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“What New Yorkers in crisis need is housing and wrap around services, which offer long-term stability instead of an endless, involuntary shuffle. Without any real support either inside or outside of psych institutions to address root causes, no one is getting any healthier or safer.”
“Statewide, crimes are down…Shootings are down. But it’s all about perception,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul at the end of February. According to Hochul, crime rates in New York are “not statistically significant, but psychologically significant.”
Psychological significance is how Hochul is justifying spending $144 million over the last three months to flood the subway with 1,000 additional cops. This is on top of the 750 National Guard troops who have been stationed in our subways since last spring, subjecting riders to random searches. And that’s to say nothing of the already extreme baseline level of police presence in New York’s transit system. There’s little evidence these tough-on-crime tactics actually increase safety, but as Hochul might say, safety isn’t the point. The appearance of safety is.
Optics are expensive. The NYPD is by far the country’s biggest and most expensive police department. Its operating budget costs New Yorkers over $6 billion each year, while pensions, misconduct judgements, and other expenses total another $5 billion. That means New Yorkers are paying over $11 billion per year for the NYPD. For decades, communities have been spending extravagantly on their own punishment instead of investing in life-affirming fundamentals like education, housing, jobs, and healthcare.
Take, for example, the mental health struggles so obviously and visibly afflicting thousands of New Yorkers. A mentally ill person without housing or medical care in New York is most likely to be met with policing. Unequipped to provide care or support, police officers end up just shipping human beings around from place to place: from the subway to the jail to the psych ward, which acts as prison by another name. This may create the perception that something is “being done,” when all that’s really happening is the spinning of an expensive revolving door.
Psych wards act as temporary holding places that offer very little in the way of actual care. People are often released without long-term resources, making it more likely for them to find themselves back in the same cycle. What New Yorkers in crisis need is housing and wrap around services, which offer long-term stability instead of an endless, involuntary shuffle. Without any real support either inside or outside of psych institutions to address root causes, no one is getting any healthier or safer.
This shameful lack of results doesn’t seem to be encouraging Gov. Hochul to change course. In yet another ploy that prioritizes safety optics over safety solutions, the governor is attempting to rollback Kalief’s law, a crucial, even if little known, due process protection.
Kalief Browder was a 16-year-old from the Bronx who was wrongfully accused of stealing a backpack in 2010 and jailed on Rikers Island for three years while awaiting trial. He had no access to the evidence against him in the case, and his family could not afford to pay the $3,000 bail set by a Bronx judge. Even after his release from Rikers, Kalief faced intense emotional and psychological challenges and died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22.
Named in his memory, Kalief’s law requires that evidence be shared with the defense before any plea deals are struck and well before trial. It’s common sense that prosecutors and police should be able to back up their charges before indefinitely locking people up. But for the opportunity to appear tough on crime, Gov. Hochul is more than happy to repave the way for wrongful convictions and indefinite pre-trial detention.
This backwards approach makes clear that the governor believes that the perception of safety relies on the state having the power to lock up whoever it wants, whenever it wants, with as little evidence as possible. That’s not safety or justice. It’s a dangerous laziness; an unwillingness to do the hard work of investing in the types of interventions that evidence shows will reduce poverty and instability, like housing, direct and easy access to healthcare, jobs, and more.
No doubt, New Yorkers are concerned about safety—more than half say crime is a problem in their local community. But Gov. Hochul’s focus on perception and optics treats popular fears about safety as if they simply fell out of the sky—contextless and without origin. The reality is that our political and media landscapes inform and reinforce one another’s fixation on crime.
Stoking fears about crime is an evergreen electoral strategy, and our nation’s diversity makes it easy to parlay fears about “others” committing crimes into votes. Meanwhile, local and national media spend an enormous amount of time reporting on crime in New York, even when crime rates are falling. The result is a cycle wherein politicians like Hochul govern based on fears that they themselves helped stoke.
Instead of fear and optics-based governance, New Yorkers need evidence-based solutions that chip away at root causes. Heightened police presence, the carceral revolving door, and all-powerful prosecutors are already part of the everyday reality of life in the Bronx. This three-pronged tough-on-crime strategy isn’t working here, and it won’t work for the rest of the state either.
If we want to build a safe, thriving New York, we need to invest in our neighborhoods instead of in the state’s prisons. That means protecting Kalief’s law. That means passing Treatment Not Jails, which would disrupt the revolving door and instead invest in actual mental health and substance abuse resources. That means passing legislative packages like Communities Not Cages, which would move New York away from policies that increase recidivism, cost people their entire lives, and cost our communities billions of dollars.
So long as our leaders prioritize safety optics over safety solutions, New Yorkers will pay the price with not only their taxes but the shape and direction of their lives. It’s time to change course.
Carolyn Strudwick is the managing director of social work for The Bronx Defenders. Brittany McCoy is the managing director of policy at The Bronx Defenders.
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