On a recent spring day, Prospect Lefferts Gardens shook with such force that some neighbors believed there was an earthquake, they said. The bricks of a co-op building in the Brooklyn neighborhood broke off and crashed into the courtyard, and new cracks wormed their way into some residents’ homes. 

“It’s as if a train were running through the house,” said Dean Foster, 75, who lives on Rutland Road and Bedford Avenue. 

It was not an earthquake but vibrations from a pile driver digging steel beams into the soil at 1935 Bedford Ave. without proper safety monitors in place to protect the surrounding homes, according to city records and a Department of Buildings spokesperson.

Pile driving involves using a heavy-duty machine to force beams into the earth to create a stable foundation for a future structure, causing intense vibrations to travel from the source of the driving. 

“If we opened the cabinet door in the kitchen, the glassware would have fallen out,” Foster said in his home, located two blocks from the construction site.

Nestled between historic houses and two 90-year-old co-op buildings, the lot has become the site of a bitter battle between its newest owners and neighbors, whose homes have been damaged and lives disrupted during heavy construction, according to photos and videos reviewed by THE CITY.

Bobby McCullough, 42, began contacting 311 with complaints of cracks in their apartment building when construction ramped up in the first week of May, service requests show. 

“That was the first time I was fearful for my immediate safety,” McCullough said. “The building was shaking at a level that I was concerned about something falling, not off the shelf, but like a part of the ceiling.” 

Suzanne Cooke, who has lived in the co-op building for 13 years, said her daughter works late nights and has been disturbed by the construction while she sleeps during the day. 

“It’s startled her and woke her out of her sleep,” Cooke said. “There’s items in our space that fell off shelves.” 

McCullough said they were standing in the courtyard of the co-op as bricks from the adjacent building broke off and crashed to the ground. They were on the phone with a city building employee when it happened, who instructed them to call 911 immediately. 

Firefighters responded to the scene for bricks falling from the co-op building, according to a fire department spokesperson. Firefighters told the contractors to stop pile driving, but they did not listen, McCullough and other residents said.

“Ten minutes after they left, work continued,” McCullough told THE CITY. 

History of Violations

The entity Bedford 1935 Daf LLC, owned by Yonit Tzadok, purchased the lot on Feb. 28, 2025, according to property records, becoming the site’s third owner in nine years. A partner to the owner, Izchak Naftalin, filed permits to build a 10-story building on the lot in July 2025, according to records and media reports. Neither Tzadok nor Naftalin responded to inquiries from THE CITY. 

The current owners have paid $16,000 to the city in fines since January for various infractions, including failure to maintain a safe job site, failing to obtain proper permits and violating a stop work order, according to building department records. 

On May 5 the city issued Lead It Builders LLC, another contractor on site, a violation with a $5,000 fine for pile driving without safety monitoring devices, which is pending. 

Past development attempts on the lot have failed in recent years, and it has a history of unauthorized demolition work from a prior developer, as previously reported by THE CITY. In 2021, the Department of Environmental Protection issued $68,000 in fines for multiple violations of asbestos-removal safety rules.

In the last two years through early January, another owner of the lot, — 1935 Bedford Ave LLC, which sold the lot to the current LLC owner — ran up $27,321 in fines for a variety of code violations, including unsafe job site and inadequate site fencing. As of this week, they’d paid off $19,196 with $8,125 unresolved, records show. 

Residents told THE CITY they have struggled to keep up with whether stop work orders are in effect, as they go back and forth with lodging complaints against the contractors, who eventually get the stop work orders rescinded, or violate the orders and write a check to the city for the fines.

“The stop work orders come and go very quick,” McCullough said. 

Between February and May 2026, the city issued and rescinded two stop work orders for driving piles without monitoring protocols in place. Another stop work order issued on April 30 with no explanation was rescinded the next day. 

On Wednesday the city ordered all work to stop again, after an inspector responding to yet another complaint and found no designated superintendent while construction was ongoing, which creates a “hazard,” according to the order.

Gary Vinbaytel, who is named as an associate of the project’s owner according to city records, denied the city’s and neighbor’s claims that he is pile driving without the proper monitors.

“They fabricate everything,” he said in an email to THE CITY, referring to the lot’s neighbors. “All our construction is in accordance with all DOB regulations, monitoring and regiments. We follow each step very carefully and have sophisticated monitoring in place.”

He added, “These neighbors have prevented any construction from proceeding for a decade with multiple prior owners.”

Shaking and Cracking

Residents began complaining to the building agency of their homes shaking and cracking in February 2026. 

Anya Glowa-Kollisch, 42, board president of the Hawthorne Street co-op adjacent to the lot, said they have tried for nearly a year to get the project owners to sign an agreement for providing proper safety equipment, calling the work “exhausting.” 

“We have no idea how much damage has already been done to our building,” Glowa-Kollisch said. “It’s not that we don’t want development. This isn’t a NIMBY situation. We understand that things change and that there’s a need for housing.”

“What we want is for it to be done safely,” they added.

An engineering report Vinbaytel had prepared and submitted to the city as a requirement for the project recommended contractors micropile — drilling small-diameter columns into the ground that creates low vibrations but typically takes longer to install — instead of pile driving, stating it could cause vibrations that would affect adjacent buildings.

Cal Hadley’s family has owned his home on Fenimore Street since 1974. The house, built in 1935, is about 20 feet away from the construction. 

He said the pile driving “would work if we were on a deserted island someplace, and no other building was around for miles.” 

“But this is Brooklyn,” Hadley said. “Everything is in such close proximity to each other.” 

“No one’s saying that, ‘Well, we don’t want any buildings,’ but when you do this — and that’s what we’re focused on — why are you causing damage to other homes?”

‘Incredibly Stressful’

The residents THE CITY spoke to described their neighborhood as tight-knit and multicultural with historic homes. Now known as Little Caribbean, the area has been rapidly gentrifying, desired for its good transit options, historically designated homes and proximity to Prospect Park. 

Nicole DeCicco, 42, has used the nearby park as a refuge from her shaking building. 

“I typically partially work from home, and I haven’t been able to sit here and do work,” she said. “We’re getting woken up. They’re doing drilling at like 7 o’clock in the morning.” 

McCullough has lived in the co-op beside the lot for a little over a decade, which they said they cherish for its “building elders,” who have lived there for over 40 years. 

“It’s incredibly stressful to feel like the well-being of the building as a structure hinges on our awareness as just ordinary residents,” McCullough said. 

They are unsure what they will do about the cracks in their walls. 

“I can’t even get there,” they said. “I’m simply, I am trying to stop more from happening.”

Additional reporting by Greg B. Smith.

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Three days before a fatal fire May 4th at 207 Dyckman St. in Inwood, housing inspectors appeared at the six-story walkup and issued a dozen code violations.

One of those was for a non-functioning self-closing apartment entry door that was deemed “immediately hazardous.”

After the blaze was put out, firefighters discovered severe fire damage in eight apartments where entry doors had been left open. Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore made a point of noting that units where the doors were closed “had very little impact, no fire.”

The city’s housing code requires property owners to fix “immediately hazardous” violations — such as the self-closing door at Dyckman Street — within 24 hours.

But, according to city records and sworn statements, the building’s owners have a track record of letting dangerous conditions linger. 

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development has issued more than a thousand violations over the last few years to the landlords of the Dyckman Street building at properties they own across New York, an investigation by THE CITY has found.

The problems are so bad that HPD has been forced to file suit 16 times since 2020 alleging a persistent failure to address serious health and safety issues at 10 properties in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens controlled by co-owners of the Dyckman St. property, Jack Bick, Chaim Schweid and their affiliated real estate companies, records show.

Bick ranks 80th on Public Advocate Jumaane Williams’ list of the city’s 100 worst landlords.

“I have heard complaints that they don’t respond,” said a 22-year-old tenant of one of Janjan’s Manhattan buildings. “Like, they take years to, like, fix a problem.” 

As of last week those 10 buildings had racked up a total of 1,343 open housing code violations, including 406 listed as “immediately hazardous.”

On April 27, HPD sued Bick, Schweid and their firms Janjan Realty and SB Dyckman LLC over serious code violations at 209 Dyckman St. — the building next door to the fire site. That included citations for two fire safety issues: a blocked egress and a missing smoke detector.

As of last week both Dyckman Street buildings had a combined total of 336 open violations, 100 of them “immediately hazardous.”

A ‘Top Priority’ for Mamdani

At the time of the fire, 207 Dyckman St. had been placed in HPD’s “alternate enforcement program,” which targets landlords who accumulate an alarming number of serious violations within a year. Property owners in the AEP program are then subject to random inspections to clean up past outstanding violations. At 207 Dyckman, HPD and Janjan had resolved 85 past citations as of Thursday.

HPD told THE CITY it “will use every tool in its toolbox to ensure tenants are safe and landlords meet their obligations.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani “has been clear that enforcing housing quality is a top priority for this administration, and we will continue to take action against unsafe conditions and bad landlords whenever and wherever they exist,” the agency said in a statement.  

The lawsuits HPD has filed against Bick, Schweid and their firms highlight a persistent failure to address serious code violations at specific buildings. Over the last year, HPD had to sue Bick three times over violations at one of his buildings on Bessemund Avenue in Far Rockaway, then another three times over a building he controls a few blocks away on Hartman Lane.

Both locations included violations for non-working self-closing doors.

‘Unsafe Conditions’

At another Bick-owned Far Rockaway building on Bay 30th Street, HPD last month filed suit accusing the landlord of deliberately “neglecting those unsafe conditions as part of an intentional and aggressive campaign to harass and displace rent stabilized tenants.” They allege at one point a tenant without a lawyer was offered $100 to vacate their apartment.

Schweid controls four properties sued by HPD over the last few years, including a 49-unit rental building on Ocean Parkway in Kensington, Brooklyn.

In the last two years housing inspectors have fielded dozens of complaints about unsafe conditions there, and HPD has at times been forced to bill Schweid for repairs city-hired vendors had to perform when the landlord failed to do so. 

As of this week the Ocean Parkway building had 91 open violations, 30 of them “immediately hazardous.” Since December the building has been cited five times for non-functioning self-closing doors.

A lawyer for Bick did not return THE CITY’s calls seeking comment, and a message left at a number listed for Janjan Realty was not returned. A lawyer for Schweid did not return a call or an email from THE CITY.

On Thursday, fire department officials cited the Dyckman Street fire at a press conference touting a recent public service announcement they released following an April fire at a building on East 187th Street in The Bronx that resulted in two deaths. Officials said firefighters entering that building found many apartment entry doors had been left wide open.

First Deputy Fire Commissioner Dan Flynn advised New Yorkers to always close their doors and leave them closed when fleeing the scene of a fire.

Open doors create a chimney effect that spreads fire, smoke and flames — a factor that was in play during the May 4 Dyckman Street conflagration that killed three tenants, including People magazine journalist Yolaine Diaz and her mother, Ana Mirtha Lantigua.

“This year we’ve had many fatalities that have resulted from residents opening doors or leaving doors open,” Flynn said. “Closed doors will limit the spread of that fire, limit the spread of toxic gases and smoke.”

Flynn cited two examples in The Bronx where open doors contributed to the rapid spread of fatal fires — a December 2017 blaze on Prospect Avenue that caused 13 deaths, and a January 2022 fire in the Twin Parks building that killed 17.

“If not for an open door, I am confident that nobody would have died in either one of those fires,” he said.

Contributing: Lilly Sabella

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At a recent press conference announcing a sweeping takedown of rival gangs notorious for their wild shootouts across public housing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch made a point of praising the NYPD’s controversial gang database.

“Yes we certainly did use the criminal group database as part of this investigation,” Tisch said, using the department’s more ambiguous name for the gang list. Asserting that 60% of all shootings in the city have some nexus to gangs or crews, she said the database “remains a valuable tool in our efforts to keep New Yorkers safe.”

The police commissioner’s enthusiastic support stands in contrast to her boss’s feelings: as a candidate, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeatedly called for terminating the database entirely, embracing the contention promoted by some criminal justice reform advocates that it targets Black and Hispanic teens and young men.

The mayor recently backed off from his call to pull the plug and now insists the database must be reformed.

While a blueprint for fixing the gang database has been around for years, an analysis by THE CITY found that the NYPD stiff-armed or slow-walked nearly a dozen reforms recommended by the city’s ethics watchdog to address allegations of racial bias.

The database is perhaps the most high profile of several areas where Mamdani and Tisch have dramatically different perspectives. In the past he’s vowed to end a crackdown on lower level quality of life crimes and to eliminate a unit known as the Strategic Response Group that’s been criticized for heavy-handed tactics during protests. Tisch supports both.

In two reports since 2023, the city Department of Investigation suggested 30 reforms aimed at ensuring that people aren’t placed in the gang database without sufficient reason and aren’t kept there when there’s no evidence of continuing gang affiliation.

First DOI recommended that cops provide a clearer explanation of the evidence they use to justify placing someone in the database, a process known as “activation.” And they suggested creating a system to continually review the police justifications and a process for individuals or their parents to appeal inclusion.

While the NYPD adopted some of DOI’s recommendations, with the implementation of several still pending, the department under then-Commissioner Keechant Sewell rejected five outright, including the appeals protocol and changes to how often justifications are reviewed and who gets to review them.

NYPD spokesperson Erika Tannor said the department “continues to work on this and has made very meaningful progress, which DOI itself has unequivocally acknowledged.”

Meanwhile, Tisch has consistently championed the database, calling it a critical weapon to reduce gun crime.

“When we have a shooting in the city, we use the gang database to anticipate where we may see retaliatory violence, and that has helped drive our gun violence down,” she said at a Jan. 6 press conference with Mamdani standing next to her.

A key aspect of that effort is tracking the conversations taking place on social media that document gang beatings and sometimes describe in specific detail a gang’s plan to seek revenge when a member is beaten or shot by a rival.

That was the case with the takedown of two Brownsville gangs Tisch and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez announced April 15, when they unsealed indictments against 36 defendants ranging in age from 16 to 27 alleging felonies from murder to weapons possession.

The Brownsville investigation targeted a gang called WOOO and another called CHOO who for the last three years, prosecutors say, have engaged in a chaotic shooting war around several New York City Housing Authority developments. The grim score to date is 11 victims — including one homicide.

These battles created chaos. 

The DA played security video showing a 69-year-old man taking out his trash who was wounded when gunfire erupted. Another video showed children ducking and running as gang members opened fire across a playground. A cell phone video posted on social media depicted gang members beating up a rival in a plaza near Metrotech Center in downtown Brooklyn.

“This is life,” the poster is heard saying as the video captures his rival beaten and prostrate on the sidewalk.

Tisch noted that, “Of the 36 defendants, every single one of them was entered into that database.”

How It Works

The database consists of people — nearly all of them Black or Hispanic teenagers or young men — identified by law enforcement as gang members. The criteria to justify “activation” includes a subject “self-admitting” gang membership on social media or openly to police. Or, during an investigation, the individual is identified by two independent and reliable sources as a gang member. 

Until recently the department also factored in if the subject frequented “known gang locations,” flashed alleged gang hand signs or displayed gang-affiliated tattoos on social media.

David Sarni, a retired NYPD detective who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, described the database as a “tool that can help define motivations and relationships.”

The NYPD says monitoring social media chatter is particularly useful in identifying possible planned retaliation and ratcheting up police oversight of gang members making specific threats. 

As Michael Gerber, the deputy commissioner for legal matters, put it during a City Council hearing last year, “If we know from the database that a shooting victim is a gang member, the identities of rival gang members, and where those gangs are based, we can immediately deploy officers in a way that will help prevent retaliatory shootings.”

Sarni noted “activation” required at least two independent sources, and said the activation was supposed to be reviewed regularly to ensure there is evidence of ongoing gang affiliation. Individuals can then either be “renewed” or “deactivated” — that is, taken off the list.

For several years, cops could also see the names of people who had been “de-activated” but, Sarni said, “They stopped that. We don’t keep a person in the system for 50 years.” That modification was in response to DOI’s critiques.

Commissioner Tisch has asserted that information about gang affiliation stored in the database is not used to determine whether there is probable cause to arrest a person. It mainly helps detectives “determine who is involved and where retaliation is most likely to occur,” she has said.

While campaigning last year Mamdani had a very different view, labeling it a “vast dragnet of New Yorkers on the basis of whether they go out late, the photos they put on social media, so much of the facts of life of being a young New Yorker.”

Tattoos and Parades

Last spring the Legal Aid Society and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit in Brooklyn federal court calling the database racist and alleging it violates free speech, due process and equal protection sections of the Bill of Rights. In December a judge denied the city’s motion to toss the suit but also rejected the plaintiff’s move to declare it a class action on behalf of anyone placed in the database, limiting it to three men named as lead plaintiffs.

The suit alleges that 99% of those placed on the list are Black or Hispanic. And it says that mere placement in the database can be used as justification to stop and question people. 

Reviewing internal documents that detectives must fill out when proposing an individual for inclusion, Legal Aid said that cops have cited everything from “Mexican tattoos” to what they described as “cultural touchstones such as common gestures used by Black athletes” or “being present at the Puerto Rican Day parade.”

In the past, the list has included children as young as 11, the lawsuit says.

“It’s basically youth behaviour,” said Legal Aid staff attorney Rigodis Appling. “Youth culture is youth culture. If this were a white suburb doing these things, they would not be put on a gang database.” Juveniles make up 2.7% of the current database.

The Legal Aid Society, whose union urged Mamdani not to reappoint Tisch, says the database can’t be fixed  and that reforms the NYPD has claimed to have adopted are incremental and meaningless.

The Department of Investigation’s April 2023 and October 2025 reports on the database make clear the NYPD has moved slowly to adopt proposed fixes, rejecting some recommendations outright. 

The 2023 report submitted by NYPD Inspector General Jeanene Barrett to then-Police Commissioner Sewell examined what evidence the NYPD used to justify placing 493 people on the list and found the nature and documentation of individuals “self-admitting” to gang membership “varied widely.”

DOI noted that some social media postings cited to justify “activation” were “cursory, conclusory and failed to include sufficient detail to support” self-admission to a gang. Examples included cops relying on “certain emojis,” or “photos of individuals in the company of known gang members without more detail.” Some cops noted “social media content” with zero information on the nature of the content.

In 136 cases, cops “activated” individuals based on what they described as “two sources” but did not always “document the existence of two independent sources.” The report found cops in some cases simply designated entire Housing Authority developments as a “gang location.”

The NYPD under Commissioner Sewell agreed in principle to accept 11 recommendations, but rejected five outright, including drafting a written policy requiring all “activated” entries be reviewed every 12 months for teens under 18 and every 18 months for adults. The department said a review every two years for teens and every three years for adults was sufficient.

The NYPD also rejected DOI’s suggestion to create a panel to review all activations, and shot down a suggestion to create an appeals process for parents if their teens have no law enforcement contact for a year, contending it could compromise investigations and endanger informants.

The department at first rejected DOI’s request to let individuals file a public records request to see if they’re on the list, but relented after the Legal Aid Society threatened legal action.

In a second review in October, Investigations Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber found the NYPD had “made substantial improvements” but had not fully adopted five recommendations.

DOI noted, for example, that while the NYPD had initiated review of “activation,” there was still no supervisory oversight of renewals and deactivations. Last week the NYPD told THE CITY it is working on fixing this. 

While DOI recommended cops provide a detailed narrative explaining the justification for putting someone in the database, DOI found police continued to use “boilerplate language” to describe the source’s “reasonable belief” that the subject was a gang member. 

Now, NYPD spokesperson Tannor said, “Department policy has been updated to require that an individual’s reasonable belief must be supported by substantive explanations that the individual is a member of a criminal group.” 

“We have previously acknowledged that our process for making juvenile notifications was deficient,” Tannor said. “We are working to fix that.”

DOI also noted that sealed arrests aren’t supposed to be used to justify placement in the database, but found NYPD was still listing the top charge of sealed arrests in complaints to justify “activation.” This policy “is being updated,” the department said.

In its October report, DOI made 13 new recommendations, and in January NYPD agreed to accept all “in principle.” The NYPD said they should be in place by July. 

In February, nearly three years after DOI’s first report, the NYPD issued the biggest change to its gang database, embracing new protocols that eliminated many of the criteria cops had been using to justify “activation.” 

The department says it no longer uses categories such as “frequent presence at a known criminal group location” or “association with known criminal group members.” Scars and tattoos “associated with a particular criminal group” are no longer enough, nor is “frequent wearing of the colors” and “frequent use of hand signs associated with particular criminal groups.”

And they note that the number of people in the database has dropped from 18,000 in 2019 to its current 7,700 — a 58% drop. The number of juveniles fell from 440 to 209.

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As New York City barrels toward a legally mandated shutdown of Rikers Island after years of delays and fierce opposition, the Mamdani administration has tapped a key architect and booster of the original plan to help see it through.

Dana Kaplan, who helped coordinate the city’s blueprint to close the troubled jail complex, has been named the administration’s new “Rikers czar,” THE CITY has learned.

“Dana is a superlative choice to lead this complicated effort,” said Liz Glazer, her former boss at the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “This is a task that is beyond just Rikers — not just bricks and mortar, but changing the culture inside both for the people incarcerated and the officers.”

Kaplan, whose appointment has not been officially announced, did not immediately respond to a text message seeking comment. THE CITY spoke with two sources close to City Hall who confirmed her hiring. 

In March, the city said it was looking for a so-called Rikers czar to “serve as a trusted advisor to the mayor” and his top team. The salary was listed as $180,000 to $230,000. 

The city is legally required to shut down Rikers Island by 2027 and replace it with a network of smaller jails located near courthouses. 

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has acknowledged that the city will not meet that deadline but he has supported the broader plan and is seeking to move it along. His predecessor, Eric Adams, repeatedly talked about needing a “Plan B” for Rikers Island, but never detailed what that would look like. 

After leaving the mayor’s office in 2022, Kaplan worked with the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform and served as a senior advisor to the Independent Rikers Commission. 

The creation of the Rikers czar was one of the key recommendations of that commission.

New Jails, Old Oppositon

Kaplan’s appointment comes as the city on Wednesday marked a milestone in building the replacement jail system, raising the final steel beam at a new downtown Brooklyn facility set to open in 2029.

“The facilities on Rikers Island are very old, decrepit, and they don’t speak life into our staff or the people in our care,” Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards told reporters. 

Richards recalled how, as a pre-trial detainee on Rikers during his youth, he felt the jail was “punishing” his father, who had to make a long trek to visit him. 

“After that visit, I asked him not to come back,” Richards said. “We lived in the Bronx, and he had to take a bus, then a train, then another bus, just to get to the Island and go through the lengthy process of reaching one of the visit spaces in the jails.

“It took him an entire day for a one-hour visit,” he added. 

Supporters of the new jails note that they will make it easier for family and friends to visit. The new facilities are all closer to criminal courthouses. 

Currently, detainees are woken up as early as 4 a.m. and hauled to courts throughout the city. The process, known as Bullpen Therapy after the courthouse holding pens, is used by prosecutors to force defendants to plead guilty or accept inferior plea deals, criminal justice advocates say. 

The Brooklyn lockup is expected to be the first of the new jails completed, according to city officials. 

In January, construction began for the new jail in Chinatown, a project expected to take six years. The 1,040-bed jail on White Street, the final piece of the Rikers closing plan, is expected to cost $3.9 billion and to be completed in 2032.

Chinatown activists and community leaders have fought the project at every turn, from protests and lawsuits to direct appeals to City Hall, pressing their case to multiple mayors, including Mamdani.

The three unions representing city jail officers and supervisors have also long opposed the plan. They say it would be easier and cheaper to simply build new facilities on Rikers. 

Backers of the shutdown plan say the new borough facilities will redefine how people accused of crimes are cared for and treated. 

“The design principles that we are using, speak life into anybody who comes into the facility,” Richards said, “with community space, with social service space, with textures and paintings and colors and operational efficiencies that would allow the department to manage whoever comes into our care for generations.”

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An ongoing fight to keep a Brooklyn grandmother in her family home escalated on Wednesday morning when the police arrested Councilmember Chi Ossé as he protested the move.

Ossé (D-Brooklyn) was in front of the Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone with community supporters to prevent longtime resident Carmella Charrington from being evicted when officers from the New York Police Department pulled the Council member to the ground and cuffed him, face down, video shows.

New York City marshals were at the home to evict Charrington and to look for her father, who is under a conservatorship in the state of Georgia. Over two dozen protestors were also on the scene. The marshals called the NYPD for backup, as the protestors were blocking access to the house, and ended up making four arrests, including Ossé, according to an NYPD spokesperson. 

NYPD officers took Ossé to the local precinct, according to a statement from his office, and released him in the early afternoon. He was taken to a local hospital for evaluation shortly afterwards. Ossé and those arrested were charged with obstruction of governmental administration and disorderly conduct, NYPD said.

Charrington spoke with THE CITY Wednesday at the brownstone, just after she said she spent five days on Rikers Island, held in contempt for the conservatorship case involving her father and linked to the property.

“I swear I feel like I’m in ‘Get Out,’” she said, referring to the 2017 horror film. If she and her family lose the house, she said: “It’d be devastating. It’s four generations of irreparable harm.”

Charrington’s son, William McFadden, said his 6-year-old daughter was rattled by the police action taken Wednesday. McFadden, the daughter and his 7-month-old son were among the family members in the home when the police, marshals and members of the sheriff’s office arrived.

“No child should have to ask, ‘Daddy, why are they taking our house right now? Daddy, why are they changing the locks?’” McFadden said.

The family and their allies, including Ossé, are adamant the situation is deed theft. But officials and records point to a more complicated story.

Charrington’s home on a tree-lined block of Jefferson Avenue has been the subject of a fraught saga that goes back several years. Charrington said her family has owned the home for decades, but an LLC that claims to have purchased the home has tried to evict her for the past two years.

Speaking outside the Bedford-Stuyvesant precinct where he was held and before he went to the hospital, Ossé said it was a “very violent, fast, traumatic experience.”

“I was just there to stand for my neighbor who I didn’t want to see her and her family removed from her home,” Ossé said outside the precinct. “To be met with violence from the NYPD for doing my job has been really disheartening and truly traumatic.”

He said he would file a misconduct report, and he advocated for resources and funds to help homeowners fight deed theft.

Deed theft — made through schemes related to forged documents, short-sale, foreclosure-rescue scams and other mechanisms — can strip families of generational wealth, separating them from a valuable asset.

The office of Attorney General Letitia James also indicated it had determined in April 2025 that the situation at Charrington’s home was not a deed theft matter, but instead a property dispute owing to competing claims from the property’s former owners, including Charrington’s father.

In a social media post, James said her office has “been in contact with the resident of this home for over a year to offer guidance and advice on her legal battle.”

The history of the property is complex. 

In 2021, a company called Brooklyn Gates LLC signed an agreement with a family member who had a stake in the property at 212 Jefferson Ave. 

Brooklyn Gates LLC was run by brothers Elliot and Joseph Ambalo and their partner Etai Vardi, whose dealings THE CITY uncovered in a previous investigation. The trio was among the groups of speculators targeting homes in gentrifying, historically Black and Latino neighborhoods whose owners died and left a network of dispersed inheritors. The three men would buy partial deeds from the heirs — often well below the value of the multi-million-dollar homes — and leverage their new partial ownership to force out longtime residents.

By 2023, the LLC had terminated the agreement with the person who claimed to have a stake in the property. Vardi told THE CITY he canceled the contract because he didn’t want to take on such a risky matter. “We saw it’s very complicated with the family. Not for us. It’s too much problems,” he said.

In 2024, another company called 227 Group LLC purchased the home for $1.4 million from several alleged family members as part of an estate of the former owner. Some property records show 227 Group LLC and Brooklyn Gates LLC share the same address in Long Island City. Vardi chalked up that detail to a paperwork mistake, and emphasized his group is not involved with the property. 

An agent behind 227 Group LLC, Simon Blitz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment and another, Daniel Gazal, could not be reached. 

In an email, a spokesperson for the 227 Group LLC called the deed theft allegations false.

What’s in dispute has to do with whether those family members and the estate had the authority to sell the property to 227 Group LLC.

Allman Charrington, Carmella’s father, is in a conservatorship based in Georgia. A conservator is appointed to manage the finances, assets and property of a “ward” who is not competent to manage those affairs.

Georgia attorney Luanne Bonnie, who is listed as Allman’s conservator on property records, signed the deed on his behalf. Carmella and other family members have said the people who signed the deed over to 227 Group LLC did not have the right to do that. (Bonnie did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

A more recent deed, from January 2026, shows Allman Charrington transferring the property to Carmella, his daughter.

A judge sent Charrington to Rikers Island on April 16 after she did not bring her father to court as part of a case related to the conservatorship. Charrington and her family at the brownstone had been caring for him, they said. The city sheriff’s office and marshals who went to the home this morning had been looking for the father.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who made fighting deed theft a priority in his mayoral campaign, on Wednesday morning had not seen the video of Ossé’s arrest, but responded when a reporter described it to him. 

“That’s exactly something that we’re going to follow up on, not just on the nature of this arrest, but also what was the underlying issue that was being protested,” Mamdani said at an unrelated event in Queens. “I know [Ossé’s] been on the front lines of fighting deed theft. It’s especially prevalent in his Council district, and I appreciate, frankly, the efforts that he’s led in the past on ensuring that this is front of mind for all of us.”

Mamdani later posted to social media saying he had “seen the concerning footage of Council Member Chi Ossé’s arrest earlier today and am in touch with [NYPD] Commissioner Tisch about the nature of the arrest.”

Additional reporting from Claudia Irizarry Aponte and Katie Honan.

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While seated behind the wheel of his green cab at East 125th Street and Park Avenue, Bakary Kane recalled how optimistic he felt more than seven years ago when he became the owner of a so-called Boro Taxi.

But with the number of green cab drivers sinking to its lowest level ever, Kane said he regularly must work seven days a week just to pay his bills.

“I had a lot of hope,” the 50-year-old driver told THE CITY outside the Harlem-125th Street Metro-North station on Monday. “But now I will say that turning green was maybe the worst decision I ever made.”

The latest New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission numbers paint an increasingly bleak picture for the green cabs that arrived in Northern Manhattan and the boroughs in 2013 as an alternative for neighborhoods not typically served by yellow taxis. 

That was around the time that Uber and tens of thousands of for-hire vehicles began upending the entire industry with on-demand rides passengers booked via their mobile devices.

TLC data shows there were just 539 working green cab drivers in February — a nearly 93% collapse from May 2015, when 7,521 operators were picking up street hails in the boroughs and Upper Manhattan.

Those numbers jumped out at Nancy Reynoso, who became the city’s first green cab operator in the summer of 2013 before she threw in the towel in March 2022.

“I was shocked to find out that there are even that many — 539, oh wow!” said Reynoso, who went on to work at the LEGOLAND New York Resort in Orange County and as a mail carrier after turning in her TLC license plates. 

Green cabs averaged 1,304 daily trips in February, according to TLC data, down almost 98% from the peak of 57,637 trips per day in May 2015. The number of those on the road fell to 522 in February, lower even than the 671 that remained in service during the early days of the pandemic in April 2020.

At their June 2015 peak, more than 6,500 green cabs were working in Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and north of East 96th Street and West 110th Street in Manhattan.

The collapse of the green cab industry has hit those behind the wheel hard, even as drivers can accept pre-arranged trips from for-hire vehicle bases and over the ride-hailing apps.

At its peak in May 2015, green cab drivers averaged $114 a day from trips, totaling $862,099 in revenue across all drivers, which doesn’t include additional earnings from credit card tips. In February, those earnings dropped to roughly $52 a day, according to an analysis of TLC data. 

“The starting time was good, but now it’s very bad,” said Syed Kabir, a 52-year-old father of three from Bangladesh who has been a green cab driver since 2014. “No, no, no — no good business.” 

That’s in contrast to competitors in the taxi and for-hire vehicle industry, which have regained significantly larger portions of their shares of pre-pandemic ridership.

TLC data shows that high-volume for-hire vehicles, such as Uber and Lyft, had 19.8 million trips in February, almost 99% of pre-2020 levels. Yellow taxis are at 47% of pre-pandemic trip levels. The green cabs, meanwhile, are at just 6.5%.

“Economically, it doesn’t give you results like the yellows, because the greens can’t go into the central business district of Manhattan,” said Jose Altamirano, president of Livery Base Owners, an association representing more than 250 bases citywide.

Altamirano added that those restrictions leave green cab owners and drivers to scrap for leftovers, while the more than 82,000 vehicles from app-based services battle for passengers alongside close to 11,000 yellow taxis.

“Instead of getting the juiciest part of the meat, you’re chewing on the bones,” he said. “And now you’re competing against filet mignon.”

On Monday afternoon, more than a dozen green cabs were parked outside the Metro-North station on 125th Street, with drivers waiting for would-be passengers to emerge.

Several drivers stationed alongside the elevated Park Avenue railroad tracks said the waits can be long.

“One hour, half an hour,” said Tamzid Khan, 45. “We’ve all been waiting more than 40 minutes.”

TLC has pushed a pilot program aimed at boosting business for the struggling green cab sector.

The commission approved changes in May 2023 that allow up to 2,500 out-of-use green cab licenses to be reactivated — but minus required upfront and operating costs that include green paint jobs, partitions, metered trips, rooftop lights and vehicle markings.

Licensed vehicles in the street-hail livery pilot program are mandated to have trips booked through livery bases and cannot be hailed on the street, unlike the green cabs. 

A September 2025 report on the initiative found that only 563 permits from the test were actively in use as of last June after 3,509 were initially issued. A TLC spokesperson said that as of February, there are 441 licenses in good standing.

The report last year noted that the drop in driver demand suggests that the business model envisioned by TLC “is of limited viability.” In addition, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance filed suit against TLC in state court, charging that the pilot program runs counter to state law by not allowing street hail livery vehicles to be hailed on the street.

Citing pending litigation, TLC declined to comment on the lawsuit, though a spokesperson said the trial run has been extended through June. 

“The TLC is committed to supporting all our drivers — including our green cab drivers —  as we move into a new era of solving the problems licensees face every day,” TLC spokesperson James Parziale said in a statement. “We will actively listen to the city’s hardworking drivers and will continue to use all the tools at our disposal to improve their economic well-being.”

Altamirano, of the Livery Base Owners group, expressed optimism that the remaining green cabs and their owners can be saved from further damage.

“The greens could be revamped, the state should look at making this less complicated,” he said. “There are a lot of requirements that the greens have to do.”

Reynoso, the original green cab driver, was less upbeat.

She said she worries about the future of the remaining green cab drivers — a far cry from the day in November 2013 when she drove then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg back to his Upper East Side home from Brooklyn after he marked the arrival of 1,000 such vehicles on city streets.

“I was always hoping, keeping fingers crossed, that it would get better for the people who [stayed],” Reynoso said. “But I don’t see that it’s happening.”

She added that she is hopeful that the bleeding can be stopped for green cab owners and drivers under Midori Valdivia, the incoming TLC Commissioner.

“Everybody made an investment to get in there, you know?” Reynoso said. “They didn’t do this to not make enough money or to feel like you’re being left out of the big pie.”

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After 15 years, volunteers at a Bushwick farm found themselves locked out of the green space that has fed thousands over the years, and lately became a temporary home for asylum seekers. The property owner told them he doesn’t want “any headaches” — and now, the gardeners are hoping the city will move to make it an official, protected community space.

“We were really unaware that the situation had changed until Wednesday, when he showed up quite upset,” Spike Appel, a longtime volunteer of Bushwick City Farm, said of the property owner, Faramarz Roshodesh. “He grabbed our lock and threw it in his car.” 

The closure follows numerous problems on the property in the last few years. Following former Mayor Eric Adams’ order in late 2023 that limited how long migrant families could stay in a city shelter, asylum seekers were routinely sleeping on the farm grounds. 

“The city put out a lot of people into the street and we were kind of left with a handful of guys that kept hopping the fence to sleep,” Appel said. “I personally kicked them out probably a hundred times, waking them up in the morning.” 

Farm volunteers had testified repeatedly to the City Council, urging agencies to help the migrants find permanent housing. 

“BCF is now overrun with rats and trash, and it has been difficult to maintain the space clean and safe for everyone to use,” the volunteers wrote in a November 19, 2024 statement to the City Council Committee on Immigration and Welfare. 

“The space does not have enclosed structures … so during the winter months it’s inhospitable, but asylum seekers who find no better option end up sleeping in there,” the testimony continued.  

Beginning in 2011, volunteers have transformed the two combined vacant lots into a garden at the corner of Lewis Avenue and Stockton Street, where two dozen chickens, 60 raised beds for vegetables, an aquaponics system, and a communal space providing free food for the community. 

“It takes a long time to build what we built there, you can’t just pick it up and move it,” Appel added. 

Over the last three years, hundreds of asylum seekers have entered the farm, finding food, water, clothes, community and resources. It’s also been a place where Club A Kitchen, a mutual aid group, has distributed thousands of free meals to the community, including up to 1,800 a week during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the group. 

But the farm does not have a current agreement with Roshodesh, the owner, to use the space, complicating its status.

It isn’t the first time the farm has faced eviction. In 2017, Roshodesh sent a letter telling volunteers it had days to shut down, but after a protest and public outcry, he eventually decided to allow the farm to stay open.

That’s why, since 2017, longtime volunteers, like Mariel Acosta, have spoken at City Council hearings and reached out to local politicians, pushing the city to step in. Ideally, the group wants GreenThumb, the community garden operator for NYC Parks and Recreation, to take over the space.

“It’s confusing and convoluted, and I guess that’s the nature of bureaucracy, paperwork, going to meetings, and trying to get in touch with politicians,” said Acosta. “It’s just painstaking, and it shouldn’t be taking this long.” 

A spokesperson for the Parks Department said GreenThumb met with Bushwick City Farm leaders in 2025, but said there is currently no active discussion or plan for the city acquiring the farm.

For the city to buy the farm, Roshodesh, who did not respond to THE CITY’s requests for comment would have to agree to sell it. Then funding for the purchase would have to be secured — likely from a mix of public sources. The property would also have to go through the city’s lengthy Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) process, according to the spokesperson.

“I just don’t want any headaches,” Roshodesh told volunteers last week as he locked the farm gates. “This is too much. I’m done!” 

Fines and Taxes

In recent months, the farm hit an impasse as volunteers struggled to prevent people from sleeping on the grounds overnight, they said. 

Gardeners said that after weeks of reaching out unsuccessfully to the Department of Homeless Services about helping the men find shelters or housing, Appel said members of the local precinct council suggested getting a vacate order to prevent them from sleeping on the property. 

But when officials from the city Department of Buildings conducted their inspection, they fined the owner for having structures, including a gazebo, that were over 7 feet tall without a permit. 

That joint inspection with the New York Police Department and the Department of Sanitation resulted in multiple violations on the farm and its neighboring lot, 23 Lewis Ave., according to DOB records.

Inspectors reported two violations, fining Roshodesh and his company, Arrow Property, $1,250 for a 10-foot-tall gazebo that was used to distribute food without a permit, according to Department of Building records, and $2,500 for electrical wiring that took power from a public streetlight for use on the privately owned lot. 

Roshodesh is set to appear at an April 15 hearing with the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings to address the violations. 

The fines come as Roshodesh owes the city more than $550,000 in property taxes — $285,865 for the 23 Lewis Ave. lot and $267,771.20 for the 354 Stockton St. lot, according to Department of Finance records. 

Councilmember Chi Ossé, who represents the area, said he’s working with city officials, Roshodesh and the site’s volunteers to find a solution. 

“We are looking into the citation, speaking to all parties involved and see how we can chart forward,” Ossé told THE CITY. “I think community gardens are integral to this district, to this community and social opportunities for people at a time when things are very divisive.” 

For Acosta, the farm is important because of what it represents. 

“It’s been a space of pedagogy, of transmission of knowledge from elders in the community to us, who are like older millennials, to the youth who were little kids,” she said. “It’s very meaningful and a space of respite for an area that doesn’t have many green spaces.”

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More than 400 nurses at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, where officials warned of a dire financial hole, have been cut off from health insurance coverage for six weeks, according to their union.

Gov. Kathy Hochul provided $15 million in emergency state aid recently to the financially strapped 181-year-old community hospital that borders Fort Greene Park, multiple sources told THE CITY. Hospital officials requested $160 million last fall, and the $15 million is not enough to restore health benefits for the nurses, according to the New York State Nurses Association. 

Officials with the nurses union told THE CITY that workers feel targeted by hospital administrators’ decision not to pay into their health care fund. Nurses are the only hospital  employees without coverage; doctors, administrative staff and other workers have been unaffected.

“You chose the nurses, the one group of people that actually show up — rain, sun, sleet, snow,” said Rehana Lowtan, a nurse educator who began her career at the hospital 20 years ago. “We have nurses here that have serious medical conditions. They have families that are on their plans that don’t have access to any kind of care right now.” 

The nurses who spoke to THE CITY said they do not know when, or if, coverage will be reinstated. 

“There’s no communication,” said Yvette Byer-Henry, a certified nurse midwife who has worked at the hospital for 25 years. “It just reeks.”  

A spokesperson for the hospital, Zack Fink, said the facility is “working closely with NYSNA and the Hochul administration on a solution.”

“The Brooklyn Hospital Center values our NYSNA represented nurses and recognizes that medical benefits are an essential part of supporting our colleagues and their families. The immediate issue is securing the funds necessary to continue covering those medical benefits,” he said in a statement.

The hospital has requested additional money from the state on top of the $74 million it received in 2025. The plea for help comes as the facility considers bankruptcy, the hospital’s chief executive Gary G. Terranoni, told Spectrum News in November.

Bill Hammond, a senior fellow for health policy at the Albany-based think tank the Empire Center, called the hospital’s failure to pay nurses’ benefits “a move of desperation” that could show the governor it needs the requested aid.

“That would communicate to the state we are in deep trouble, and it would turn the nurses into your allies for pushing the state for money,” he said. “If that is their strategy that would be using them as a bargaining chip.”

The State and the Safety Net

Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest (D-Brooklyn), said the reality of safety net hospitals necessitates state aid, explaining that Medicaid reimburses the hospital below the cost of its care. 

“The reimbursement rates are not on par with the care that is being given,” she said. 

“Ultimately, the responsibility rests with the state that hospitals like Brooklyn Hospital Center should be made whole,” added Souffrant Forrest, who has worked as a nurse. “Unfortunately, the governor is trickling in funding. She did make the choice not to include increases in safety net funding overall in last year’s budget.”

Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Brooklyn Hospital Center’s nurses averted a strike in January by coming to a tentative agreement on a labor contract with management. The terms included the hospital fully providing the nurses’ health care and pension benefits.

The nurses, who said they were unaware that the hospital had not paid the benefits fund since November, accepted the contract, but it has not yet been ratified.

“If they are in a financial crisis, [hospital officials] should not be making promises they can’t keep,” Hammond said.

Byer-Henry told THE CITY the hospital has failed to make monthly payments to the benefit fund in the past, but this is the first time nurses have lost health care.

“When you made the decision to not pay one portion of your employees’ benefit, what was your thinking going forward?” Byer-Henry said. “Because you can’t run a hospital without nurses — nurses are the backbone of the hospital.” 

Brooklyn Hospital Center is a safety net hospital and is not affiliated with large providers such as Mount Sinai Health System or Northwell Health.

Instead, its primary source of income is from its patients. About 80% are covered by Medicaid and Medicare, where the hospital receives its reimbursement and funding, according to a recent report from the Healthcare Association of New York State. 

President Donald Trump’s recent cuts to Medicaid have hurt safety net institutions like Brooklyn Hospital. 

According to Hammond, the request for state aid also points to a broader issue of hospitals relying on the state for emergency bailouts, rather than having long-term plans to solve their fiscal problems. 

“That makes it more likely that hospitals will get in financial trouble in the future because they have a reasonable expectation they can squeeze money out of the state,” he said.

The nurses at Brooklyn Hospital Center currently face what Hammond called, “a very painful irony” — confronting the health care system every day while not having coverage for medical care themselves. 

Byer-Henry said she continues to show up at the hospital to work, despite the changes in her insurance. She previously thought her husband’s insurance would cover her, but found out on Wednesday it would not.

“I do it because I love my patients,” she said. “A lot of my patients don’t want to see anyone else.”

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A major snowstorm that blanketed the city overnight forced criminal arraignment courts across New York City to remain closed until 2 p.m. Monday, delaying the processing of newly arrested people and raising fresh concerns about potential backlogs in already strained holding facilities and courthouses. 

By mid-afternoon, courts began working through arrests mostly made before the snow began to pummel the city Sunday night, according to a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Court Administration.

The temporary shutdown came just days after the Legal Aid Society filed an emergency habeas corpus petition accusing the Police Department and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office of holding people for longer than the legally allowed 24 hours before arraignment.

Under a landmark New York Court of Appeals 1991 ruling commonly known as Roundtree, police must bring someone arrested without a warrant before a judge “without unnecessary delay,” which courts have interpreted to generally mean within 24 hours, except in extraordinary circumstances. The decision has long served as the legal backbone governing how long people can be held in central booking before arraignment.

When attorneys filed the so-called writ on Feb. 13, the scale of the backlog was significant, according to Legal Aid.

In Brooklyn, 317 people were awaiting arraignment including 127 who had already been held for more than 24 hours.

“That’s a very, very high number in terms of what we are used to seeing,” Jennifer Hose, a supervising attorney with Legal Aid’s Decarceration Project, told THE CITY about the Brooklyn figures. 

By contrast, in Manhattan, there were 175 people awaiting arraignment, with 32 over the 24-hour threshold, while the Bronx had 162 people waiting, including 58 held longer than a day.

Legal Aid attorneys sought immediate court intervention, asking a judge to order the release of anyone held beyond the legal time limits unless officials could provide a sufficient explanation for the delays. 

The Legal Aid complaint triggered a major response from top city police officials and state court bigwigs. 

The NYPD’s deputy commissioner of operations and the Office of Court of Administration chief administrative judge came to the Brooklyn arraignment courts to speed along cases, said Tina Luongo, chief attorney of the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society.

“Everybody was paying attention. They opened extra parts [of the court] and a lobster shift from 1 a.m. to 8 a.m.,” she added. 

It took four days before Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Adam Perlmutter formally took on the case due to the President’s Day weekend. 

Last Tuesday, he ordered the NYPD to detail every person who was being held at that time for longer than 24 hours and to explain why they were still locked up.  

By then, practically the entire backlog had been cleared. 

Blame to Go Around

Still, even after it was resolved, the logjam triggered finger-pointing across the city’s criminal justice system. 

Legal Aid blamed police for increasing low-level arrests that add volume to already strained arraignment calendars. 

In a statement Monday, the New York City Police Department said there have been no recent policy changes that would affect arrest levels.

“There was a slight uptick two weeks ago, but that increase should not have impacted the system this significantly,” a department spokesperson said via email. “This is more an issue about the OCA not processing people efficiently.”

The Office of Court Administration did not respond to an email seeking comment regarding the court case. 

Police officials also said the department had repeatedly asked the New York State Unified Court System to open additional court sections in recent weeks to ensure people were arraigned within legal time limits but were told staffing shortages prevented that from happening.

The department pointed to a series of disruptions that it said contributed to delays, including limited court operations on Lincoln’s Birthday and Presidents’ Day holidays, as well as construction that affected detainee movement inside the Brooklyn courthouse on Feb. 14.

Legal Aid attorneys contend many arrests are unnecessary and could instead be handled with desk appearance tickets, while also faulting prosecutors for choosing to pursue some of those cases. 

Brooklyn DA spokesperson Oren Yaniv said all the cases involved people with long rap sheets. 

“The low-level transit cases that resulted in custodial arrests overwhelmingly involved individuals with extensive criminal histories that raised legitimate concerns about the risk of further offenses,” Yaniv told THE CITY in a statement.

Legal Aid countered, saying four of the cases involved a person arrested for using two seats on the subway, said Hose, who noted some of those people had other outstanding warrants. 

One person was arrested for double parking and spent more than 24 hours making their way through the arraignment process, she added, noting that person did not have an open warrant in another case. 

The arrests come as Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has publicly rejected suggestions that the department is returning to so-called broken windows policing. That crime prevention policy — celebrated during the Giuliani administration — focused on low-level quality of life crimes as a way of making a community feel safer. 

Speaking to reporters in early January, Tisch said the NYPD’s Quality of Life Division was created in response to a sharp rise in 311 complaints involving noise and parking abuses across the city, not as a broad crackdown strategy.

“By no means a return to broken windows policing,” Tisch said, describing the initiative as an effort to respond to neighborhood concerns such as noise complaints and abandoned vehicles. “These are things that we had not historically been responsive to, and New Yorkers were begging us for help.”

The backlog does not appear to be tied to a sudden spike in enforcement, police records show. 

Brooklyn has seen only about a 5% increase in arrests so far this year, rising from roughly 10,200 to 10,800 compared with the same period last year, according to NYPD statistics. 

The Legal Aid Society case was so sensitive that organization officials met with Tisch last Thursday to discuss it at 1 Police Plaza. 

“It shouldn’t take a writ,” Luongo told THE CITY Monday. “They explained that they saw some issues with the court and inefficiencies with courtrooms and construction.” 

Luongo argued that the lower level offenses should not lead to arrests, and people should be given so-called desk appearance tickets instead. 

“There’s a human cost: people who are in custody, on lower level cases like taking two seats on a subway, are in horrendous conditions,” she said. “Some of them may lose their shelter bed. There are consequences to being held.” 

“There’s also a real financial cost to holding somebody who should not be held,” she added, referring to the need for more staff. “That means overtime.”

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now holding immigrants in two different cell blocks inside of the Metropolitan Detention Center, a hulking federal jail in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.  

That news came from Rep. Dan Goldman, whose district encompasses the prison and who toured the facility for the first time on Wednesday, speaking to several detainees who had been held there for months. 

ICE officials told Goldman, the first member of Congress to visit since the agency started housing immigrants there last summer, that 191 people were being held as of Wednesday afternoon in two cell blocks with a combined capacity of 248 detainees. That’s nearly a fifth of the prison’s overall capacity of 1,300 people. 

While Goldman told THE CITY following his hour-long visit that he didn’t encounter any major problems, federal habeas corpus lawsuits and interviews with immigrants locked up there in recent months described frequent lock downs, inedible food, and difficulty accessing medical care.

Those are issues that prisoners charged with federal crimes or serving short sentences inside the prison have long described, and are well-documented in news reports and federal court filings over many years. But ICE detainees, unlike people in the criminal justice system, aren’t guaranteed attorneys to advocate on their behalf. 

“Even sleeping wasn’t easy,” a 30-year-old from Guinea recalled in French. The man, who asked to remain anonymous, spent seven months inside MDC after his arrest following an immigration court appearance last summer. 

He eventually learned about pro bono attorneys at Make the Road New York through another immigrant being held there. The nonprofit filed a habeas corpus writ on his behalf in early January, and a judge ordered his release the same day.

“It’s suffering. That’s what I went through there,” he said. “People are suffering there.”

Goldman said he didn’t know when ICE had opened the second block for its detainees. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, didn’t return a request for comment.

Lawsuits paint grim picture

MDC, the only federal lock-up in New York City, houses notorious inmates like Nicolás Maduro and Luigi Mangione. Last June, it also started holding ICE detainees. 

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who are supposed to be able to conduct unannounced inspections of any place ICE detainees are being held, had been repeatedly denied entry. 

Wednesday was the first time Goldman attempted to visit since a court order last December reaffirmed the law requiring ICE to let members of Congress inspect its detention facilities. 

But while congress members are allowed to enter other ICE facilities unannounced, Goldman’s MDC visit had to be pre-planned because the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees the jail, requires advance notice. 

“It didn’t jump out that there were any serious issues in terms of the actual conditions other than being in jail,” Goldman told THE CITY after the visit. “They were getting fed. They had access to the basketball court, rec area. There were a couple of TVs. They had access to computers.”

But several lawsuits filed by ICE detainees held there since last summer paint a grim broader picture, with several describing difficulty accessing medical care. 

A Colombian man with HIV, referred to in legal filings as O.F.B., went more than a week without access to his preventative HIV medication despite asking staff at the prison for them multiple times each day, according to a federal habeas corpus case filed last November. 

“His health deteriorated quickly, and Mr. B worried no one would ever help him and he would die,” read his lawsuit, filed by Brooklyn Defender Services. 

“He felt feverish, sore and weak. His lips got extremely chapped and they began to break and bleed, and his leg broke out in an infected pustule; that is when the medical staff at MDC took notice. Mr. B told them that HIV can spread through blood, and that his pustule oozing and his lips cracking and bleeding was a health hazard. Mr B was finally given HIV medication that day.”

His attorneys declined to comment further on the case.

Another HIV-positive detainee who spoke with THE CITY on the condition of anonymity described going more than two weeks without access to his antiviral medications. 

“I was so stressed out,” the man, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who was held at MDC for two months last summer, told THE CITY in Spanish. “That’s the thing that keeps me healthy,” he said. Without it, “whatever illness, even a fever, can be fatal for me.”

In another legal filing, Jonathan, a 34-year-old Mexican man, described months of severe dental pain that prevented him from eating and sleeping. While he needed a tooth pulled, he was offered only ibuprofen. “The pain affects his ability to eat and sleep, he has been told to simply wait,” his attorney wrote in a December filing. 

Several detainees described prolonged lockdowns where they would be trapped in their small cell with a roommate for days at a time, sometimes for the entire weekend, or for several days if a high profile inmate was entering or leaving the building. 

“They’d lock us in for any little thing,” the Venezuelan man told THE CITY. “Sometimes for three days at a time.”

A Queens high school student, one of the few Bangladeshi immigrants held at MDC, spent a month there last fall, barely able to communicate with anyone. The twelfth grader told THE CITY he instead tried to focus on improving his English. He suffered frequent stomach aches from food he said was “cold, hard, or spoiled.” Sometimes he opted not to eat at all. 

When he was released, his teachers and principal welcomed him back, offering extra support so he could keep up with his classes. “You’re not alone, we’re here with you,” they told him, he recalled. “They love me so much.”

The teen said he’s trying to focus on his future, but the dark weeks he spent inside a small cell still come to mind. 

“That’s my worst memory, I’ll never forget about that,” he said. “I don’t want anyone else to go through that.”

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