New York

What a Commissioner’s Abrupt Exit Says About the N.Y.P.D. Under Adams

Published

2 years ago

June 17, 2023

What a Commissioner’s Abrupt Exit Says About the N.Y.P.D. Under Adams

If Commissioner Keechant Sewell, head of the nation’s largest police force, wanted to promote an investigator to first-grade detective, she had to clear it with City Hall, according to her former top uniformed officer.

When she was selecting someone to run the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division, her choice was blocked by members of Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, according to several current and former officials.

And when First Deputy Commissioner Edward Caban and Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey took the department’s second- and third-highest jobs, they had been handpicked not by Ms. Sewell but by Mr. Adams, those officials said.

After less than 18 months on the job, Ms. Sewell had apparently had enough. She will leave 1 Police Plaza for good at the end of the month.

Ms. Sewell, 51, is walking away from a department of 36,000 uniformed officers that saw the rate of major crimes like murders and shootings fall during her tenure. Morale, at critical levels following the pandemic and racial-justice protests in 2020, was slowly improving, partly because of a contract she helped negotiate that included raises and more flexible schedules. She added about 30 detectives to a sex-crimes unit that for years had been understaffed and overworked.

Now, officers, department watchdogs and community leaders are trying to figure out what comes next.

Mr. Caban, who has been with the department since 1991, is the leading candidate to become interim commissioner, according to several officials with knowledge of the decision.

Whoever heads the department will face a slew of challenges: officers who union leaders say are being lured away by better hours and pay; residents of color who do not trust the top leaders; and the challenge of keeping the city safe enough to foster a post-pandemic revival.

Perhaps the most daunting task will be serving a mayor — himself a former police captain — whose administration is believed to have meddled so much that Ms. Sewell felt she had to quit. While previous commissioners said they had to deal with some level of micromanagement, they said they were typically allowed to pick their own teams and rarely had to get approval for discretionary promotions.

Patrick Hendry, the incoming president of the Police Benevolent Association union, said officers saw Ms. Sewell as “someone who truly cared.”

“We didn’t think she was going anywhere,” he said, adding, “No matter who the police commissioner is going forward, whether it is Commissioner Caban or someone else, we have real issues that we have to address right away.”

Signs of a new chapter emerged soon after Ms. Sewell’s announcement on Monday.

On Tuesday, Mr. Adams canceled his appearance at a Pride event at headquarters, where he and Ms. Sewell had both been scheduled to speak. Ms. Sewell did not take the stage. Instead, she remained seated in the back as a line of high-ranking command staff sat in the front row, including Mr. Caban. On Thursday, Mr. Caban joined Mr. Adams at an appearance related to World Elder Abuse Awareness Day that Ms. Sewell had been scheduled to attend.

A spokesman for Mr. Adams declined to comment, referring to a news conference where Mr. Adams defended his management and said he was the only mayor in decades “who actually worked in a city agency.”

“Every other mayor had to turn over those agencies and allow people to run them the way they desire,” Mr. Adams said. “That’s not how I function.”

Ms. Sewell did not respond to a message seeking comment. On Thursday, the department’s Twitter account posted a video of her at Gracie Mansion for a Juneteenth celebration, where she thanked Mr. Adams for making her the commissioner and called it “the honor of my lifetime.”

But in December, Ms. Sewell gave a fiery speech at a scholarship ceremony hosted by the Policewomen’s Endowment Association that was cast as a rhetorical letter to whomever might become the department’s second female commissioner. Ms. Sewell warned that person that she would be “second-guessed, told what you should say, told what you should write by some with half your experience.”

“You will get free unsolicited personal advice: ‘Your hairstyle is wrong, you look tired, already worn out in less than a year, you should wear different clothes, you’re not qualified, you are in over your head,” she said to applause and cheers. “None of this is true.”

William J. Bratton, the department’s former commissioner, called Ms. Sewell’s departure a “lesson for the mayor.”

Mr. Adams should reflect on “what the hell went wrong,” he said, adding, “How do you lose somebody as talented and respected and capable as her?”

Advocates for survivors of sexual assault said they hoped that the next commissioner would continue the momentum they saw building under Ms. Sewell. She had put in a new chief to run the Special Victims Division, told him to prioritize the concerns of advocates, provided more training for officers on how to interact with victims and installed a legal adviser to help investigators understand laws and procedure, they said.

“It was great that Mayor Adams appointed the first woman commissioner, but it was so much more important that he chose a commissioner who took crimes against women seriously,” said Jane Manning, the director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project.

Ms. Sewell also earned a reputation for loyalty to her subordinates that angered some watchdogs.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board, a watchdog agency that examines police misconduct, said that in 2022 she rejected more than half of its disciplinary recommendations. Ms. Sewell defended her record, saying that in many of those cases, the board had not given the department enough time to review complaints. When it did, she said, she agreed with the board’s recommendations more than 80 percent of the time.

Arva Rice, the chairwoman of the board, said that the relationship improved after the department agreed to provide the data to investigate complaints of racial profiling. She said she hoped the new commissioner would be pushed to cooperate more.

“The mayor said he’s in support of accountability,” Ms. Rice said. “We want to make sure we’re in line with him on what that means, and what those polices look like in action.”

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said her organization was troubled by what she sees as a sharp return under Mr. Adams to more aggressive tactics that disproportionately affect Black and Latino residents. “It’s no stretch to say he’s been serving as police commissioner in many ways,” she said.

She noted that the number of times police stopped and frisked people on the street, while still far lower than a decade ago, increased in the past year.

Police issued more than twice as many summonses in the first quarter of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022 for low-level offenses like open container violations, disorderly conduct and public urination, according to the organization’s analysis.

“Things are not going in the right direction,” Ms. Lieberman said.

Many young officers, who were horrified by images of police brutality they saw in the city and across the country, want a different approach, said Edwin Raymond, who retired as a lieutenant last month and has criticized the department for discriminating against Black and Latino residents.

“There is a disconnect between the powers that be and the rank and file,” he said. Mr. Raymond said he believed Ms. Sewell appeared ready to enact more reforms, but “she didn’t have enough time.”

Kenneth Corey, the former chief of the department, who was briefed on how Ms. Sewell’s promotions were vetted by the Adams administration, said that she had connected more quickly with the rank and file than any other commissioner he had seen.

She moved officers to tears with her eulogies for Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora, who were fatally shot less than three weeks into her tenure. On Christmas Eve, she visited nearly two dozen precincts and dropped off Italian cookies for officers working the holiday shift. She visited the home of an officer whose teenage daughter had contracted a staph infection and had to have limbs amputated.

Mr. Corey recalled an event for fallen officers, where Ms. Sewell abruptly stopped reading from prepared remarks and looked out at the families in front of her.

“‘Yeah, I don’t want to do this,’” Mr. Corey recalled her saying. “‘What I’m going to do is walk around and talk to you.’”

She spent the next two hours going from table to table, asking about the officers who had died, Mr. Corey said.

At the Pride event on Tuesday, Ms. Sewell waited until the ceremony was over, then strode to the front of the auditorium to meet with officers, who quickly lined up for pictures and hugs. One who took a photo with her ran to a group of friends and beamed as she showed it to them.

The officer said she had wanted to get one last shot with the commissioner before she left.

Hurubie Meko, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

New York

Large Blaze Ravages Bronx Apartment Building, Leaving Many Displaced

Published

7 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Large Blaze Ravages Bronx Apartment Building, Leaving Many Displaced

Dozens of families were looking for shelter after a large fire broke out at an apartment building in the Bronx early Friday, injuring at least seven people, the Fire Department said. There were no fatalities or life-threatening injuries, according to officials.

About 250 firefighters and emergency medical responders rushed to a six-story residential building on Wallace Avenue near Arnow Avenue after a fire was reported there just before 2 a.m., the Fire Department said. The blaze on the top floor was elevated to a five-alarm fire about an hour later, it said.

Several dozen firefighters were still gathered outside the building at around 10 a.m. Many windows on the top floor were blown out and some had shards of glass hanging in place that resembled jagged teeth. Smoke continued to climb from the building as a firefighter on a ladder hosed the roof.

The fire was brought under control shortly before 2 p.m., according to fire officials.

The seven people who were injured included five firefighters, the department said in an email. One person was treated at the scene but declined to be taken to a hospital.

A spokeswoman for the Police Department said earlier that some people had suffered smoke inhalation injuries.

Robert S. Tucker, the fire commissioner, said during a news conference that it was a miracle that there had been no serious injuries or fatalities. Officials said that all of the apartments on the building’s top floor were destroyed.

Firefighters blasted water at the smoke and flames pouring out of the upper floors and roof, according to videos posted online by the Fire Department and television news outlets. Heavy winds had fueled the blaze, the department said.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, officials said.

The Red Cross was at the scene helping residents that were displaced by the fire, and a temporary shelter had been set up at the Bennington School on Adee Avenue nearby. Doreen Thomann-Howe, the chief executive of the American Red Cross Greater New York Region, said during the news conference that 66 families had already registered to receive assistance, including lodging. She said she expected that number to increase.

Juan Cabrera and his family were among those seeking help at the Bennington School. Mr. Cabrera said that he and his family had not heard a fire alarm but had instead heard glass breaking as residents climbed out of windows. He said he had also heard people race across the hall one flight above him while others screamed “Get out!”

Mr. Cabrera, 47, said he had smelled smoke and woke up his daughter, Rose, 13. He and his wife, Aurora Tavera, grabbed their IDs, passports and cellphones, and the family left the building.

“I felt desperate,” Ms. Taverna, 32, said.

“Thank God we are still alive,” said Mr. Cabrera, who works as a school aide and custodian and has lived in the building for five years. “The material stuff you can get back, but we have our family,” he said.

Louis Montalvo, 55, was also among those seeking help. He said firefighters banged on his door at around 3 a.m. and that he had smelled smoke.

“I am grateful to be around,” Mr. Montalvo said, as he stood outside of the temporary shelter. He was still wearing his felt pajama pants, which had snowmen printed on them.

Vanessa L. Gibson, the Bronx borough president, said she was “so grateful” there had been no fatalities from the fire.

The last major apartment fire in the Bronx occurred in 2022, and resulted in 17 deaths, which experts said were entirely preventable. Self-closing doors in the building did not work properly, allowing smoke to escape the apartment where the fire started and rapidly fill the structure’s 19 stories.

New York

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

Published

15 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

The Chinese government’s paranoia about overseas dissidents can seem strange, considering the enormous differences in power between exiled protesters who organize marches in America and their mighty homeland, a geopolitical and economic superpower whose citizens they have almost no ability to mobilize. But to those familiar with the Chinese Communist Party, the government’s obsession with dissidents, no matter where in the world they are, is unsurprising. “Regardless of how the overseas dissident community is dismissed outside of China, its very existence represents a symbol of hope for many within China,” Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who spent years in prison before being exiled to the United States in 1998, told me. “For the Chinese Communist Party, the hope for change among the people is itself a threat. Therefore, they spare no effort in suppressing and discrediting the overseas dissident community — to extinguish this hope in the hearts of people at home.”

To understand the party’s fears about the risks posed by dissidents abroad, it helps to know the history of revolutions in China. “Historically, the groups that have overthrown the incumbent government or regime in China have often spent a lot of time overseas and organized there,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University. The leader Sun Yat-sen, who played an important role in the 1911 revolution that dethroned the Qing dynasty and led eventually to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, spent several periods of his life abroad, during which he engaged in effective fund-raising and political coordination. The Communist Party’s own rise to power in 1949 was partly advanced by contributions from leaders who were living overseas. “They are very sensitive to that potential,” Weiss says.

“What the Chinese government and the circle of elites that are running China right now fear the most is not the United States, with all of its military power, but elements of unrest within their own society that could potentially topple the Chinese Communist Party,” says Adam Kozy, a cybersecurity consultant who worked on Chinese cyberespionage cases when he was at the F.B.I. Specifically, Chinese authorities worry about a list of threats — collectively referred to as the “five poisons” — that pose a risk to the stability of Communist rule: the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, followers of the Falun Gong movement, supporters of Taiwanese independence and those who advocate for democracy in China. As a result, the Chinese government invests great effort in combating these threats, which involves collecting intelligence about overseas dissident groups and dampening their influence both within China and on the international stage.

Controlling dissidents, regardless of where they are, is essential to China’s goal of projecting power to its own citizens and to the world, according to Charles Kable, who served as an assistant director in the F.B.I.’s national security branch before retiring from the bureau at the end of 2022. “If you have a dissident out there who is looking back at China and pointing out problems that make the entire Chinese political apparatus look bad, it will not stand,” Kable says.

The leadership’s worries about such individuals were evident to the F.B.I. right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kable told me, describing how the Chinese worked to ensure that the running of the Olympic flame through San Francisco would not be disrupted by protesters. “And so, you had the M.S.S. and its collaborators deployed in San Francisco just to make sure that the five poisons didn’t get in there and disrupt the optic of what was to be the best Olympics in history,” Kable says. During the run, whose route was changed at the last minute to avoid protesters, Chinese authorities “had their proxies in the community line the streets and also stand back from the streets, looking around to see who might be looking to cause trouble.”

New York

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Published

24 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Thursday proposed several measures that would restrict hedge funds and private-equity firms from buying up large numbers of single-family homes, the latest in a string of populist proposals she intends to include in her State of the State address next week.

The governor wants to prevent institutional investors from bidding on properties in the first 75 days that they are on the market. Her plan would also remove certain tax benefits, such as interest deductions, when the homes are purchased.

The proposals reflect a nationwide effort by mostly Democratic lawmakers to discourage large firms from crowding out individuals or families from the housing market by paying far above market rate and in cash, and then leasing the homes or turning them into short-term rentals.

Activists and some politicians have argued that this trend has played a role in soaring prices and low vacancy rates — though low housing production is widely viewed as the main driver of those problems.

If Ms. Hochul was inviting a fight with the real estate interests who have backed her in the past, she did not seem concerned. She even borrowed a line from Jimmy McMillan, who ran long-shot candidacies for governor and mayor as the founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

“The cost of living is just too damn high — especially when it comes to the sky-high rents and mortgages New Yorkers pay every month,” Ms. Hochul said in a written statement.

James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said his team would review the proposal, but characterized it as “another example of policy that will stifle investment in housing in New York.”

The plan — the specifics of which will be negotiated with the Legislature — is one of several recent proposals the governor has made with the goal of addressing the state’s affordability crisis. Voters have expressed frustration about the high costs of housing and basic goods in the state. This discontent has led to political challenges for Ms. Hochul, who is likely to face rivals in the 2026 Democratic primary and in the general election.

In 2022, five of the largest investors in the United States owned 2 percent of the country’s single-family rental homes, most of them in Sun Belt and Southern states, according to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office. The report stated that it was “unclear how these investors affected homeownership opportunities or tenants because many related factors affect homeownership — e.g., market conditions, demographic factors and lending conditions.”

Researchers at Harvard University found that “a growing share of rental properties are owned by business entities and medium- and large-scale rental operators.”

State officials were not able to offer a complete picture of how widespread the practice was in New York. They said local officials in several upstate cities had told them about investors buying up dozens of homes at a time and turning them into rentals.

The New York Times reported in 2023 that investment firms were buying smaller buildings in places like Brooklyn and Queens from families and smaller landlords.

Ms. Hochul’s concern is that these purchases make it harder for first-time home buyers to gain a foothold in the market and can lead to more rental price gouging.

“Shadowy private-equity giants are buying up the housing supply in communities across New York, leaving everyday homeowners with nowhere to turn,” she said in a statement on Thursday. “I’m proposing new laws and policy changes to put the American dream of owning a home within reach for more New Yorkers than ever before.”

Cracking down on corporate landlords became a prominent talking point in last year’s presidential election. On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris called on Congress to pass previously introduced legislation eliminating tax benefits for large investors that purchase large numbers of homes.

“It can make it impossible then for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home,” Ms. Harris said last summer.

In August, Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York, called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging by private-equity firms in the housing market. He cited a study that estimated that private-equity firms “are expected to control 40 percent of the U.S. single-family rental market by 2030.”

Statehouses across the country have recently looked at ways to tackle corporate homeownership. One effort in Nevada, which passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, proposed capping the number of units a corporation could buy in a calendar year. It was opposed by local chambers of commerce and the state’s homebuilders association.

A bill was introduced in the Minnesota State Legislature that would ban the conversion of homes owned by corporations into rentals. It has yet to come up for a vote.

At the federal level, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, introduced joint legislation that would force hedge funds to sell all the single-family homes they own over 10 years.