The John Gore Organization & Scarlett Johansson's Our Town Benefit Raises $500,000 for Hurricane Maria Community Relief Fund
The event played to a full house and a very enthusiastic crowd. With more than 3,500 tickets sold, it was one of the largest audiences the play has ever been presented to in one night. Johansson...
The event played to a full house and a very enthusiastic crowd. With more than 3,500 tickets sold, it was one of the largest audiences the play has ever been presented to in one night. Johansson was joined on stage for opening remarks by director Leon and Xiomara Caro, Director of New Organizing Projects for the Center of Popular Democracy and coordinator for The Maria Fund, sharing an inspiring message about the purpose of the event and the relief effort. They brought the crowd to their feet when they revealed that the evening’s efforts resulted in half of a million dollars raised to help Puerto Rico in their hour of need.
Read the full article here.
How Lisa Murkowski Mastered Trump’s Washington
How Lisa Murkowski Mastered Trump’s Washington
When details of the Senate tax bill started to emerge in the fall, it became clear that many Republicans hoped the ultimate bill would contain a provision that opened up a portion of ANWR for...
When details of the Senate tax bill started to emerge in the fall, it became clear that many Republicans hoped the ultimate bill would contain a provision that opened up a portion of ANWR for drilling, as well as language that would eliminate the individual mandate for health insurance, which most economists argue would gut the Affordable Care Act. Nonprofit organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy tried to rally grass-roots activists in Anchorage and raised money to fly a handful of Alaskans to Washington to show up at Murkowski's office. ''I thought she would realize she could not maintain her political success, and her popularity, if she was to repeal any part of Obamacare,'' says Jennifer Flynn Walker, the director of mobilization for the organization.
Read the full article here.
Community activists and others file legal opposition to NYPD body cam policy
Community activists and others file legal opposition to NYPD body cam policy
The New York Police Department’s body camera program launched this week, but not without a fight from activists.
Last week, Communities United for Police Reform and other community groups...
The New York Police Department’s body camera program launched this week, but not without a fight from activists.
Last week, Communities United for Police Reform and other community groups filed a legal opposition to the NYPD’s then-proposed policy. Submitted to Judge Analisa Torres, they wanted to halt the program’s rollout. The community groups, along with entities like The Center for Constitutional Rights, believe the language of the program renders the concept of body cameras for cops meaningless.
Read the full article here.
Fed comes up short on diversity goal, Democrats say
Fed comes up short on diversity goal, Democrats say
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. central bank remains a bastion of white privilege and Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen should promptly take steps to “remedy” the issue, 115 Congressional Democrats...
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. central bank remains a bastion of white privilege and Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen should promptly take steps to “remedy” the issue, 115 Congressional Democrats said Thursday.
In a letter to Yellen, the House and Senate Democrats urged her to “fulfill its statutory and moral obligation to ensure that is leadership reflects the composition of our diverse nation” and include representatives outside of the banking industry. Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and a presidential candidate, also signed the letter.
The letter noted that Congress in 1977 passed a law mandating more diversity at the Fed.
“Nearly 40 years later, the leadership across the Federal Reserve system remains overwhelmingly and disproportionately white and male, while major financial institutions and corporations are overrepresented in senior roles,” the letter said.
Leading Democrats including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan signed the letter. Rep. Maxine Waters, the ranking member on the House Financial Services panel, was also a signatory.
At the moment, 11 of the 12 Fed regional presidents are white and ten are men.The five members of the Fed board of governors are all white, while two are women.
“Is the Fed Board of Governors embarks on its search for regional president vacancies, we urge you to engage in an inclusive process to consider candidates from a diverse set of background, including a greater number of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian Pacific Americans, women and individuals from labor, consumer, and community organizations,” the letter said.
In response, a Fed spokesperson said the central bank has “focused considerable attention in recent years” on recruiting directors of regional Fed banks with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
As a result, minority representation at the 12 district banks and their branches has increased to 24% this year from 16% in 2010, the spokesperson said.
By Greg Robb
Source
Capital Pressroom - April 24, 2014: Scaffold Law
WCNY - April 24, 2014, by Alyssa Plock - AUDIO CLIP. We discuss the Scaffold Law with two people who hold opposing views on the issue: Dr. Michael...
WCNY - April 24, 2014, by Alyssa Plock - AUDIO CLIP. We discuss the Scaffold Law with two people who hold opposing views on the issue: Dr. Michael Hattery, director of local government studies at the Rockefeller Institute, and Connie M. Razza, director of strategic research at the Center for Popular Democracy.
Listen to the discussion here.
Homestretch: The fight to raise Colorado’s minimum wage
Homestretch: The fight to raise Colorado’s minimum wage
Homestretch: The fight to raise Colorado’s minimum wage
Voters at polling centers across Colorado will soon be deciding on Amendment 70, a measure that would alter the state constitution to...
Homestretch: The fight to raise Colorado’s minimum wage
Voters at polling centers across Colorado will soon be deciding on Amendment 70, a measure that would alter the state constitution to increase the minimum wage from the current $8.31 per hour by yearly 90-cent increments to $12 in 2020. In 2020, it will be fixed at $12, except for yearly adjustments to account for inflation. Amendment 70 would further mandate that those inflation-tied adjustments only apply when they mean an increase in wages. In the past, when inflation was negative, minimum wage workers saw a pay cut.
Who’s behind it?
Supporters of the increase coalesced in mid-2016 into a group called Colorado Families for a Fair Wage, a coalition of unions, economic justice advocates and progressive policy analysts. Many of them had been part of an informal consortium of anti-poverty groups called The Everyone Economy that came together to strategize about raising the minimum wage back in February 2014. Partnering with Democratic legislators, they advocated for a pair of bills in the 2015 legislative session to help low-wage workers. One would have allowed municipalities to set their own minimums, and the other would have created a ballot measure to reach a $12.50 per hour minimum by 2020. Republicans killed both bills in the Senate.
Democrats floated another bill in 2016 to allow cities to set their own minimum wages, which met the same fate as its predecessors. After that, Everyone Economy members decided they had no recourse but to pursue a ballot measure themselves and formed Colorado Families for a Fair Wage.
Why $12 per hour and not $15?
The amendment’s proponents faced criticism for their decision to pursue $12 instead of $15 per hour in this week’s Westword cover story. According to the story, some former members of the coalition’s steering committee expressed deep dissatisfaction with its decision to pursue a $12 wage, arguing that, in doing so, the coalition shut out those whose voices were most pertinent to the effort — namely, dues-paying union members. They further take issue with the coalition’s failure to conduct focus groups composed of African-American working people, the demographic that would most benefit from a wage increase. CFFW spokesman Mike Kromrey now admits that was a mistake.
In its decision, the campaign relied on polling that showed that $12 per hour was more likely to pass. Campaign spokesman Timothy Markham dismissed any suggestion that the Westword story would affect the election outcome. “It might make for interesting gossip, but it doesn’t change the fundamental facts of the struggles Colorado workers are facing,” he said.
Interestingly, CFFW’s opponents on the right appropriated some of those far-left criticisms in the article and applied them to their own pitch. Keep Colorado Working, a conglomeration of chambers of commerce, industry groups and free-market business advocates that came together to oppose Amendment 70, sent a press release on Wednesday drawing attention to Westword’s report and castigating CFFW for deciding on their ballot language based on “polling, not policy impacts.”
The release does not mention the fact that those reports came from former CFFW members who wanted the minimum wage increase to be greater, not smaller, as Keep Colorado Working does.
How much firepower is against it?
Keep Colorado Working had a slower start raising funds, but has now raised $1.7 million. It has spent just under $1.4 million as of the most recent campaign finance filings, primarily on television advertising and consultants. About half of its funds ($650,000) come from the Alexandria, Virginia-based Workforce Fairness Institute. It has also gotten $525,000 from Colorado Citizens Protecting Our Constitution, a committee that has donated hefty sums to pro-fracking campaigns and to a 2013 effort to recall legislators who had passed gun-control legislation.
For its part, CCFW has outraised its rivals almost 3 to 1, raising about $5.3 million in donations, much of which is from out-of-state groups like its largest donor, the Center for Popular Democracy, which has kicked in over $1 million. Its second-largest donor is the Palo Alto-based Fairness Project, which has contributed over $960,000 to CFFW and is also supporting minimum wage ballot measures in Maine, Arizona and Washington, D.C.
Keep Colorado Working wants to make sure you know that some of CFFW’s donors are not from Colorado. Virtually all of its communications use the terms “wealthy out of state special interests” liberally.
According to the most recent campaign finance filings, CFFW has spent $4.6 million on television and digital advertising, outreach efforts like canvassing and hosting events, mailers, polling and research.
Keep Colorado Working did not respond to requests for comment in time for this story’s deadline.
Will it pass?
Early polls indicate that it will.
An August Magellan Strategies poll of 500 likely Colorado voters showed that 55 percent of respondents supported the measure, 42 percent were opposed and three percent were undecided. A September joint project between Colorado Mesa University, Rocky Mountain PBS and Franklin & Marshall College showed that 58 percent of respondents favored Amendment 70, with 36 percent opposed and seven percent undecided.
CFFW is also conducting its own internal polls and told The Independent that it is consistently getting positive results. Colorado politics expert Eric Sondermann also predicted that it will narrowly pass in a comprehensive ballot prediction for Westword.
CFFW’s case was buoyed in the fall months, starting with the release of a University of Denver study that tied Amendment 70 to a $400 million increase in state GDP. The logic is straightforward: when low-wage workers get a raise, they are very likely to spend it in their local economies, rather than filing it away. Not long after, Governor Hickenlooper endorsed the amendment, tethering worker pay raises to a boost for the overall economy.
Keep Colorado Working countered with another study, commissioned by the Common Sense Policy Roundtable, which concludes that the increase would lead to a decline in income and massive layoffs. But critics say that CSPR’s ties to groups like EIS Solutions, a PR outfit with several oil and gas clients, and Americans for Prosperity, the oil and gas giant Koch brothers’ political arm, undermine the study’s integrity.
Proponents are feeling optimistic as they buckle down for the the pre-election weekend. Andy Jacob, political director for SEIU Local 105, which is CFFW member, said that the group will spend the weekend making phone calls, knocking on doors, communicating with members and “doing everything we can to get this passed.”
If it passes, will it really be a game-changer for workers?
Whether Amendment 70 passes or fails, the work is just beginning for Colorado labor unions and low-wage worker advocates. Most CFFW members acknowledge that $12 per hour is not in fact a living wage for workers with families in some parts of Colorado. Most estimates put a living wage for a single parent of two children in Denver at around $30 per hour. But advocates also believe that the current $8.31 per hour is inexcusable, and any more than $12 is not politically viable.
There’s a sense of immediacy among CFFW members. One hears the term “right now” a lot. They would rather take a safe bet than a real gamble when so many people’s livelihoods hang in the balance.
“Do we go with something that we know is going to be tough but that we know we can win on, or do we go with 15, which the Denver area might be ready for but the state isn’t, and we lose?” SEIU’s Jacob asked.
He works with low-wage union members every day and he believes he’s doing right by them. “‘12 by 2020’ will impact half a million people in Colorado,” Jacob said. “Don’t tell those people this isn’t going to help them. It is.”
By Eliza Carter
Source
Black Unemployment Rate 2015: In Better Economy, African-Americans See Minimal Gains
International Business Times - March 8, 2014, by Aaron Morrison - Cyril Darensbourg has been unemployed for 10 years. As...
International Business Times - March 8, 2014, by Aaron Morrison - Cyril Darensbourg has been unemployed for 10 years. As shocking as he knows that sounds to those who don’t know him personally, the 48-year-old native of New Orleans had enjoyed a 15-year career managing restaurants in Chicago and New York, after taking a chance on a dream and ending his third year of studying electrical engineering in Louisiana. Years of job-application submissions and temporary work here and there has persisted for far too long. Darensbourg is one of close to 2 million African-Americans in the U.S. who are currently unemployed and looking for work.
Across the American economy, the dominant story during the past several months has been a sustained recovery that resuscitated a dormant job market and the accompanying unemployment rate that has plunged below pre-Great Recession levels. But if better days are here for many workers, this feeling is shared to a lesser degree by African-Americans, whose unemployment rate is still considered high and has long been double the rate for whites. Among black working-age people, however, the unemployment rate since February 2014 has dropped more quickly than among nonblack workers.
On the surface, that improvement should signal a triumph, but it is accompanied by an asterisk, given the fact that nonblack workers’ unemployment rates fell much earlier and faster during the recovery. Government data indicates recent job creation has been less beneficial to African-American workers when compared with whites, Asians and Hispanics: Basically, blacks had more ground to make up and their labor-force representation is skewed toward lower-wage industries in which there are higher turnover rates, one study found.
These clear-cut differences mean that for people such as Darensbourg, who have been out of work for periods of several months or several years, other factors exaggerate the length of their unemployment. Many African-Americans find it hard to dismiss completely the role that race plays in their difficulty finding work, even with federal laws making discrimination illegal. Studies have found that even when black applicants possess qualifications that are on par with white applicants, variables as simple as their names or as complex as the breadth of their professional networks can many times hold them back.
“I’ve never felt secure, in my entire adult life working,” said Darensbourg, who is now married with two kids and living with his family in a New York apartment. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 eliminated his management-level job at a restaurant located within the no-traffic zone, he was forced to look for work in other restaurants, which he said wouldn’t pay him at his previous annual salary of nearly six figures.
“I’ve been in disbelief,” said Darensbourg, a 6-foot-5-inch, 220-pound man who is often told his presence is at worst intimidating and at best unforgettable. During an interview for a job he was certain he would get, he recalled feeling his younger, white, female interviewer was put off by his size and confidence. “Over time, I didn’t know what to do,” he said of the experience.
“People in my situation are giving up. They are just adapting their lives to where they are. I’m not thinking about trying to buy a home or going on vacation. I don’t know how retirement is going to work,” Darensbourg said.
Unemployment Among Blacks Still High
In February, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 10.4 percent, while the comparable rates for whites, Hispanics and Asians were 4.7 percent, 6.6 percent and 4.0 percent, in that order, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday. The national unemployment rate was 5.5 percent last month. Last year, 23.7 percent of those who are black and unemployed had attended some college, 15.4 percent had bachelor’s degrees and 4.5 percent had advanced degrees.
A 2014 study by the Young Invincibles, a nonpartisan education and economic opportunity advocacy group, found an African-American college graduate has the same job prospects as a white high-school dropout or a white person with a prison record. The study attributed the gap to racial discrimination.
The experience of joblessness for African-Americans can have a lasting effect on their economic mobility, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal think tank in New York that released a report on black unemployment this week. It was prepared with the technical assistance of the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute in Washington. On an hourly basis during the past 15 years, black workers’ wages have fallen by 44 cents, while Hispanic and white workers’ wages have risen by 48 cents and 45 cents, respectively, according to the report. Black wealth has also shrunk, while Hispanic and white wealth has stabilized.
Since March 2010, black employment climbed by about 2.3 million jobs, a 15.0 percent increase, and the black employment-population ratio rose to 54.8 percent from 52.0 percent, according to government data. Over the same period, white employment climbed by about 3.8 million jobs, a 3.4 percent increase, and the employment-population ratio rose to 60.1 percent from 59.5 percent. Because whites had less ground to make up, the increase for blacks, while statistically significant, still wasn’t large enough to suggest that they reaped more than a modest share of the gains in the economic recovery.
Most jobs that came back during the recovery, close to 45 percent, were lower-wage jobs, such as those in the retail and service industries, according to the Center for Popular Democracy’s report. Those industries employ 1.85 million more workers today than they did at the beginning of the recession. The data indicate African-American representation is skewed toward the lower-wage end, rather than toward either the mid-wage range or higher-wage end, where fewer jobs came back.
The center said the U.S. Federal Reserve’s recovery initiative to stimulate job creation through its monetary policies has been most beneficial to workers in higher-wage industries and to workers in regions of the U.S. where those jobs exist, such as on Wall Street. Even with the apparently gloomy outlook, economists say things are improving for black job seekers. “The economic recovery is finally beginning to take hold,” said Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. “The rate of growth that we’re seeing now, this has only been happening for a year.”
Economists have stressed the Fed’s focus should be on genuine full employment. That’s been President Barack Obama’s argument for addressing joblessness among all Americans. But critics have said this approach ignores structural reasons -- lower educational attainment and higher rates of criminal convictions -- for African-American joblessness that is more prone to fluctuation than whites. “Assuming that monetary policy continues to function in a way that allows the recovery to proceed, the prospects for finding a job should improve for African-Americans,” Wilson said.
Education Can Make A Difference (Usually)
African-Americans who have achieved higher-education degrees -- a key investment leading to the middle class -- still find themselves more likely to face long-term unemployment than their white, Hispanic and Asian counterparts. According to the Center for Popular Democracy’s study, the only proven solution to this problem are those Fed programs that ideally stimulate job creation for workers of all experience and skill levels. But that still has not been robust enough to help the broadest swath of African-American workers.
Tamica Thompson said she could use preferential hiring consideration, although she didn’t believe she needed it before her long-term unemployment set in. Thompson’s difficulty in finding a job puzzles her. A 30-year-old born to Jamaican immigrants in New York, Thompson joined the U.S. Army in 2002, right after she graduated from high school. She was stationed in South Korea, and left active duty four years later to earn a bachelor’s degree in health-service management from Berkeley College in New York. She later obtained a master’s degree in public administration from Pace University in New York.
But even with those credentials and her military experience, Thompson has struggled to find a job that values her skill set. When she did interview for a promising job at a nonprofit development corporation -- for which the hiring manager told her she was the sole applicant -- she later discovered the position was given to someone else. She also worried that the formatting of her paper resume, which received a harsh critique from a job-placement counselor, was a factor in the length of her unemployment.
“I was unemployed for a good eight months until I found myself here,” Thompson said, referring to a stipend-supported internship for Operation: GoodJobs, a work-placement program run by the Goodwill Industries for Greater New York and Northern New Jersey, an initiative that helps military veterans and their families find jobs and training opportunities. The irony of her current situation is not lost on Thompson, who works to help other veterans find jobs while she scrapes by on the stipend. “Because I was not working, I was getting behind on my rent. I couldn’t do even the simple things anymore. Money was so limited for me. That caused me to be depressed, sad and angry. It’s a little better now, but I’m still struggling,” she said.
Race And Class Are Factors In Unemployment
Despite federal laws protecting women and racial minorities from discrimination by employers, several studies point to racial prejudices and favoritism as big contributors to how blacks fare in the job market. A 2004 study by the American Economic Review found job seekers with resumes that had so-called white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Names such as Jamal or Lakisha or others that are perceived as black-sounding names, received fewer callbacks. That racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry and employer size, researchers found.
Another study, conducted by the business school at Rutgers University in New Jersey, found that favoritism, or the race of the hiring manager, was a contributing factor to racial disparity in the workplace as well. The prevalence of a mind-set in the U.S. that the rich worked hard for everything they have and poor haven’t toiled enough certainly doesn’t help matters, said Sam Brooke, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that tracks racial disparity and hatred. “There’s a deep, fierce resistance to setting aside that idea,” Brooke said. “That’s an incredibly valuable part of the story that we tell about America. If you view it just through that lens, it’s hard to see how we’ll overcome” the disparities, he said.
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 made changes to a law passed in the 1960s that protected workers from intentional employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion and national origin. It also provided monetary damages in cases of proved discrimination. But few cases are won in U.S. courts, and a comparatively small proportion are resolved by settlements, according to federal data.
Darensbourg, the unemployed former restaurant manager, hasn’t considered a lawsuit against a prospective employer, even when he suspected that there was something more to its rejection of him than his qualifications. “I’m pushing my kids to do way better than I did in school,” he said. “I can’t pay for them to go to school. I don’t know how that would happen unless they got a scholarship. I tell my daughter that she is not just competing with the kids at her school; she’s competing with the whole world. I try to have them see stuff that my parents didn’t show me.”
Source
Wal-Mart Pay Raises Still Don’t Amount to Living Wage
02.19.2016
NEW YORK CITY — Wal-Mart’s wage hike to a minimum $10 per hour kicks in tomorrow, February 20, but the higher wages fall well short of a...
02.19.2016
NEW YORK CITY — Wal-Mart’s wage hike to a minimum $10 per hour kicks in tomorrow, February 20, but the higher wages fall well short of a living wage. Last year, Wal-Mart earned more than $16 billion in net income and announced plans to spend $10.3 billion on a stock buyback to increase value for wealthy shareholders. Center for Popular Democracy, a national pro-worker coalition, estimates that paying $15 an hour to its 1.2 million full-time employees would cost the company an extra $3.4 billion per year, a third of what it will spend under its share repurchase plan.
The Center for Popular Democracy has fought for a higher minimum wage for Wal-Mart workers along with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), Our Walmart, and a worker-led movement.
JoEllen Chernow, Director of CPD’s Minimum Wage campaign, released the following statement:
“Wal-Mart has announced pay raises in an attempt to reform its image as an employer that doesn’t pay workers enough to take care of their families. But it’s not raising them enough – and, the truth is, Wal-Mart can afford higher wages.
The company has a $10 billion stock buyback program and earned more than $16 billion in net income last year. That will put an additional $5.6 billion directly into the pockets of the Walton family - a family that already controls more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined. As the company’s fortunes continue to rise, they must let their workers share more of their success. Wal-Mart workers simply deserve better.”
www.populardemocracy.org
The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.
Contact:
Asya Pikovsky, apikovsky@populardemocracy.org, 207-522-2442
Anita Jain, ajain@populardemocracy.org, 347-636-9761
As Critics United, Stalled Battle Against Frisking Tactic Took Off
The New York Times - August 13, 2013, by J. David Goodman - As the Police Department performed a mounting number of stops on New York streets, voices of opposition, slow and scattershot,...
The New York Times - August 13, 2013, by J. David Goodman - As the Police Department performed a mounting number of stops on New York streets, voices of opposition, slow and scattershot, struggled to be heard.
Complaints, mostly from minority areas, never quite coalesced into a movement. Police officials and city leaders casually dismissed opponents, denying that the stops were race-based and pointing to the plummeting crime rate as justification for the tactics.
The stops continued to rise by the tens of thousands, as police officials pushed to drive crime levels even lower. And although the dialogue never changed, the slow unmaking of the stop-and-frisk strategy had quietly begun.
In a 16th-floor conference room in TriBeCa, roughly 40 different groups of researchers, lawyers and community activists gathered in June 2011 to plan a unified political attack on the policing practice to go along with the one being mounted in the federal courts.
The groups coalesced under one name, Communities United for Police Reform, fanning out into neighborhoods with heavy police activity and becoming a regular and loud presence at rallies on the steps of City Hall and outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan. The mantra: Change the Police Department.
Their efforts, backed by $2.2 million in grants from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, set the stage for a stunning repudiation of what has become the department’s signature street-level tactic, long defended by successive mayoral administrations.
In the City Council in late June and in a federal court on Monday, the Police Department suffered severe setbacks to its crime policy, and is now facing a court-ordered monitor,two police oversight bills and the possibility that its perceived legacy of a significant decline in crime may come with an asterisk.
“They redefined it successfully,” said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, crediting advocates from the Communities United for Police Reform, which includes the civil liberties group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, that brought the federal suit, Floyd v. City of New York.
“By using data we’re required to produce,” Mr. Browne said, the advocates managed to reframe the debate over the stop-and-frisk policy as a numbers-oriented calculation of how often the police interactions resulted in arrests or summonses.
In a vast majority of the recorded stops, officers cited a reason other than fitting the description of a suspect as being the basis. And in nearly 90 percent of the cases, the person stopped was neither arrested nor given a summons.
“Stop-and-frisk isn’t stopping criminals,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It is stopping innocent people.”
The battle over police stops in New York has many origins, but most see its beginnings in the killing of Amadou Diallo by a team of specialized police officers, who shot the man as he stood in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building in 1999. That violent encounter — in the course of a stop on a darkened street — led to a report by Eliot Spitzer, then the state attorney general, titled “The New York City Police Department’s ‘Stop and Frisk’ Practices.”
“Obviously the killing of Diallo was a flash point,” said Andrew G. Celli Jr., who as the head of the civil rights bureau under Mr. Spitzer worked on the report. “But underneath it was a seething sense that people were living in a police state.”
The report shined a light on an area of policing that remained largely cloaked during the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a time when data about police stops were not public, and advocates sparred more often with the department over individual actions by officers than over broad policy.
Once it became clear that the department collected detailed data on stops — from the UF-250 forms filled out by officers for each interaction — a push began for more access. The Council passed a law in 2001 requiring the department to release data on stops, including by race.
“I don’t think anybody understood at the time how important that legislation was,” said Ms. Lieberman, of the civil liberties union. “But this is a classic example of how a fight over transparency supports a campaign for reform.”
The first release of data, for stops in 2002, showed that a little more than 50 percent of the stops were of blacks and about 31 percent were of Hispanics, roughly the same as during the period studied in the Spitzer report.
To the department, those numbers made sense, because they roughly matched the racial breakdown of suspects identified by witnesses or victims of crimes. It is an argument still made forcefully by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as it was by Mr. Giuliani when he was mayor.
Yet after taking office, Mr. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, seemed willing to move past the issue. The city settled a lawsuit, brought shortly after the Diallo killing by the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the unit responsible for the shooting was dissolved. Under terms of the settlement, it modified the UF-250 form and created a written policy against racial profiling.
At the same time, the number of stops quietly rose each year.
The police shooting of Sean Bell, in 2006, set the stage for a new confrontation with advocates, who began asking again about data on stops. The New York Civil Liberties Union found that the department had not released it to the Council in years.
When the new stop data were finally released in 2007, the numbers were startling: 508,540 stops in 2006, up from 97,296 four years earlier. Civil rights lawyers filed the Floyd suit the next year. (The suit takes its name from David Floyd, a Bronx man who said he had been stopped more than once by the police and who served as lead plaintiff in the class action.)
Advocates from different groups — including, among others, the Legal Aid Society, Make the Road New York, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice — began meeting informally.
But it was not until the first large meeting in June 2011 at 75 Varick Street, and the creation of the single coalition, that momentum began to gather, said Joo-Hyun Kang, the coalition’s director. “We’re talking about a year and a half, which is not a long time period to pass what I’d call landmark legislation,” she said, referring to a pair of oversight bills passed by the Council. (The bills were vetoed by Mr. Bloomberg; an override vote is planned for this month.)
For Mr. Celli, the former state civil rights lawyer, the Police Department missed several opportunities to change itself in ways that might have avoided a public backlash.
“They should have embraced the I.G. and sought to frame exactly what the person’s powers would be,” he said, referring to one of the bills creating an inspector general for the police. The other, a more direct response to the stop-and-frisk policy, would expand the ability of New Yorkers to sue the department over bias-based profiling.
The federal judge in the stop-and-frisk case, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, was more critical of the police, finding the department to be “deliberately indifferent to the discriminatory application of stop and frisk.”
Nonetheless, by last year, the department began to change, significantly dropping the number of stops. Commissioner Kelly denied that political pressure or the court case led to the decline, saying it had been the result of redeployment and better training.
Whatever the explanation, after record highs in the first quarter of 2012, the number of stops plummeted to near record lows by early 2013.
Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia University law professor who testified against the city in the Floyd case, said the Police Department did not open itself up for self-criticism on the issue of stops.
“They became defiant about sticking to the story,” he said. “And they dismissed any questioning as being grumpy old civil rights advocates.”
Source
Council Moves to Enhance Voter Registration Through City Agencies
Gotham Gazette - November 24, 2014, by Samar Khurshid - At a hearing Monday, the New York City Council's Committee on Governmental Operations approved the latest drafts of two bills that enhance...
Gotham Gazette - November 24, 2014, by Samar Khurshid - At a hearing Monday, the New York City Council's Committee on Governmental Operations approved the latest drafts of two bills that enhance the responsibility of city agencies to conduct voter registration and a resolution calling for the State Legislature to pass similar legislation.
These measures are an attempt by the Council to improve the compliance of City agencies with Local Law 29, also known as the Pro-Voter Law, which was passed in 2000. The law requires 19 city agencies to handle voter registration applications for customers.
The new legislation is headed to the full Council for a vote on Tuesday and then, if passed as expected, to the desk of Mayor Bill de Blasio. The bills expand the mandate of the Pro-Voter law to seven additional agencies and create a standard for enforcing the law, including required semi-annual reports from participating agencies. Implementation of the existing law has proven to be a problem, with city agencies failing to uphold their responsibilities to offer registration forms to New Yorkers doing other business with the City.
The accompanying resolution calls upon the State Legislature to augment existing agency-assisted registration laws to include codes on registration forms that would help track agency performance and registration statistics.
Council Member Ben Kallos, chair of what he called the "good government committee," introduced Intro 493 A which expands scope of the Pro-Voter law and sets a deadline of December 1, 2015 for agencies to integrate their forms with voter registration.
The second bill, Intro 356 A, which establishes reporting requirements for the agencies, and the accompanying resolution, were introduced by Council Member Jumaane Williams.
"The last election was abysmal," Williams said of voter turnout in response to questions from Gotham Gazette. Stating that the city and state are falling behind in civic participation, he said, "This should be an issue that all parties - Republicans, Democrats, third parties - every party should be working to increase participation."
The push for increased voter registration began in July with Mayor de Blasio's Directive 1, which ordered agencies under the Pro-Voter law mandate to create plans for implementing the law. Then, in October, the City Council introduced the two new bills in response to a report released by a coalition of good government groups which showed the City's lax compliance with Local Law 29.
According to the report, 84 percent of clients at 14 of these agencies were not provided registration applications when they should have been. Additionally, only 2 out of 5 applicants with limited English proficiency were given translated applications, and agents were not trained in the application process.The report was compiled by the Pro-Voter Law Coalition, comprised of the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, Citizens Union of the City of New York, and the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). Their investigation was aided by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
The report's importance is highlighted by the fact that over 30 percent of New Yorkers who were interviewed at the agencies were not registered to vote.
The de Blasio administration initially rejected the two bills over privacy concerns and on the grounds that they came too close on the heels of Directive 1 and wishing to see agencies given more time to comply. Taking those concerns into consideration, changes were made to Williams' bill on reporting mandates. Williams disagreed with the administration but eventually came around to ensure changes were made in the proposal which will protect applicants' information while still allowing the Board of Elections to track registration data from agencies.
"I'm expecting (the) resolution to have a serious impact in Albany," said Council Member Kallos to Gotham Gazette. "Whether it's the Assembly or the Senate, we can all agree that government works better when we measure what its doing and this will take a step towards that."
Representatives of the good government groups that authored the report also testified at the hearing. Steven Carbo, director of Voting Rights and Democracy Initiatives at CPD praised the proposals, asserting, "Likely hundreds of thousands, if not millions of eligible voters were never given the opportunity to register to vote over the years, perpetuating regrettably low rates of voter registration in New York particularly among lower income, of color and immigrant citizens," he said.
Peggy Farber, legislative counsel for Citizens Union, called the proposals "meaningful steps to improve the pro-voter law, to codify the important work of the administration."
On Tuesday, the bills and the resolution will head to the full Council for a vote at the Stated Meeting, where they are very likely to pass.
Source
2 days ago
2 days ago