The NYPD is reaching out to activists and young people to attend the Build the Block meetings meant to inform the Neighborhood Policing program. But that’s not the crowd who’s showing up.
The mayor’s decision to omit people convicted of a list of 170 crimes from a program providing legal counsel to detained people facing deportation will affect the very cases where good advice is critical to a just outcome, providers say.
Research shows—and inmate families insist—that visitation is key to prisoners successfully rejoining society and to limiting the damage of incarceration to children.
Thirteen years after settling a case over mental-health discharge planning for people leaving Rikers, New York is getting closer to the goals it agreed to. But looming changes in federal policy could create new obstacles.
Funding for the bodies has increased steadily, if slowly, since 1996. But resources are still scarce for the entities that represent the city’s most local level of government.
Even as borough presidents have been offering incremental changes, like the appointment of several teenage board members in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, several Council bills to reform term limits and mandate demographic reporting from board members have stalled.
Recent citywide projects like the mayor’s affordable-housing plan have reignited long-standing critiques of community boards—about the value of their advisory votes and how effective they are at reflecting the will of the diverse community districts they represent.
The mayor’s citywide ferry plan could face challenges dealing with operating costs and the development of a market, but supporters say its value to the city includes offering a more of transit that will work even if the lights are out.
The draft law emerged amid anger by many Councilmembers that a different suite of NYPD reforms was tabled by their speaker.
Thinkers are dreaming up engineering solutions to ease the impact or cultural events to capitalize on it, while businesses eye ferries and bus service as potential gap-fillers. See images of some ideas.