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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We'll talk now about one of the defining issues of our time that leaves people of goodwill genuinely divided and has now divided the New York City Council Progressive Caucus. The issue is how to secure public safety, both from civilian criminals and from police brutality and mass incarceration at the same time. The police killing of Tyree Nicholas has given the issue new urgency, as people see that even with the kinds of reforms enacted after the police murder of George Floyd, mostly body cams and extra training, this kind of thing is still happening.

The wave of deaths on Rikers Island last year adds urgency too. On the other hand, the crime waves of the pandemic here leave most New Yorkers wanting more of a police presence, especially in the subways, according to multiple polls. We just heard that from our previous guest Congressman Adriano Espaillat of Upper Manhattan in the Bronx, who says, most of his constituents want an active police presence. How does this affect the city council's Progressive Caucus while the caucus did have 35 of the 51 members, a majority and a veto-proof majority at that when it's in conflict with the mayor?

Now comes a new statement of bylaws for the caucus that has caused nearly half its members to quit, according to a headcount in the news site, city and state. The main reason for this fracturing is language about police funding that says in part, "We will do everything we can to reduce the size and scope of the NYPD and the Department of Correction and prioritize and fund alternative safety infrastructure that truly invests in our communities." Public safety will be provided more effectively, it says, "By enacting policies that build a robust public health infrastructure to provide New Yorkers with mental health support, stable housing, violence prevention teams and tools, training and employment and harm-reduction for drug use" from the New City Council Progressive Caucus bylaws.

Listeners, should that kind of language be so controversial as to drive this bigger wedge among members who call themselves progressives? It was about that language, and if it was about that language, would you stay or would you go from the City Council Progressive Caucus? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. With me now, is a city councilmember who is still in the caucus and strongly supports the new bylaws. It's Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, who represents the Queens neighborhoods of Astoria, Woodside, East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights.

Rikers Island is in the district too, and she has an op-ed in city and state called "Reduce the size and scope of the NYPD, and Department of Correction, public safety depends on it." Councilmember, Cabán, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to your arguments for your position and the vision that you have for how a less police New York leads to a safer New York, but to start on the news, the deadline, as I understand it for caucus members to sign the bylaws and remain in the caucus was Friday. Was that the deadline, and of the 35 members, you had a week ago, how many do you still have today?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Yes. The deadline was Friday, but I think some context is really important. This was a long multi-month process that we went through. We did go from 35 members to 20, which I do think it's worth noting that that solid 20 that we have is bigger than the previous iteration of the Progressive Caucus, we saw before the new council came in. This was a process that started months and months ago, who we knew that the body was changing a ton. Most of the members in our current city council, our first-term members, everybody getting their feet under them, their bearings about them.

At the beginning of this, when we elected co-chairs for the Progressive Caucus, it was understood that there would be a democratic process that would take place to update both the bylaws and the statement of principle. It was the natural ending to a very deliberate process. I was part of the Bylaws Committee, along with a number of members of the caucus and we [unintelligible 00:04:47] for months, did these 8:00 AM meetings to go bullet by bullet, section by sections, word by word. Then ultimately, when it was presented to the Caucus as a whole, we had discussion, debate around it, and it passed with a supermajority.

Brian Lehrer: From what I've read, those who left include many of the members who represent the whitest most affluent districts, mostly in Manhattan where people would feel the least threatened by the police. Gale Brewer, Julie Menin, Keith Powers, Eric Dinowitz, but I see that also leaving our Diana Ayala who represents East Harlem and the South Bronx. Some of the neighborhoods in the South Bronx including Mott Haven. Shauna Breyer, who has parts of Harlem and Washington Heights, plus Morningside Heights in Manhattan Valley.

Darlene Mealy, representing Bed-Stuy, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, East Flatbush, Crown Heights. Selvena Brooks-Powers representing Laurelton, Far Rockaway, Rosedale, Southeast Queens, and I could name others. Given the range of people who have objected to this language, how would you describe the split? People of goodwill who see different paths to public safety, or what would you say from your vantage point?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I think that that's right. I think it makes sense that not everybody is in the Progressive Caucus. I have a lot of respect for folks who engaged in good faith in the process and said, "Hey, I don't think this is the space for me to organize around a certain set of things or solutions." I don't think you can talk about who left the caucus without talking about who stayed, because we have folks from some of the most acutely impacted neighborhoods from all across the city who stayed. We have Carmen De La Rosa who represents Uptown, for example.

We have Nantasha Williams out in Southeast Queens, we have Amanda Farías who's out in the Bronx. We have obviously myself in western Queens, Julie Won, Shekar Krishnan. We have central Brooklyn represented. We have Crystal Hudson, Sandy Nurse, Jen Gutierrez. There really is, this really, really broad spectrum of all parts of the city being represented here. Again, some of the parts of the city that have been most disproportionately impacted by a lot of the acute crises that our city is facing from criminalization to homelessness, to mental health, to just complete lack of access to public health infrastructure. I think those are really, really important pieces of context.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned in the intro that multiple polls indicate large majorities of New Yorkers wanted more police in the subways. Now there is a flood of more police, according to the mayor in the MTA, but on the polls, for example, during the mayoral primary in 2021, an NBC Telemundo Marist poll found 77% of Black Democrats said they wanted more police presence in the subways. A Quinnipiac poll in April of last year, found 86% of all New Yorkers wanted more police in the subways. 86% is so huge, it's going to cut across all kinds of demographic lines, too. I guess the question is, are you representing your ideas for what would be best more than you're representing your constituents?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: No. Actually, I love that you brought this up because I definitely enjoy digging into data here. Because those same polls also say that people want libraries, better schools, more housing. If you look at the structure-- I think you can't look at a poll without looking at what questions get asked, how they're asked, and in relationship to what, because there are other polls that exist that also tell a little bit of a different story. I'm going to bounce around a little bit here.

By the mayor's own survey, one of the largest surveys our city has ever seen, before policing, people said their highest priorities were housing, mental health response availability that didn't rely on police as their priorities over more policing, and more investment in Department of Corrections, for example.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Let me jump in on that, just that for a second, because when Congressman Espaillat was here, mostly on national politics last hour, but I asked him about this too. He would be I guess, on the other side of this from you, but he said they don't have to be either or fund a robust police presence, as long as policing is done well, like community policing, he said, but also fund these other things, mental health, housing, everything else, rather than put it as, "Reduce the police as much as possible." What do you say there?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: The reality is that our budget is a pie. It is a very large budget, but it's a finite budget. We have x amount of dollars, and how big one area's piece of the pie is determines the size of another area. That sounds like a nice thing coming from the Congress member but you have to put it into the context of what we're facing. The mayor currently has a preliminary budget that is proposing $50 million cuts from DHS to over $200 million cuts from DOHMH, nearly $300 million from the Department of Education, nearly $600 million from the Department of Social Services.

Under those conditions, you can't even claim a balance. I'm not even saying that that necessarily is what I agree with, but that's an impossibility when we're facing these really horrific cuts that get to the root causes, which actually there's a lot of consensus around, that there's difference on how we get there, but we see whether it's myself, whether it's the congressman, whether it's the mayor himself saying, "We're dealing with certain crises, and here's the route."

Let's take the mental health crises, for example, we've all identified a continuum of care as the root of the problem we're facing, and yet what we're seeing across the board is defunding of the very services, departments, and workforce that would have the ability to provide that continuum of care. Police cannot provide that continuum of care. That is not their role, that is not their job.

When we continue to inflate that budget, or over-invest in that budget while cutting the things that are actually going to get to that root problem and prevent harm, you tell me, that certainly doesn't make sense to me. For me, I think the city's job is to create a workforce that meets the city's needs, and right now, we are not doing that. Police officers are not a substitute for full-time mental health specialists, field specialists, and peer specialists to meet our neighbors who are in crisis on the streets. Police officers are not a substitute for social workers or outreach workers to help with the problem of homelessness.

Police officers are not the right worker to help children figure out how to mediate conflicts before they rise to the level of really scary or extreme violence, but what we're seeing is a drastic cut in the resources that allow us to not only maintain but grow that resource, that infrastructure. It comes down to this, you either care about outcomes, or you don't. All of the research data empirical evidence says that those kinds of strategies get better results than again reacting or relying on reactive policing.

Brian Lehrer: Another dog makes their radio debut on the Brian Lehrer Show. What's your dog's name?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Her name is Natalie, and she's 12. She's my only.

Brian Lehrer: Hello, Natalie. You're so cute, Natalie. Did she pack up? Listeners, how much do you agree with Councilmember Cabán? I'll read a few lines to amplify what she was just saying from her city and state op-ed, "Homeless outreach ought to be performed by social workers, speeding violations ought to be assessed by cameras, school conflicts ought to be mediated by counselors. Even in cases of violence organizations like common justice, which are grounded in restorative justice practices have better track record than jail of changing people's behavior and fostering healing."

Listeners, fund up those services and have less funding for the police. Do you want this in your neighborhood of New York City if you live in New York City? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. We'll continue by taking your calls for Councilmember Tiffany Cabán of Western Queens, and by asking you, Councilmember, how would this affect police staffing in your district if you were to get what you want, and the staffing of other things. Stay with us, Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we talk about the new fracturing of the Progressive Caucus in New York City Council, 15 of the 35 members have left over new bylaws for the caucus, which emphasize cutting funding to the NYPD in order to better find other agencies that also work on public safety. Can I just ask before we take some calls as I'm sure you're not surprised, our lines are full. How would your blueprint affect your district on the ground? Like, how much would you cut police presence in your own district this year in the new budget if you were to get your way and the caucus got its way? Like, how many officers do you have there now on a given day, and how low Would you go, and how many other people would you have from other agencies in exchange?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I just want to start by addressing something you said a few moments ago, I would venture to say that it's not a fracturing, but a sharpening. What you're finding is that now we have a more honed sharp instrument to move forward on an agenda that, again, largely is really, really focused on fighting against the mayor's cuts across agencies that deliver really, really critical services, or first and foremost is what we're doing.

I love that you asked about my district specifically because we've been doing a ton of work around this, so I'm able to talk about it with a bit of confidence. We've done a couple of things recently that give us a good dataset to work off of. We have a public safety team, which includes our organizer, myself, and some volunteers, and we're partnering with our assembly members [unintelligible 00:15:57] office, where we have done public safety canvassing with well over 50 small businesses in our community.

In addition to that, we took our participatory budgeting process and took a model that's used across the world, but not here yet. We did what or called there is known as Citizens' Assemblies, and the focus was on public safety. Overwhelmingly, what people identified around what they needed to be safe was really clear, and it also laid out where the gaps in our neighborhood infrastructure are. You had business owners saying, the things that we're seeing every day are mental health, people experiencing mental health issues causing disruptions or things that concern us, or maybe make us feel a little bit less safe, homelessness issues, and dissatisfaction with how they're handled and what they want to see happen.

From them, I've heard from business owners that, they wouldn't be heard in our neighborhood, they want the pilot program that sends out mental health specialists to meet people where they're in need instead of police officers. They want that kind of infrastructure, they want homes for their homeless neighbors. Oftentimes, they'll say if there's a situation, we take care of each other on our block, we don't necessarily want to call the police officer, sometimes we have to because we need to fill out for insurance purposes, and things like that, but they really identified all of these different routes that they wish we had more resources for in our community.

In the citizen's assemblies, when people talked about the subway or walking around in the neighborhood, there was something that kept coming up over and over and over again, on what would make them feel safer. It wasn't police officers, it was creating a neighborhood that invited people to be outside a lot, to have subways where you didn't have to wait 20 minutes late at night to get the train, it came quickly, that would make them feel safer, better lighting, parks that are inviting so that they're really well used and your neighbors and those relationships. A lot of it boiled down to being able to congregate and knowing who was around you, being familiar with folks in the neighborhood, and in good lighting and things like that. Those came as priorities that they said would improve their feelings of safety. Much, much higher on the list, than policing and incarceration.

Brian Lehrer: John in Queens, you're on WNYC with clean City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán. Hi, John.

John: Hi, I would like to just ask Miss Cabán. I think we call it get on board with wanting more social service workers for outreach to the homeless, but there are a lot of situations where the situation just escalates very quickly, where you might send someone who's not trained or authorized to use force because you're dealing with a mental health crisis perhaps, suddenly within a matter of seconds, that just becomes imminent.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I love that you asked that. I am a member of this organization called Local Progress. It's a national organization of progressive municipal electeds across the country, and I sit on their public safety committee. As part of that, I had the privilege of traveling to these other cities and seeing firsthand on the ground, how they respond to their mental health crises. Basically, their versions of be heard, but they're a little bit further along and have a larger data set. I had been out to Denver to start program, Portland Street Response Team, and I love the research on this.

Then I want to talk to you about what police chiefs and fire chiefs in those areas told me about these programs. First of all, the data is really incredible. If you look at Denver Star that's been in operation for more than a couple of years now, they have gone on, I think close to 1000 calls at this point, they have never up to this point had to call in police backup because it ended up being too dangerous of a situation. That's because it is a well-put-together program. It means everybody is working together. Dispatch is properly dispatching calls so that the appropriate worker is going at the appropriate times. There's always a connection to the police department. Even though they're not the ones meeting that person, there's always a quick line if it were to come to that. Portland Street response, very similar. I think they've had to call in the police for backup just a couple of times over several hundred different calls and the beautiful thing about it too is that another data point of these programs is that none of these responses by mental health professionals has resulted in an arrest.

Then you don't have all of the other things that come along with with a police interaction potentially. We know that the responses are a bit different. I talked to a police chief, a deputy police chief, and the fire commissioner out in Portland and they said something that has been said across different places and they were like, "We don't want to do this work." "In fact, we can't do this work." It's a line that I now parrot a lot. They said there's no substitute for a full-time mental health professional in these situations. We're not equipped to do it. There's no amount of supplemental training that could allow us to be equipped to it.

It's just a different approach and set of knowledge. I want to give one quick example. They talked about this gentleman and I brought this up at a hearing recently where there were NYPD representatives there and I said, "Let me give you a scenario." There's a person appears to be experiencing a mental health episode. People call 911. They said that they saw this person putting rocks in their pocket and they were concerned by it because the NYP had referenced weapons, they go out to cause weapons.

They had said, "Listen, you would probably think that this is where the police should come." Out in Portland, they did something different. The mental health responders said, "No, no, we want to go out on this call. We don't find this to be threatening. Our job is to de-escalate." When they went out, they talked to that person and got them one by one to take a rock out of his pockets until there were none left. De-escalating to the point where then they can engage and then hopefully connect to services.

Whereas admittedly, the police department out in Portland said and NYPD agreed in this hearing the police response would've been a lot different. They would've said, "Hey, that's a weapon, we go in. We subdue with force. We contained the threat." Just thinking about how different workers approach different issues, it's really, really important and it all connects to how do we get the best outcomes?

Brian Lehrer: Interesting story from Portland there. On the actual budget proposals from the mayor, I see in your op-ed and city and state that the mayor's proposed budget for the next fiscal year, which begins in July, includes what you call brutal cuts, like $50 million from homeless services, 200 million from health and mental hygiene, 300 million from the schools, 600 million from the Department of Social Services, but the New York Post had an article about the more conservative members of City council, Holden Ariola, Borelli, were all named criticizing Adams for cutting the police budget from 5.59 billion this year to 5.44 billion in the next, I guess that would be 150 million less for the NYPD as well. Is that your understanding and would you look at it as an across-the-board cut rather than a shifting toward policing?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: The percentages don't compare. The police department is having a proposed cut that is nominal at best compared to some of the cuts we're seeing across the board. I know that you mentioned DHS, DOHMH, and some of those other agencies, but just to give you an idea where you're looking at the police cut is maybe and my math might be a little bit off, but I think it's something of between 1% and 2% if that the oversight budget is looking at an almost 40% cut. That's not equitable at all.

Again, this is more about how do we get the best public health and public safety outcomes and leaning in to robustly funding the strategies that we know work better and that's really, really got to be the focus here. It's really hard to function or say that we're going to house people or get people that continue to care when we are cutting by hundreds of millions of dollars in these really, really critical spaces.

Brian Lehrer: One more call, Audra in Crown Heights. You're on WNYC with Councilmember Tiffany Cabán. Hi, Audra.

Audra: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. Thank you for your work and also for bringing this very important issue to your forum. I'd like to just remind everyone, the very origin of policing in this country was obviously a spinoff of the overseers and the plantation system, which was originally designed to keep Black and brown people under [unintelligible 00:25:18] of their so-called owners as such. In it's very nucleus, there's already a problem. Recent history shows that the police are ill-equipped even in the most benign situations to help their communities. They're trained to kill, let's be honest.

They're trained to be afraid and they're trained to react with explosive behavior. The money is there. It's absolutely absurd to say that we can't support mental health. When have we ever invested in mental health in our communities, particularly communities that are the most abused by the system and the most attacked by the police? I live in New York City, I live in Crown Heights. I was a participant in the protest in 2020 when I saw NYPDs turn against its constituents, the actual people who pay their salaries and act like complete untrained animals, literally beating people in the street for asking for human rights. The police are already set up to demean and demoralize the people who actually paid--

Brian Lehrer: Let me just ask you, Audra, real quick and-- Actually, we're going to run out of time with the councilmember. I'm going to go back to her, councilmember, and can you react to the news of today that because of incidents of violence in some public schools recently, the city is deploying more police officers to the public schools?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: First I want to thank Audra for what you shared with us and connect it to something that is really, really important. What happens when you defund social safety nets, social services, and the workforce that delivers those things is that you then create social ills in our communities, and to Audra's point where their most felt are in Black and brown lower-income communities.

When you defund those things and you create those social ill in communities, then what happens, or what this administration is doing, is taking those social ills and identifying them as criminal problems and responding to them with criminalization. Austerity or the leaning of the budget in that way goes hand in hand with and can't be separated from policing because then what happens is you fill those gaps and then police come and respond to them.

Don't interrupt, don't prevent, but respond and then create a lot more violence in the aftermath. That goes to your question, Brian, around schools. We can't defund schools make it so that schools don't have counselors, guidance counselors, social workers, and then expect young people to just know how to navigate conflict with one another. Expect young people to know how to really deal with their feelings and communicate and change their behavior in different ways. They're going to do the things that maybe is modeled for them. They're going to do things that are affected by untreated trauma, but there's no support system there.

What you will see is an escalation of violence. This is about making those and the mayor says it all the time, we've got to make those upstream investments so that we don't have these horrific outcomes. I know a couple of those shootings happened in councilmember Jen Gutierrez's district, who has also talked a lot about how these kids don't have programming after school. They don't have job opportunities, they don't have enough resources in their school during the school day and so the answer is making sure that we are funding our schools and it's the right workers for the right problems and the money's got to come from somewhere.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you one quick Rikers question? Since Rikers is in your district, you know that one of the common complaints about why it's so dangerous is that so many correction officers abuse their sick day privileges, so they're often understaffed. Do you share that point of view and to the extent that it's correct, Howard cutting correction department funding immediately make Rikers safer in 2023? We've got 30 seconds.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Oh, Brian, I can't answer that in 30 seconds, but we have been doing a lot of work around this. It is much more complicated than that. The DOC oversight hearing has made it very clear that they are unwilling to be accountable to anyone. They have stopped cooperating with the Federal Monitor, they have stopped cooperating with taskforce that have been put into place and they are not following best practices in terms. I've gone many times to visit Rikers both as a public defender for over seven years, but also in my role as a councilmember. The number one thing that we can do is decarcerate, and we can do it.

Again, we have an administration that is forwarding policies, that is increasing criminalization. We're seeing arrests for quality of life, low-level offenses, offenses that are tied to poverty, mental health, substance use, skyrocketing under this administration, driving up the census on Rikers. The best thing that we can do to quickly keep people safe on Rikers Island is to decarcerate. That's like going to be a really, really huge piece. Rikers Island still remains the largest mental health provider in our state. That's a real condemnation of the system that we have been operating right within for a long time.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Big news on one of the defining issues of our time, how to best provide public safety. The New York City Council Progressive Caucus has lost 15 of its 35 members over how to do that. Tiffany Cabán represents those who have stayed. Councilmember, we always appreciate it. Thank you very much for engaging.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Thank you. Have a good one.

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