TESTIMONY OF:

Maryanne Kaishian BROOKLYN DEFENDER SERVICES

Presented before

The New York City Council Committee on Finance

New York City Council Budget and Oversight Hearings on The Preliminary Budget for Fiscal Year 2022

March 24, 2021

Introduction

My name is Maryanne Kaishian and I am Senior Policy Counsel at Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS). BDS provides multi-disciplinary and people-centered criminal, family, and immigration defense, as well as civil legal services, social work support and advocacy to nearly 30,000 people and their families in Brooklyn every year. In addition to zealous legal defense, we provide a wide range of additional services to meet our clients’ unique needs, including help with housing, benefits, education and employment. In many cases these services are of a preventive nature, helping people avoid loss of housing or immigration status, assuring benefits are available when needed to avoid hunger and other concerns, and addressing education issues before a student leaves school. I thank the City Council Committee on Finance, and in particular Chair Dromm, for this opportunity to testify today about the preliminary budget for Fiscal Year 2022.

This month, New York City marks the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of courts to in-person appearances. The communities impacted most by the criminal and family court legal systems have also been those hit hardest by the pandemic.¹ It is essential that funding for indigent defense and legal services for low-income New Yorkers remain intact as we proceed into the next year and as the City begins to recognize the impact of the quarantine on these communities. BDS is well-situated to respond to the anticipated needs of impacted communities as we emerge from this crisis. New Yorkers will need access to legal support to address widespread evictions, job loss, and enormous educational challenges.

New York City is one of the most progressive cities in the world. Yet for too long, the City has invested in systems that have worked to surveil and control low-income neighborhoods and communities of color rather than investing to uplift communities and families. This Council has been responsible for legislating and funding groundbreaking programs to meet the needs of communities that are highly surveilled but overlooked by other service providers—including the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP) ensuring universal representation to immigrant New Yorkers facing deportation and the Right to Family Advocacy Project providing advocacy to families being investigated by the Administration for Children's Services.

How a society allocates its budget is a statement of its values. It is time that this City value the experiences and needs of its community members over government surveillance that neither protects nor serves them. As the City begins to move away from surveillance and criminalization and toward community investment and community response, we are committed to providing a bridge in services for people who continue to be impacted by the criminal legal, family regulation, and immigration systems.

Create New Pathways to Community Services

This is a unique moment in our City’s history as a world-wide public health pandemic has laid bare the profound inequities nationwide that have deepened the disparities in healthcare, employment, and housing and made marginalized communities more vulnerable to legal systems involvement. As a nation we are also experiencing a long overdue public reckoning of systemic racism and police violence. While the City begins to reopen and rebuild, there is an opportunity for the Council to invest in communities and ensure that New Yorkers receive the support and resources, not surveillance, that help our City thrive.

BDS provides criminal, immigration, and family defense services to over 30,000 people and their families each year, but our work goes far beyond the courtroom. Many of the people we serve become eligible for support services only because of their interaction with the NYPD, Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). With the support of the City Council, we are able to provide robust support services to people who may have avoided court involved if they had access to services sooner, such as assistance navigating benefits applications and affordable housing processes, quality mental health care, substance use treatment, educational support, respite centers, or immigration assistance. We are committed to continuing to provide these services to the people who come through our doors but urge the City to consider why it takes an arrest or investigation for a New Yorker to access meaningful assistance and humane support.

We urge the City Council to work with the Mayor to begin to move funding away from surveillance and criminalization and toward community investment and community response. This must include ongoing support for existing community-based providers, who can provide increased interim services as the City begins to reduce reliance on the criminal legal system and trust in evidence-based alternatives. We are committed to providing a bridge in services for people who continue to be impacted by the criminal legal, family regulation, and immigration systems as we work to shrink the scope of these systems and their impact on Black, Latinx, and other New Yorkers of color.

Divest from Policing and Invest in Communities

As police reforms are proposed across the country—including a set of a federal standards sought by Governor Cuomo that would largely bring other departments into alignment with current NYPD guidelines (e.g., banning chokeholds and requiring body-worn cameras) and the Mayor’s proposed New York City Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative Draft Plan, published in two parts in March 2021—it is important to note that piecemeal regulations have not solved the issue of violence perpetrated by officers in New York City. Ultimately, the NYPD oversees enforcement of Patrol Guide violations by its members and has almost never been inclined to take action.

In addition to calls for these types of reform, certain instances of widely condemned police abuse are followed by calls for additional training, which not only costs money but has already failed to solve the issues within the NYPD. The NYPD does not lack the funding, training, or infrastructure to implement change. Officers are trained in de-escalation, implicit bias, and protest response. The issue is one of Department culture and willingness to concede power.

Placing sole responsibility for change in the hands of the NYPD only ensures that change will never come.

The City Council can and should exercise its authority to strip funding from the Department. The NYPD is an omnipresent force in certain NYC neighborhoods, yet it is abundantly clear that they do not offer a solution to violence. Rather, they are drivers of violence, sources of unrest and anxiety, and destructive and demoralizing forces straining the social fabric of neighborhoods.

As this Council is well aware, the City spends roughly $11 billion on policing, a budget which has largely survived the ravages of COVID-19 and an economic crisis that cut everything from school funding to subsidized transit programs. Just 13% of all NYPD arrests are for crimes classified as “violent felonies.” Of those, only half result in a conviction of any kind, and those convictions are likely to exacerbate racial inequities twice over—both through race-based policing and race-based sentencing. Studies show that increasing the size and budget of a police force does not directly correlate with safer streets.² Even as spending on policing has increased, the majority of murders in low-income neighborhoods remain unsolved.

The City Council controls NYPD funding and must implement necessary changes through both legislation and the diversion of resources. There are many ways the NYPD budget could be significantly and quickly reduced without impacting safety, namely firing officers credibly accused of misconduct, eliminating the NYPD gang database, and disbanding specialized units— particularly the Vice Squad—with histories of abuse and rogue operations.

It is time that this City valued the experiences and needs of its community members over a police force that neither protects nor serves them. While there has been considerable handwringing over the message that “defunding the police” sends, we must consider the message it sends our young people when we cut summer youth employment programs to afford to pay the officers who terrorize their communities, or when teachers are shortchanged while the NYPD blows past its annual overtime allotment by $100 million yet again. We must consider the message we send about the value of human life and dignity when we defund everything but the police.

Keep Families Together

BDS is the primary defense provider for parents and caretakers in Brooklyn who are facing ACS investigations or child neglect and abuse cases in family court. Our Family Defense Practice represents about 4,000 parents each year. We have represented over 14,000 parents and caretakers in Brooklyn Family Court and have helped more than 20,000 children remain safely at home or leave foster care and reunite with their families. We use a multidisciplinary approach that offers our clients access to social workers, parent advocates and civil and immigration attorneys who work to minimize any collateral impact of our clients’ court cases. While the essential services BDS provides help keep families together once allegations are made, we believe what families at risk of ACS-involvement need is access to safe and affordable permanent housing, quality education, meaningful employment and a living wage, and safe low- or no-cost childcare.

Like the criminal legal system, race and poverty are defining characteristics of the family regulation system.³ Over and over again, we see the ways in which families are traumatized by ACS and how the system works to punish families rather than help them. In many cases, the issues that brought a family to the attention of ACS is poverty. Far too often the response of mandated reporters is to call ACS instead of helping families access resources, such as stable housing, food, and adequate childcare. Despite making up only 23% of New York City’s child population, Black children represent over 52% of foster care placements.⁴ Of NYC children with indicated reports in the State Central Registry, 42% are Black, 40% are Latinx, and 6% are white,⁵ although overall 32% of New Yorkers are Latinx and 27% are white. Black children also fare far worse in the foster care system and have much longer stays in care.⁶

Most allegations made by ACS against parents and families involve neglect, not abuse, and the majority of those neglect allegations are related to a family's poverty. It has repeatedly been found that simply providing funds to families—for shelter, clothing, food, and other basic necessities—reduces reports of neglect.⁷ When the City removes children from their families, and places children in foster care, foster parents are given money to provide necessities for the children in their care. Those funds should be put directly into the hands of parents and community-based organizations engaged in mutual aid efforts. Families need resources, not surveillance and family separation.

Beyond this straightforward investment in marginalized communities, parents should be able to access free, competent support when navigating opaque systems—including special education services and the Department of Education, the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, affordable and public housing systems, and pre-natal and labor and delivery support.

Brooklyn Defender Services is able to provide many of these services, referrals, and supports to the parents, thanks to City Council initiatives and private foundation funding. It should not take an ACS investigation or court case for parents to be connected to wrap-around services that help families meet their basic needs. BDS is committed to continuing to bridge this gap for the families we serve but we urge the City to invest in support and resources for families and divest from surveillance and separation.

Support Immigrant New Yorkers

Immigrant New Yorkers have been hit extremely hard by the COVID-19 pandemic both in their personal circumstances (including job loss, food insecurity, harassment from landlords for inability to rent, exclusion from economic relief programs), and in relation to the fallout from lack of operations of immigration courts and limited and dysfunctional operations by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). As the pandemic raged in our city in 2020, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continued to detain hundreds of New Yorkers in detention facilities where COVID-19 spread rapidly.

As a “Sanctuary City”, NYC has an obligation to support immigrant New Yorkers. Through your funding of NYIFUP and the Immigrant Opportunities Initiative (IOI), this Council has demonstrated a commitment to providing excellent legal support for immigrant New Yorkers.

Because of this Council’s commitment to legal services, BDS and our partners were able to provide emergency pandemic response to our clients, including freeing at-risk clients from dangerous ICE detention conditions and providing material support for our clients who were left out of stimulus funds and other services.

As the City divests from policing and we see a decrease in arrests, continued investment in immigration legal services will continue to be needed for affirmative applications and support the thousands of New Yorkers with pending deportation cases. All immigrants, especially those who are detained, should have a right to competent counsel.

With a new administration in Washington, we move into a new era where we hope the cruel immigration policies of the prior presidential administration are put to an end. In this hopeful period, the need for free immigration legal services and legal education is actually greater. While it seems that deportations will be less common, there are still hundreds of people whose cases have already been filed. In addition, there is the hope that many people previously unable to obtain status will have a new opportunity to stay with their families in the United States. One example is DACA, which has already been reinstated. Many of these programs require complicated documents and a thorough risk analysis before filing, particularly if someone has been arrested in the past. In order to meet that need, and possibly stave off deportation and allow Brooklynites to achieve status, the City Council must continue to invest in supports for immigrant communities including the NYIFUP Program, Immigrant Opportunities Imitative, and other critical services funded through the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs.

Ensure Access to Housing

Investing in communities must include ensuring that all New Yorkers, regardless of income, have access to safe, affordable, and permanent housing. The City has already acknowledged its escalating housing crisis by committing to funding the right to counsel for tenants facing eviction in housing court. Eviction prevention is a necessary but insufficient stopgap to preventing homelessness but it not a guarantee of housing. Instead of enforcing barriers to existing housing subsidies and vouchers, the City should be funding more accessible and better vouchers so that more tenants can secure and remain in affordable housing. Similarly, the City should be removing barriers to accessing and maintaining public benefits and grants so that New Yorkers in crisis have a real social safety net.

It is time that the City live up to this pronounced commitment to affordable housing by examining existing public housing policies. Although public housing is supposed to be a way to guarantee New Yorkers have housing, residents are increasingly over-policed, then evicted or denied entry over any contact with the criminal legal system. By continuing to fund an entire bureau of the NYPD dedicated exclusively to public housing residents, and by maintaining strict and punitive policies evicting those residents over minor arrests, the City makes clear that its commitment to affordable housing does not extend to all New Yorkers.

Invest in Youth

The last year in New York City schools has been extremely difficult for many students, families, and school staff. During the last year, many students have experienced profound trauma – they have lost close family members and friends, have had their families experience job losses and other financial insecurities, and have been disconnected from friends and other support networks. Many students have struggled to navigate remote coursework while lacking the critical technology needed to participate and have found it difficult to attend school from home, where distractions abound. Most students have been out of school buildings for nearly a year; those attending in person have had to contend with buildings repeatedly opening and closing.

As students return to school, the stress and trauma of the last twelve months may bring with them increased behavioral issues as students readjust to in-person learning. Many students, especially students with disabilities and English language learners, will have fallen behind academically.

When students return to in-person learning, they need access to academic remediation, social- emotional supports, and increased extracurricular and athletic opportunities. And our City’s schools must shift to a culture where school staff, not police officers or security personnel, address and prevent student misbehavior, and do so in a nonpunitive way, that does not serve to further disconnect students from the schools they attend. Rather than continuing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into school policing, the City Council should instead take this opportunity to invest in mental health and other supports for schools that will increase the health and well-being of New York City’s children.

The City must also continue to invest in programs to support young people outside of schools. One example, the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) has been an asset for the youth we serve—and for low-income Black and brown youth across the City. In this time of economic uncertainty, young people are seeking opportunities to help support their families. The City’s investment in SYEP—and the 75,000 young people who participate each year—is an indication to young New Yorkers that their lives and time have value. If the City wants to in invest young people, it must create opportunities for young people to feel safe, to thrive, and see a viable, successful future for themselves.

Decarcerate NYC Jails and Ensure Oversight and Accountability

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, our office has joined the voice of people in City jail custody, their loved ones, and advocates to demand transparency from the Department of Correction (DOC) and Correctional Health Services (CHS) on measures being taken to keep people in custody safe. There has been little response. Public health officials have consistently warned that the answer to keeping people safe is to decarcerate and decarcerate now. Yet, we have seen jail populations continuously rise since the summer – today the City has over 5,000 people in custody.

DOC is riddled with mismanagement, a culture of violence and an unwillingness to change. At their budget hearing, they described a need for increased funding for additional uniformed staff, however DOC has a higher staff to persons-in-custody ratio than anywhere else in the US. Still, the Department fails to transport people to court, legal visits, family visits or emergency healthcare appointments. People are not safe in DOC custody and more staff is not the answer.

The NYC Board of Correction (BOC) is tasked with providing essential oversight of the NYC jails, and to do so it must be fully funded. The Board has a responsibility to all people in City jails, their families, loved ones, and the community to ensure transparency and accountability is sought. For the DOC to be held responsible, we must start with transparency and fully funding the Board of Correction. The Board is essential at ensuring the public is made aware of the Department’s violations of the BOC Minimum Standards; deaths in custody followed by an investigation; data and statistics related to sexual abuse, investigations, grievances, and the use of restrictive housing to name a few. People in custody and the public depend on the Board of Correction, and without them we fear the City jails will become more isolating, only exacerbating the already known horrors within NYC DOC’s correctional facilities.

Conclusion

BDS is proud to say as we move into Fiscal Year 2022, we will be celebrating 25 years since we opened our doors and began representing clients in Brooklyn. We have worked to protect the rights of the people in our communities every day since, but the need for our services is more acute than ever.

BDS’ requested funding will ensure we can continue to provide quality legal services to New Yorkers facing dire consequences—incarceration, family separation, deportation, homelessness, school suspension and job termination. We thank the City Council for the opportunity to testify today and for your continued support of the people, families, and communities we represent in Brooklyn. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me at mkaishian@bds.org or Kristine Herman, Director of Policy and Advocacy, at kherman@bds.org.

¹ Villarosa, Linda (April 29, 2020) “ A Terrible Price: The Deadly Racial Disparities of Covid-19 in America”; New York Times; Mays, Jeffrey C. Andy Newman. (2020 April 8). “Virus is Twice as Deadly for Black and Latino People Than Whites in N.Y.C” New York Times.

² See for example, Philip Bump, Over the past 60 years, more spending on police hasn’t necessarily meant less crime, Washington Post, June 2020, Available online https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/07/over- past-60-years-more-spending-police-hasnt-necessarily-meant-less-crime/

³ Commonly referred to as the “child welfare system” or the “child protection system,” defenders and parent advocates have adopted “family regulation system” language to reflect the prioritization of surveillance and control over genuine assistance to families struggling with health and mental health issues, shortage of basic necessities and lack of access to appropriate education and services for children with disabilities.

⁴ New York City Administration of Children's Services Community Snapshots, (2010, 2011, 2013); retrieved from: http://www.nyc.gov/html/acs/html/statistics/statistics_links.shtml.

⁵ Vajeera Dorabawila, Racial and Ethnic Disaprities in the Child Welfare System: New York City compared to the Rest of the State, NYS Office of Children & Family Services, July 2011, https://ocfs.ny.gov/main/recc/... df

⁶ https://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07816.pdf, page 4.

⁷ Kim Eckart-Washington, Fighting Poverty Reduced Child Neglect Cases, Futurity, January 2021, https://www.futurity.org/child-neglect-poverty-eitc-2508382-2/.