individual officers, but it's more about the
systems that are in place that block that type of
movement from happening. You know, you hear a lot about
(25:12):
the blue Wall of silence. There are these disincentives and
retaliation against officers that point out when the system is
not working the way that it supposedly should. What role
do you think racism plays in the maintenance of police
practices that we have today. I think it's inescapable. Racism,
(25:34):
if you look back at the history of policing in
this country, has been at the core. Policing in the
US traces its origins back to slave patrols, groups of
white citizens that came together to control disorder in communities,
and that disorder was to crack down on black people
(25:56):
who were kept as slaves and to capt runaway slaves.
And from those slave patrol origins you started to see
the template for how many of the country's early police
forces developed policing following the Civil War was largely focused
on enforcing Jim Crow restrictions. You see the role that
(26:17):
police departments have played in suppressing labor movements, suppressing the
civil rights movement, in enforcing segregation. It's largely been a
core function of police departments as part of this idea
of maintaining order and control, that they are there to
maintain order and control on behalf of white people and
(26:38):
targeting black and brown people. Do you think it's necessary
for something as sensitive as the police department to reflect
the color of the community. I think the what we've
seen is a pattern of police departments not reflecting the
makeup of their communities, and I think it's important that
they make strides to better reflect the communities they come from,
(26:59):
the communities they patrol. I don't think it's anywhere near enough.
It's good to have diversity, diversity itself cannot be the
end goal if you're not changing the underlying purpose and
mission of the department. And what we've seen is as
the rank and file has gotten more diverse in the NYPD,
you're still not seeing much in terms of senior leadership
of the departments concern the people calling the shots setting
(27:22):
the policy people in charge. Yeah, the people in charge
are not actually reflective of most New Yorkers. I'm always
mystified as to not that we need quotas, but I'm
always mystified about the optics of that that the population
of New York is a plurality of people of color,
at the police department looks pretty whitey white, white at
the top. To me, the city is a mess. The
(27:46):
city is on the precipice of this horrible reckoning in
terms of its finances, and and I'm assuming just logically
that's gonna have a tremendous impact on the tech space
of the city right when they need money most. The
city is in a free fall economically right now. What
do you think the impact of that is going to
be on police reform? Because crime is going up. So
(28:10):
I think it's it's central to the discussions around what
to do with the city's budget with the state budget.
And we saw the first part of these conversations around
how to handle the fallout of the pandemic in city
budgeting last year, when the kind of center piece of
the debate around New York City's budget was what to
do with the NYPD which there were calls last year
(28:33):
to defund the NYPD by one billion dollars, which incidentally
is about the amount by which the NYPD's budget has
expanded since de Blasio took office. So still returning to
some realistic level. So do Blasio, who was elected in
two thoust and you're saying that during de Blasio's term,
the budget of the police department is going to one
(28:54):
billion dollars, That's right. The expense budget when he took
office was around five billion dollar dollars and it got
up to six billion dollars when we were having this
conversation last year. Why there was more hiring of thousands
of officers added to the police force. There is really
hard to grasp like number because so much of it
was kept secret of new surveillance technologies and equipment that
(29:18):
the NYPD was acquiring, new units that were put together.
You know, we saw the NYPD has touted their Strategic
Response Group, which is a new unit that was created
under the Blasio that brought in really expensive and alarming
to look at military equipment and gear. These are the
counter terrorism officers who incidentally are also tasked with policing
(29:39):
protest because for some reason the NYPD has decided that
First Amendment protected protest is similar enough to counter terrorism
responsibilities that they're going to put the same militarized officers
out of the force. But we saw this investment of
resources into the police department in terms of their budgeting,
and we saw this real dramatic expansion of just how
(30:02):
much funds we're going into the department. So the call
last year was to say, you know, as a starting point,
we need to look at how this rapid growth of
spending on the police department can be reset a bit
and take some of that billion dollars that was called
foreign savings, put it into things like the Department of Health,
which was struggling, the Department of Homeless Services, which was struggling.
(30:25):
You know, you look at the NYPD's budget and it
is more than the budget for the Departments of Health,
Homeless Services, Housing Preservation, Youth, community Development, and workforce development combined.
So the needs that are facing New Yorkers as we're
trying to, you know, look towards recovering from this pandemic,
are in those areas. That's where the most critical daily
(30:47):
needs of New Yorkers are not being met. So I
think we'll be having this conversation again heading into city
budget season this summer. I don't think the calls for
divesting from the NYPD budget and reinvesting in these other
agencies is going to go away anytime soon. I would say,
state level, a lot of the conversation now around what
happens with things like can we add state revenue with
(31:08):
marijuana legalization, for example, And it's certainly something that we're
advocating for, but with a very kind of specific purpose,
which is the legislation that's been around in Albany for
a while, the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act. It takes
a historical look at how policing has impacted communities of color,
devastated communities of color as part of the War on drugs,
(31:30):
and says that for the revenue that we're now going
to be generating from this industry that just yesterday we
were locking you up for, we're actually going to take
half of it and reinvested in these communities, which I think,
you know, is one really critical way to repair harm done,
but it's also critical to COVID recovery because many of
the same communities that were devastated by marijuana police saying,
(31:54):
are the same communities that have been hardest hit by
the pandemic. Now you have been You've commented occasionally about
surveillance equipment. Give us some examples, if you will. What
are some of the developments in terms of the police
use of surveillance equipment that trouble you the most. So,
the most troubling thing for years was the fact that
(32:14):
we just didn't know what tools and technologies the police
department had acquired and was deploying against New Yorkers. The
NYPD would always fight requests for information on contracting, on
what tools they were buying, on what their capabilities were.
So last summer that started to change when the New
York City Council passed what's called the Post Act Public
(32:37):
Oversight of Surveillance Technology, And now we're starting to see
some basic transparency and reporting on just what the NYPD
surveillance infrastructure looks like. So if you look at the
NYPD's website, there's now thirty six different policies that are
listed that talk about what kind of surveillance capabilities they have.
There's a lot of lies and misrepresentations in those policies,
but it's the starting point and we've seen that the
(33:00):
n y p D has purchased an unknown number of
mobile X ray bands, for instance, which were developed as
military tools for deployment in active war zones, and they
would use it in New York for what They don't
really say. Their policy is that we may be able
to use it in counter terrorism purposes to look for explosives,
(33:21):
but there's not a lot of data on what that
translates to in practice. We also don't know how many
of them there are. We do know that they're very expensive.
Just one unit, it's about eight hundred thousand dollars. So
that's one technology that we've learned about through litigation. Through
recent disclosures, we know that the NYPD has space recognition,
(33:41):
which is hugely problematic. What troubles you about that so
based recognition. The way that it's worked in practice is
that it's reasonably effective at identifying white men and not
so great at producing positive matches on anyone else who's
subject to the technology. Why is that? Largely because the
(34:02):
technologies are developed by largely overrepresented groups of white men,
they're just not effective. They're not really trained to work
well when looking at other skin tones. What we see
the NYPD use this technology for it's some really questionable
practices where they've had a policy that allows them to
manipulate photos before they even run it against their databases.
(34:25):
You know, one thing that came out and reporting from
Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology was they uncovered that
the nyp D was uploading celebrity lookalike images if they
didn't have the best quality picture of the suspect that
they were trying to identify. They would say, and this
is a real example, well that guy kind of looks
like Woody Harrelson, So let's run a picture of Woody
Harrelson's face into our database and see who that might
(34:48):
produce as a potential match. They would manipulate faces. They
would edit someone's face, if someone was viewed in profile,
they would try to recreate like a full image of
that person's face. We'll gonna have a Meryl Race coming
up in the completely exhausted and innervated New York City.
Do you have any hopes that anybody who's assumed to
(35:10):
be running from there that resetting the police. I'm gonna
coin that phase now that resetting the police is on
their menu. I think it's been an issue that's come
up in a number of the candidates platforms. I've seen
some discussion of to use your term resetting, to use
my term defunding that have come up in some of
the candidate forums that have come up on their platforms.
(35:31):
But I think it's something where I don't know that
we'll see what fully needs to be done from my perspective,
to fundamentally change the way that the NYPD operates. I'm
not discounting the possibility, but I think a lot of
it will depend on whether New Yorkers maintain the current
energy and momentum that we started to see building from
(35:53):
the George Floyd protest last year when Albany repealed fifty.
When they passed the police reform bills that were part
of that package, these were measures that had existed for years,
they had been installed, there was no real legislative sense
of urgency to move them. Then you saw New Yorkers
by the thousands turnout protests demand that some action finally
be taken, and it's led to real sustained conversations beyond
(36:16):
that about what other kind of shifts we want to
make in the role, the powers, the scope of law enforcement.
And I think if that momentum is able to be maintained,
if that is carried forward into the next election cycle
and the one after that, you know we're going to
see continued calls for elected officials, for mayors, for city
council members, and for police departments to take a different approach.
(36:39):
But it really is going to be dependent on New
Yorkers elevating those demands and making the call to reset,
defund policing a continuous call. What do you say with
the work you do, which is to expose the wrongdoings
and to reform the system. I don't like that phrase
good cops, but what does the warrior from the a
(37:01):
c l U on behalf of police transparency? What message
do you have, if any, to the good cops out there.
I think the message is, we have, as you said,
often antagonistic relationships because it's our job to make sure
that the systems that are put in place by our
government are actually serving the people and benefiting the people.
(37:22):
And it's often not about attacks on individual cops, although
there are some individual cops who deserve as much scrutiny
as they as they can get. But this is about
making sure that the work that we do is to
hold government accountable to the ideals that they purport to follow.
And that's what it is. At the end of the day.
(37:43):
We have these systems, we are told because they are
meant to protect the public. They are meant to ensure
people's well being in safety. And if they're not doing that,
if they're not serving that purpose, it's our job to
call them out. Michael Sasitski as a lawyer of the
New York Civil Liberties Union. His work is focused on
(38:06):
police reform. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend
and be sure to follow Here's the thing on the
I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. When we come back, I'll check in with
Catherine Wilde, CEO and president of the Partnership for New
York City about the city's post pandemic future. I'm Alec Baldwin,
(38:39):
and this is here's the thing. In the early months
of the pandemic, New York City seemed to be on
the ropes. Storefronts and restaurants were closed, Broadway was dark,
unemployment claims skyrocketed. Now a year later, things look very different,
as New York City is slowly coming back to life,
how wanted to follow up with Katherine Wilde, CEO and
(39:03):
President of the Partnership for New York City. She's in
close contact with the heads of the city's biggest corporations
and as such she has an informed outlook on the
city's finances. Things are substantially better than people thought it
would be. A year ago in we had a gross
city economic output of eight hundred and nine billion dollars.
(39:28):
That is only shrunk by three point four percent during
the pandemic, which is far less than anybody thought was
going to happen. And that's for basically three reasons. Number One,
Wall Street and much of our office industry was able
to immediately transfer to remote operation actually improve their profitability
(39:53):
and productivity in the process. Number Two, we got tremendous
a from the federal government starting with the first stimulus,
and so that while in March and April last year,
consumer spending dropped dramatically. Today, while we're still in pandemic mode,
(40:13):
consumer spending is back up to normal levels. It's e
commerce spending more than ever, but that's kept the economy going.
And finally, we were well positioned for the digital economy
takeover our key growth sector has been in technology and
(40:34):
in the technology side of financial services and media. All
these industries that use technology have been our growth area
and represent most of our economy. So we've had all
those things going for us and going well. What we
lost was our brick and mortar economy, retail, travel, and tourism.
(40:59):
Direct service is small business that represents of our jobs,
but it's only nine of our economy. So the losses
there were severe and tended to focus on low wage
workers and small business. They were severe, but they did
(41:20):
not take down the whole economy, and our tax roles
kept growing, and every day were more surprised by state
and city government not being in a fiscal crisis. Everybody
was predicting, we're gonna have a fiscal crisis. We've got
a problem, We've got to raise taxes. We have no
fiscal crisis. Between the federal aid to the state and
the city over a hundred billion dollars, thank you, Senator Schumer,
(41:43):
and the macro economy that has kept going throughout the pandemic,
we do not have a fiscal crisis, and we had
no need to raise taxes, even though two weeks ago
Albany raised taxes for the people that were put out
of a job. I don't want to say time bomb,
but of their loom being problems for us in terms
of how to deal with those people in their loss
of income. I don't think time bomb is inappropriate because
(42:06):
what happened is the COVID accelerated what we knew was happening.
You know, work of the future going to robots replacing people,
et cetera. The COVID accelerated that by maybe as much
as two decades. So we find ourselves in a situation
we knew was coming in the distant future has come
within the last thirteen months. So we have a crisis
(42:27):
of six hundred and forty two thousand job losses. Those
are New Yorkers who are probably not prepared for the
jobs that are available. Ironically, in March, we had postings
of three hundred and sixteen thousand open jobs, but we
don't have the people to fill those jobs because of
(42:48):
this skills gap that we've been talking about for years,
but we've done nothing at scale to deal with. What
should we do about the skills gap? Well, I think
number one, I think employers have a big opportunity to
step up and they are beginning to do that with
a number of programs. JP Morgan has started a program.
There's other companies that are participating in starting programs to
(43:11):
one revisit jobs. You know, New York got spoiled. They
could hire an Ivy League b A for a job
that could be done by somebody with a community college degree,
especially in technology areas, and we haven't focused on making
those marriages with the City University and with others that
(43:31):
are producing people who could fill those jobs. Got to
change the criteria, and we've got to go to Albany
and get the state Education Department to change their classification
so that people can be credentialed in these jobs as
your organization lobbying for them. Absolutely, yes, we are working
on that and we have been for a couple of years,
and hopefully things are going to speed up now. So
(43:53):
this is a fixable problem. The other piece of this
problem is our immigration policy. Immigration has been cut off
in recent years, especially in one H one B s
and education scholarships and the ability for people to come
here and study, so we have lost a lot of
the talent pool that was filling those jobs. So it's
(44:15):
a combination of reforming our immigration policies at the federal
level and at the local level really going in there. Unfortunately,
there is a lot of education funding in the stimulus
package that the federal government has put out. Let's invest
in that education, and let's do it in partnership with employers.
This should not be Ivory Tower, get your bachelor's degree.
(44:37):
This should be get a job. Right. A friend of mine,
he's got two floors, two fifty employees on Park Avenue
and that Gold Coast. They're hovering around the fifties and
sixtie Street. They said, half of them home and then
up bringing them back, he told me, And he said
they're going to downsize their lease to half. Now I've
been told that the residential real estate market is bottoming out.
(45:01):
Its starting to come up again, because as as people
have said, in a kind of folkloric way, they've said, well,
you know, New York, no one can pay for one
bedroom apartment in a nice part of Brooklyn and Manhattan
or anywhere for that matter. And then the rents come
down below, some come down below two thousand and a
whole other crop of people that couldn't afford to live
(45:21):
in your they're coming absolutely, and that is the silver lining.
I talked to a similar Park Avenue guy last week
who told me he just bought two Upper east Side
apartments for his kids at fifty percent off what they
cost a year and a half ago, so he was
thrilled with the bargain. It's a long term investment, so
it's not for speculative resale. But I think, yes, this
(45:44):
has happened. Remember in the seventy of course, where everybody
got all those fancy Central Park views for a song.
New York is affordable to a new crop of people
now who are going to come, which solves a big
problem looking for jobs. Looking for jobs, absolutely, but it's
it solves the problem of gentrification, fear of displacement, and
(46:05):
if construction costs can come down. You know, it's been
a seller's market in the office market for years. They
now have a sixteen percent vacancy rate in Manhattan. That's
a good thing as far as businesses. Absolutely. People tell
me that the commercial real estate market that's in the
retail market that's still struggling, very weak, very weak. And
(46:27):
we've got another time bomb coming, which is May first.
The moratorium on evictions of small business in New York
ends and that's the point where thirteen fourteen months of
rent could come due for those small businesses and in
many cases small landlords of small businesses in neighborhoods throughout
(46:48):
the city, not just Manhattan, who have not had the
wherewithal to pay the rent. And that's particularly true, unfortunately,
as with much of the COVID, particularly impactful to black
and Hispanic, low income immigrant communities, where you've got small
building owners, you've got small businesses that weren't ready to
(47:10):
go online, didn't have a website, didn't have the capacity
to meet the demands of the COVID. So this is
going to be a serious problem. And this is where
those job losses really are going to become long term problems.
The federal aid will not last long enough. We have
to fix this through education and through upgrading the technology
(47:31):
and the skills of those small business owners. Now you
hear a constant, metronomic call to tax their bitch, tax
their bitch. And I believe that this is an opinion.
I'm under an economist, but in my opinion, there should
be minimum taxes that everybody pays. If I say to
you that you're in a fifty percent bracket and So therefore,
(47:52):
on an income of a million dollars, you oh half
a million dollars in taxes, and I can say to you,
you can knock it down by giving away to order
in fifty dollars to charity, but nothing below that, meaning
you must pay a minimum amount of tax. What do
you think has to happen in the city and in
the state in terms of tax policy, Well, two weeks
ago the state has made us the highest tax state
(48:16):
in the nation without looking at the equity arguments. Before
the pandemic, fifty six percent of the people in the
top bracket in New York State were non residents of
the state. Comes the COVID. Suddenly people are working remotely
from Palm Beach or Miami or Austin or wherever, and
(48:41):
suddenly that talent is telling their companies, we want you
to move our job to where we are because the
tax burden. If Biden's proposed tax increases on the wealthy
also go through, which they probably will to pay for
the next infrastructure bill. If those go through, then you're
going to have a situation where New York professionals at
(49:04):
the high end earning more than a million dollars a
year are going to have a tax burden of about
six of their income going in federal, state and city taxes.
And that is a kind of breaking point when you
found out that you can do your work from a
state where your taxes like Florida, will be your income,
so you keep more than you would both under Trump
(49:28):
and of course I one thousand percent view this that
he did this to kill major cities in blue states.
The deductibility on your federal income taxes if your state
and local Texas was disallowed. Is that going to come back?
Does your organization wanted to come back? Our organization is
split because it's tied to the corporate taxes. I would
(49:49):
say the vast majority of our members of the business
community of New York fields this was a discriminatory hit
at New York. It was designed to disadvantage our economy,
to create incentives to move to Florida and to Texas
and to other red states states with no income tax,
with no income tax. So absolutely, it is a hit
(50:10):
at New York and it is devastating. And we made
that argument in Albany to no avail. The feeling of
the politicians was that rich people will never leave New
York you really have to tread carefully because yes, they
will leave. I mean, I'm telling you right now. You
say a lot of people are going to leave, people
start to notice, and every tax accountant, every tax lawyer,
(50:34):
every private wealth advisor that I speak to tells me
that their business in people working on relocating their residents
for tax purposes has dramatically increased since the COVID. So
this is again another ticking time bomb. We're not going
to see it this year. We've got good tax revenues
(50:58):
coming in this year, but over the next couple of years,
as they're able to make those arrangements and people can
if their company opens an office in Florida and you're
working out of that office, you're no longer paying New
York City income Texas. Right. So, for example, if you've
left New York and you're in Connecticut or you're in
(51:19):
New Jersey and the office that you're working through is
in New York City, you're an employee of a New
York City company, and the moment that company opens an
office into the remote area you're in, you're out. Now
you're working for a Florida company. Correct, Bingo, That's exactly
the problem. That's what I said before. Fifty six percent
(51:39):
of the current highest taxpayers are already non residents in Connecticut,
in New Jersey, wherever, but their company resisted investing and
opening an office where they are Now the pressure from
the talent is so strong. A guy was telling me
last week, I've got four partners us in Florida. I've
(52:02):
ignored them for years. I haven't opened an office there.
And then a new recruit that's a superstar came along
and said, I will not pay New York taxes. You
have to open an office in Florida. And he said,
what am I gonna do? April one, I opened an
office in Florida. Well, listen. Thank you for doing this
with us anytime, anytime. Thank you. Catherine Wild, CEO and
(52:27):
President of the Partnership for New York City. My thanks
to her and Michael Cisitski. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the
thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio. We're produced
by Kathleen Russo, Carrie donohue, and Zach McNeice. Our engineer
is Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening. Don't make n
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.