The Buildings Department slapped new violations on the owners of the building where three tenants died in a fire last week after inspectors found padlocks on doors leading to rooms with fire escape exits, records show.

Inspectors also alleged that a rear courtyard where the fire escape leads to was obstructed by debris, blocking access to the street.

“This poses a safety risk to tenants,” according to a violation served on owners Jack Bick and SB Dyckman LLC on May 7, three days after a fire allegedly caused by a dropped cigarette ripped through the six-story tenement at 207 Dyckman St., killing three tenants and leaving five others in critical condition.

Inspectors also discovered the basement of the aging tenement had been illegally subdivided into what they described as four single-room occupancy flats.

The danger of a blocked fire escape was made clear by the May 4 fire, which prosecutors say started with a flicked cigarette in the lobby that soon ignited and raced up the stairwell to the bulkhead leading to the roof. 

Escape by the stairwell was impossible, forcing tenants to instead seek a way out via the fire escape. Three tenants, including a fashion journalist for People magazine and her mother, perished in the blaze. Five other tenants were critically injured.

The Buildings Department served the owners with three violations, including one that alleged they “observed throughout different apartments second means of egress was obstructed.” That included discovering padlocks “on the doors leading to some of the rooms leading to the fire escape in apartments #21 and #33.”

An attorney for Bick did not return THE CITY’s call Wednesday.

Homicide Charges

On Tuesday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Victor Arias, 29, a tenant in the building, with criminally negligent homicide. Prosecutors allege Arias returned home shortly after midnight on May 4th and sat down on a window sill in the lobby to smoke a cigarette. Law enforcement officials say he tossed his cigarette into a cardboard box and went upstairs to his apartment to go to bed.

The boxes soon ignited and the fire then jumped to the stairway. When firefighters arrived they found several tenants scrambling on to the fire escape fleeing the blaze.

THE CITY reported Sunday that the city Department of Housing Preservation & Development has sued the landlords of the Dyckman Street building 16 times over serious violations at 10 buildings they own across the city. The owners have also racked up more than 1,300 housing code violations, including citations for non-functioning self-closing doors.
Fire Department officials said apartments in the Dyckman Street building where the entry doors were closed suffered little damage. Eight units where the doors were left open were gutted.

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The city’s Correction Department is set to renew a multimillion-dollar contract with a prison telecom giant that’s bragged of using recordings of detainees’ private phone calls to train its artificial intelligence model.  

The Mamdani administration plans to pay Securus Technologies up to $23 million over five years for phone service used by roughly 7,000 people detained on Rikers Island, according to a notice in the City Record. The contract is set to begin July 1.

The Brooklyn Defenders legal aid group and technology experts are urging the Mamdani administration to scrap the agreement, arguing it could hand over vast amounts of personal data including recordings, voiceprints and social connections to a private company with limited oversight and a checkered history.

The conversations people in jail have with their loved ones include intimate moments and private, vulnerable, interactions. It was unclear if, in addition to being recorded, the private calls of New York City detainees are being used to train Securus’ AI model. 

In a memo opposing the contract, Brooklyn Defenders warned of “a community surveillance apparatus that reaches far beyond jail walls, sweeping up the families, friends, and communities of incarcerated New Yorkers without their knowledge.”

Securus began developing AI systems in 2023 using its archive of recorded jail calls to train models designed to flag potential criminal activity, company president Kevin Elder told MIT Technology Review.

One model, he said, was built using seven years of calls from the Texas prison system, with additional efforts underway to create similar tools tailored to other states and localities.

Over the past year, the company has been testing these tools to analyze inmate conversations in real time, according to Elder. 

He described the system as capable of scanning what he called a “treasure trove” of data, using large language models to identify signs that a crime may be planned, with the goal of detecting potential criminal activity earlier in its development.

Correction officials pushed back on several of the concerns raised by advocates — particularly related to immigration enforcement — saying the agency has not enrolled in Securus’ broader data-sharing network.

“The Department has not opted-in to any data or information sharing application with external users,” spokesperson Latima Johnson said in a statement. 

The contract’s confidentiality provisions bar Securus from sharing reports or data without prior written approval from the department, she added.

Department officials declined to answer detailed questions about whether federal immigration authorities have ever sought access to the data, or whether the new contract contains additional safeguards related to AI or third-party integrations.

The proposed contract has not been made available to the public.

Advocates point out Securus was found to have improperly recorded hundreds of attorney-client calls from Rikers, which was later disclosed to prosecutors in 2020 and 2021. 

The issue came to light after public defenders discovered the recordings in evidence shared by prosecutors. The company ultimately deleted the affected calls and worked with the city to overhaul safeguards.

Representatives for Securus, headquartered in Dallas, did not respond to an email seeking comment. 

‘Swept Into These Systems’

Zina Maka, a law professor who studies prison surveillance and emerging technologies, said prison systems historically operate with broad secrecy and legal deference.

“A lot of things that happen in the prison space are subject to a significant amount of opacity,” she told THE CITY.

The introduction of technology has improved communication in jails and prisons — detainees now have access to tablets for video calls — and educational offerings for incarcerated people. 

But it also expands surveillance beyond jail walls, Maka said. 

“Families who have done nothing wrong are increasingly swept into these systems simply because they’re communicating with someone in custody,” she said.

Critics noted Securus’ THREADS platform, which aggregates call recordings, transcripts, voiceprints and financial data to map social connections and flag behavioral patterns that investigators deem suspicious.

Securus previously said the database included information from more than 1.5 million people — including many who were never incarcerated but had received calls from someone who was.

The Correction Department says recorded calls to and from Rikers are not part of the THREADS community. 

Current jail officials did not detail what, if any, privacy protections would be part of the new contract. 

Brooklyn Defenders also raised concerns about a feature that allows participating agencies to share data across jurisdictions. If enabled, that tool could pool New York City jail data with information from facilities in other states — including some that routinely detain immigrants for federal authorities. 

That could potentially allow outside investigators to search data on New Yorkers locked up on Rikers, critics of the new contract say. 

DOC officials maintained that none of the calls would be shared with ICE. 

‘Control every word’

Bianca Tylek, executive director of advocacy group Worth Rises, said the Correction Department should stop recording detainee calls altogether..

“People’s detention is the punishment,” she told THE CITY. “But there are tons of private moments — conversations about family finances, mental health, things that have nothing to do with crime — that really shouldn’t be the purview of the government.”

Tylek also pointed to the impact on people outside the jail system. 

“It’s not just the person who’s incarcerated,” she said. “Families who have done nothing wrong are caught up in this surveillance — their voices are recorded, databased and stored for years, if not forever.”

One mother, whose son has been held on Rikers Island for more than two years, said the constant monitoring has fundamentally changed how they speak to each other.

“We have to control every word,” the woman, who asked not to be named, told THE CITY. “It’s impossible to really talk with my son about his children.”

She said her son sometimes breaks down crying on the phone but avoids discussing why because he assumes the conversations are being recorded.

Tylek noted that recording calls made from jail only started in 2008 under former Commissioner Martin Horn. Initially, the calls would be kept for 18 months before being erased. DOC did not say if that is still the case. Horn has long argued the recordings are a key tool to keeping people safe in jail and for prosecutors to bolster their criminal cases. 

Tylek noted that city officials have never publicly disclosed data on how often the recorded calls have led to those outcomes. 

“We’ve asked DOC to share how many hours they are recording and what percentage of those calls are being flagged for any security purposes,” she said. 

Commissioner Defends Contract

The contract renewal with Securus was spearheaded by James Conroy, the department’s deputy commissioner for legal matters. Conroy, who spent 25 years with the NYPD’s legal department, joined Corrections in 2024. 

The proposed deal must still be formally registered by City Comptroller Mark Levine. His office is reviewing the contract, which will likely take several weeks, spokesperson Terrence Cullen said. 

The contract extension comes as the Mamdani administration has hired a senior advisor for technology and innovation to oversee the city’s expanded use of AI. Rashida Richardson, a civil rights attorney, previously served as senior counsel at Mastercard. 

Asked about the Securus deal, she responded, “I have to decline.”

The contract comes as new Corrections Commissioner Stanley Richards has publicly talked about his difficult experience as a detainee on Rikers during the 1980s as he struggled with addiction. 

Richards defended the contract at an unrelated event last week, saying the calls would not be shared with ICE.

Asked if he’d have been concerned about his calls from Rikers Island to his father being recorded back in the day, Richards responded, “No.”

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City lawyers have agreed to pay nearly $5.2 million to settle lawsuits brought by the families of two men who died from methadone overdoses while jail staff ignored them on Rikers Island.

The settlements come amid a sharp rise in claims and a dramatic spike in taxpayer-funded payouts by the Department of Correction. 

In fiscal year 2024, the city logged 7,254 claims, up from 4,580 the previous year and eclipsing prior highs, according to data from the city comptroller’s office. Payouts ballooned to about $254 million, up from roughly $43 million in 2023. The reasons for the massive increase weren’t clear. 

Jose Mejia Martinez, 34, was neglected by multiple correction officers for more than three hours as he suffered a fatal overdose in a housing unit at the George R. Vierno Center on June 10, 2021, according to a lawsuit filed by his estate. The city agreed to pay $2.7 million to resolve the claims.

The other case involved Donny Ruben Ubiera, 33, who died from a similar overdose at the same facility on Aug. 22, 2023. The city settled that lawsuit for $2.4 million last Friday.

Both men appeared to overdose on methadone that had been administered to other detainees as part of their addiction treatment, according to jail sources familiar with reviews of the two deaths. Some incarcerated people will “cheek” doses of methadone administered by Correctional Health Services — hiding the medication in their mouths — and later spit it out to sell or trade, according to multiple jail insiders. 

Methadone is a long-acting opioid medication used to treat addiction by reducing withdrawal symptoms and cravings — but it can be fatal if taken in large quantities. 

“These settlements reflect the devastating consequences of a correctional system that repeatedly failed two vulnerable men in its custody,” said Julia Kuan, a lawyer at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel, the firm that filed the lawsuits.

Martinez had been held after violating his parole by allegedly stealing a can of beer and had a history of substance use and mental health disorders, according to the lawsuit. He obtained methadone from another detainee and ingested it in a housing unit dayroom, a common area that should have been under supervision.

Soon, Martinez began staggering through the unit, struggling to remain upright and leaning against a stairwell railing while appearing severely intoxicated for more than 40 minutes, the lawsuit alleged. At one point, a correction officer walked past him without intervening as he slumped over the railing.

Other detainees helped Martinez back to his cell. Over the next several hours, officers looked into his cell multiple times as he lay incapacitated but did not call for medical assistance.

A medical emergency was declared only after another detainee found Martinez unresponsive and alerted staff, according to the lawsuit by Martinez’ family. By the time medics arrived, he was already dead — and showing signs of rigor mortis.

In a 29-page report issued in January 2025, the state Attorney General’s Office found that a correction officer had failed to fulfill his duty to obtain medical care, despite rules and training requiring him to do so.

Ubiera, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had previously received treatment at a state psychiatric center because he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial before being returned to Rikers Island, jail records show.

According to the complaint, his mental health deteriorated in a mental observation unit, where he repeatedly attempted to harm himself in front of staff and told officers he wanted to die.

The lawsuit alleges that on the night before his death, Ubiera ingested methadone in view of correction officers and later banged on his cell door and called for help for hours without a response.

Surveillance footage cited in the complaint shows officers had missed routine rounds. Ubiera was found unresponsive the next morning and, while officers began CPR, Narcan was not immediately available in the housing area.

By the time it was retrieved from another unit, several minutes had passed. Ubiera was pronounced dead later that day.

A spokesperson for the city’s Law Department declined to comment.

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Hundreds of case workers, career coaches and housing specialists at two prominent nonprofits serving recently incarcerated people announced they plan to unionize on Friday morning, May Day, looking to join the ranks of scores of workers in the education and social services sector who’ve organized in recent years.

Approximately 600 employees at the Fortune Society and the Osborne Association are seeking to join Local 153 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union. 

If the campaign at either organization is successful, it would mark a historic shift for nonprofit mainstays that receive hundreds of millions in funding from the city to help people re-enter society after stints in jail or prison. 

Fortune and Osborne staff began their organizing push a little more than a year ago, seeking better pay and health benefits, noting that many of their colleagues earn only slightly above the city’s $17 hourly minimum wage.

“There were literally people who worked for, like, the finance department who were homeless, like living in shelters,” union organizer Nicole Matthews told THE CITY. “We just want [management] to do what’s fair and what’s right.”

Some workers are, like the clients they serve, formerly incarcerated or otherwise impacted by the criminal justice system, with many supplementing their income with public assistance — a reality that Matthews, an Osbourne Association care coordinator who works at Rikers Island, described as an open secret.

In addition to better pay and health benefits, workers at both nonprofits told THE CITY they are eager for training and mentorship opportunities.

Jeff Simmons, a spokesperson for the Fortune Society, told THE CITY in a statement that the organization is “working on responding to this request. As always, we will act with the best interests of our staff in mind, and in compliance with all legal obligations.”

A spokesperson for the Osborne Association said the organization would “participate in good-faith discussions.”

“We will listen to their demands and do all we can to support our staff as they continue providing critical services and advocacy on behalf of people impacted by incarceration,” said the spokesperson, Reynaldo Muniz.

More than a dozen City Council members signed a letter to the heads of both organizations pushing them to allow workers to organize. 

The former head of the Fortune Society, Stanley Richards, was recently appointed commissioner of the city’s Department of Corrections, the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the city’s jails.

Both organizations rely heavily on city funding to serve thousands of clients across the five boroughs: Fortune Society has 22 active contracts totaling nearly $370 million, and Osborne Association has a dozen contracts totaling $223 million, according to records from the comptroller’s office.

The Fortune and Osborne workers join the ranks of scores of private-sector workers who’ve unionized in New York in recent years, a wave driven by young, college-educated workers in sectors like health, education, non-profits and the arts. 

Instead of going through a secret ballot election to form the union, workers are requesting recognition through card check neutrality, in which both management and the union agree to a neutral third party, likely an arbitrator, to count union card signatures to ensure a majority of workers want to unionize. Local 153 says that it is gathering signatures from workers on an ongoing basis until the card count takes place.

The union said it is invoking the city’s 2021 labor peace agreement law for city contractors, by which the union agrees to forfeit the right to strike in exchange for recognition by management; the union can still choose to strike down the line for another reason, for example if the parties fail to reach an agreement on a contract.

Workers who spoke with THE CITY are hopeful that their employers will recognize their union and work quickly to settle a contract.

Caleb Knight, who spent several years in and out of jail as a young person in Michigan, said it was programs like the ones offered by the Fortune Society that helped him recover from addiction, go to school and start a career. He eventually earned an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and is now an arts counselor at the Fortune Society, where he has worked for the past two years.

“I’ve been on the receiving end of programs like this,” said Knight, 33. “And though I wasn’t a participant in the Fortune Society, it was creative arts programs like what I teach now that changed my life.”

“Our message to management is positive,” he added. “I believe that the people who are part of our leadership also came to Fortune with the right idea and with the right values, and my sincere hope is that we can treat this as a collaborative opportunity.”

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Two weeks ago, a 15-year-old boy was fatally shot with a handgun on a Queens playground during a water gun fight. This Monday, another 15-year-old boy was shot multiple times on the A train. 

On Thursday, groups that work to curb teen gun violence gathered at a forum in Brooklyn to highlight the programs that they say give kids the help they need but are woefully underfunded. 

“What they do is develop trusting relationships that express to young people that you are loved, you are not thrown away by us–like, that’s not happening,” said Stanley Richards, the new city Correction Commissioner who is the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the department.

“And so there needs to be an investment in that relationship, because that’s the relationship that will disrupt and interrupt and break down the cycle of incarceration.”

While overall shootings are down in New York City in recent years, shootings involving young people have remained elevated since spiking as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the city in 2020, NYPD data shows. 

On average, roughly 127 minors have been shot each year over the past five years, and 111 minors have been identified each year as shooters, according to police data.

There have been 29 people under 18 shot so far this year through mid-April, in a city of 8.5 million. But in communities where gun violence is concentrated, the fear and grief can be pervasive. 

“Young people who carry guns are afraid of being killed,” said Julia Davis, who heads the service provider and advocacy group Youth Represent. “They experience life as an urban siege.”

There is no great mystery about why shootings persist on the city’s historically violent corners, especially among teenagers.

 Poverty and isolation send young people into the street, where impulsive teenage decision-making plays out amid mortal fear and the pressure to conform, advocates said. Social media serves as a new crucible in which threats beget threats.

“They want to be a part of something,” said Jamaal Clarke, 30, who works as a peer facilitator with Haywood Resilience Project in the Bronx. 

“You feel less valuable, you yearn for social acceptance and social equity, and that causes people to go shoot people.”

‘Simply Not Enough’

During the forum, the conversation centered on hundreds of millions of public dollars set aside for such youth. 

In 2017, elected officials passed the Raise the Age law to stop treating most 16 and 17 year olds facing criminal charges as adults. 

That reform was designed to be paired with significant resources to address the root causes that often lead young people into the adult criminal justice system. Lawmakers allocated $300 million in 2018 and 2019 and $250 million annually after that. 

But only a fraction of that funding has been used statewide, as Politico previously reported. As of last year, localities have spent just $569 million of the $1.55 billion set aside, state budget records show. 

And the law was written so that not a penny of its funds reach New York City, despite the fact that in 2024, the most recent year for which state data is available, there were more juvenile murder arrests in the five boroughs than in the rest of the state combined.

“The current programs as they exist are simply not enough,” said Renita Francois, the Mamdani administration’s Deputy Mayor for Community Safety. 

Advocates are calling for a change to the state law that would direct $50 million of the annual $250 million straight to community-based organizations that provide support services to young people for mentorship, family therapy, and programs that get kids back in school and into jobs, among others. 

That change would allow some of the funding — which has been limited to localities that agreed to a 2% cap on their property taxes at the insistence of then-Governor Andrew Cuomo — to reach the city.

Former Department of Correction Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi said the critical funding had been lost to then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s political fight with then-Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“When Raise the Age was enacted and all this stuff was negotiated, Cuomo and de  Blasio were really at each others’ throats,” Schiraldi said. “And New York City got no money to support Raise the Age, got no access to the $250 million allocated.” 

At the forum, Shawnda Chapman of Women Building Up questioned why existing funding has yet to reach frontline groups.

Even the proposed $50 million for the Youth Justice Innovation Fund is “probably not enough,” she said.

“What does it mean that the money exists but hasn’t reached the communities doing this work?”

Davis of Youth Represent said a public records request filed three years ago revealed how little of the money set aside for Raise the Age implementation had actually reached communities.

“What it showed us is that the politics around serving young people are a powerful barrier to the change we need,” Davis said. “When advocates and young people aren’t at the center of those decisions, the money goes right back to the usual suspects.”

She said most counties spent little on prevention, early intervention or alternatives to incarceration, and instead directed funds toward policing, detention and probation.

State lawmakers are currently hashing out proposals to send some of the funding for alternative to incarceration programs tied to the Raise the Age legislation, City & State reported in February. 

‘High Risk and Hard to Reach’

Thursday’s forum, entitled “High Risk and Hard to Reach: Solutions for Young People Often Over-Prosecuted, Underserved, or Ignored,” was held at the headquarters of Women Building Up in Boerum Hill. More than 100 people attended, including nonprofit leaders, formerly incarcerated people, and top city officials. 

The forum focused on the idea of directing intense resources and attention on a concentrated group of young people deemed most likely to be involved in gun violence, either as victims or perpetrators. 

Schiraldi described a program he led in Maryland that targeted a group of youths deemed at extremely high risk of shooting or getting shot and surrounded them with an engaged life coach who had the resources to help them pay for school, get housing and otherwise stabilize their lives. 

“When someone’s friend got shot, that’s the day they become high risk,” he said. “And that day we need to be there for them.” 

But advocates also noted the needs of girls, who are less likely to be shooters. The gun violence is a smoke signal, in a way, pointing to a much larger class of kids trying to meet basic needs without much support. 

“These young people are not even able to be young,” said Naquasia Jones, the founder and CEO of PureLegacee, a group that aims to empower girls and young women impacted by incarceration, foster care, and systemic trauma. “They got adult problems.”

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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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Mayor Zohran Mamdani vetoed a controversial bill approved by the City Council last month instructing the police department to establish anti-protest “buffer zones” around schools and educational institutions.

A related bill calling for security perimeters around houses of worship passed by a veto-proof majority.

In a statement Friday, the mayor said he had reviewed both bills but found the one for education institutions “meaningfully different.” 

“The problem is how widely this bill defines an educational institution and the constitutional concerns it raises regarding New Yorkers’ fundamental right to protest,” he said in the statement. “As the bill is written, everywhere from universities to museums to teaching hospitals could face restrictions.”

Mamdani’s statement echoed the concerns of labor groups and other allies who said many buildings could technically be considered an educational facility, further limiting protests.

Speaker Julie Menin, a moderate Democrat, pushed for both bills, saying they were needed to combat rising antisemitism. She and her allies have said the so-called “buffer zone” proposals are meant to provide greater accountability in the NYPD’s protest protocols, and won’t infringe on free speech rights.

In a statement Friday, Menin said the purpose of the bill was safety.

“Ensuring students can enter and exit their schools without fear of harassment or intimidation should not be controversial,” she said. “This bill simply requires the NYPD to clearly outline how it will ensure safe access when there are threats of obstruction or physical injury, while fully protecting First Amendment rights.”

The veto is the latest confrontation between Mamdani and the Council, with the most recent being over the city’s contentious budget negotiations. 

The Council can attempt to override Mamdani’s veto in a new vote, or let it stand.

United Auto Workers Region 9A, which fiercely opposed the bill, sent a message to its members Friday morning taking credit for the veto and said it would begin whipping Council members to make sure any re-vote fails. The union represents thousands of educators and researchers at Columbia University and New York University.

Menin, the memo read, “is potentially going to attempt to override the veto by flipping multiple council votes.”

“We will begin a whipping strategy with Council members in the next week but for now, the most important thing is an overwhelming display of public support for this veto.”

The religious sites bill passed 44 to 5, a veto-proof majority, but the schools buffer-zone bill passed by a 30 to 19 margin.

Despite the overwhelming Council majority that supported the bill affecting places of worship, Mamdani, speaking in a social media video, portrayed his decision not to veto it as a matter of principle, adding that he nevertheless disagreed with “its framing of all protests as a security concern.”

In recent weeks, labor and community groups closely aligned with Mamdani have urged him to veto the bill, known as Intro 175, saying that it threatens free speech and worker rights. Legal groups including the New York Civil Liberties Union also strongly opposed the measure. 

Menin’s bills came as an answer to the widely-criticized police response to protesters who picketed the Park East Synagogue, which had rented space to an organization that helps Jews move to Israel and to settlements on the occupied West Bank, as well as the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses.

A consortium of prominent Jewish organizations including the UJA-Federation of New York rebuked Mamdani on Friday, calling the planned veto “a profound failure of City Hall to demonstrate to all New Yorkers that our safety is a priority.”

On April 17, a representative of Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su met with leaders of more than a dozen unions and the New York City Central Labor Council who pushed for a veto.

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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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Labor and other allies of Mayor Zohran Mamdani are urging him to veto one of two City Council bills aimed at restricting protests around educational facilities, saying the “radical overreach” of the bill limits free speech and endangers New Yorkers.

The two “buffer zone” bills passed March 26 with the goal of targeting hate crimes across the city, with one bill related to religious sites and the other for schools and education facilities.

The religious site bill passed 44-to-5, a veto-proof majority, but the other passed by a 30-to-19 margin — which the mayor could veto. 

The buffer zone laws rose from demonstrations last year outside a pair of synagogues in Manhattan and Queens where some protesters chanted in support of Hamas. The synagogues were hosting an organization that helps American Jews emigrate to Israel and the Israel-occupied West Bank. Critics said Mamdani’s initial comments failed to condemn the pro-Hamas slogans.

The bill focused on “educational facilities” comes after college campuses across the city were rocked by protests against the Gaza war.

Nearly a dozen organizations sent Mamdani a letter on Friday imploring him to veto the bill creating security perimeters around schools and other “educational facilities,” with opponents saying the language is so broad that any location could be deemed one. 

“By defining ‘educational facility’ as any place where ‘educational programming takes place’ and not solely traditional educational institutions, 175-B functionally subjects any building in this city to the proposed law, including the more than 200 public libraries,” the letter said. 

It was signed by the steering committee of the People’s Majority, along with the union representing CUNY professors, United Auto Workers Region 9A, Desis Rising Up and Moving and other organizations.

“The broad reach of the legislation again means that the NYPD must create a plan for just about every building in this city,” the letter said.

Speaker Julie Menin said last month the bills will stop hate crimes. “The increase in hateful acts across the city is absolutely abhorrent, and we have to do something about it,” she said.

Mamdani can veto the bills within 30 days of their passage in the Council, giving him until April 25. He said Thursday he’s still weighing his options.

“I’ve heard from a number of New Yorkers about their concerns about aspects of this legislation,” Mamdani said. “And I will be making a decision on that shortly.”

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Around 11 p.m. one night in January, a Long Island couple was driving back to their home in Hicksville when Nassau County police pulled them over for having a suspended registration. The officers searched the car and claimed to have found drugs inside. 

The couple was held overnight at the precinct. The next morning, police released the woman with a desk appearance ticket. 

But as the woman waited outside for her boyfriend, she saw him walk out shackled with an officer who said he was with the FBI, according to a description of his arrest submitted in a federal habeas corpus petition filed in the Eastern District of New York. He called her from immigration detention later that day, having apparently been passed off from Nassau County Police to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

The man’s lawyer didn’t immediately return a request for comment; neither did the Nassau County Police Department.

The case is one of three dozen arrests identified by THE CITY in a review of habeas petitions filed in federal courts in New York City and New Jersey between October 2025 and March of this year in which local police departments allegedly collaborated with ICE to apprehend unsuspecting immigrants.

The cases all took place in cities and towns on Long Island and in counties north of New York City that lack sanctuary city protections, leaving local law enforcement there free to share information with ICE and to coordinate operations. 

Most of the cases occurred in Nassau County, where the sheriff and police departments have expansive agreements with ICE that deputize them to conduct immigration enforcement. Many of the arrests identified by THE CITY, however, involved local police and probation officers tipping off ICE agents, rather than making arrests themselves.

THE CITY found several cases in Port Chester, Mount Vernon and Monticello, none of which have formal agreements with the Department of Homeland Security. There, local police or probation departments allegedly tipped off ICE to undocumented immigrants they had encountered. 

THE CITY’s report comes as the state legislature is in final deliberations over the New York for All Act, a bill that would limit cooperation between local police departments and federal immigration authorities, except in certain circumstances. The legislation, sponsored by State Senator Andrew Gounardes (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblymember Karines Reyes (D-The Bronx), has dozens of co-sponsors and the backing of a number of immigrants rights groups and the NYCLU.

Gov. Kathy Hochul initially countered with a more limited proposal that would end contracts with local jails and the 287(g) agreements that deputize local officers to perform immigration enforcement. On Thursday she offered a new proposal that went further, restricting communication between local authorities and ICE unless there was “probable cause” of a misdemeanor or felony crime.

“This is not done, it’s an important step forward,” Hochul said at a press briefing.

Immigration advocates say the proposal still leaves too much to the discretion of local police officers — and, in some cases, could open the door to more collaboration than is currently allowed. Yasmine Farhang, Executive Director of the Immigrant Defense Project, which has been tracking cases of collusion between local governments and ICE, called Hochul’s current proposal “deeply dangerous.” 

“Doing this would create more harm than the status quo,” she said.

On X, Gounardes pointed to the recent viral video of police beating up a man in a bodega in Brooklyn. 

“Police thought they had probable cause to arrest someone, used unjustifiable force on him, and had the wrong guy,” he wrote. “Letting police collude with ICE if they think there is probable cause a crime occurred will harm immigrants, and people who look like immigrants.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security criticized New York’s attempt to limit coordination with federal law enforcement. “Partnerships with law enforcement are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country,” an unnamed spokesperson said. 

ICE Came Instead

THE CITY identified 11 cases in Nassau County in which a local probation department tipped ICE off that an immigrant would be coming in for an appointment. Five of those involved a person on probation for driving while under the influence. Newsday has previously reported that Nassau probation officers are regularly tipping off ICE officers about immigrants showing up for probation appointments. 

Local police in Nassau County appear to have notified ICE in 11 other cases reviewed by THE CITY. Seven of these took place on streets and highways, where cops stopped cars to arrest people and later handed them off to ICE.

In some cases, immigrants described waiting for police and a tow truck after minor car crashes. ICE came instead.

Spokespeople for the Nassau County Police and for County Executive Bruce Blakeman — who’s also the Republican gubernatorial nominee running against Hochul — didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Blakeman’s campaign released a statement after Hochul introduced her proposal on Thursday charging her with “allowing dangerous criminals to return to our neighborhoods.”

More than 140 people have been arrested by ICE on Long Island through local 287(g) agreements since the start of the Trump administration, a small portion of the approximately 2,800 ICE arrests on Long Island in that time, according to data from the Deportation Data Project. 

Outside of Nassau County, THE CITY found three examples in which Port Chester police were alleged to have tipped off ICE.

In two cases, men had spent the night in jail for traffic violations; as they were released the next morning, ICE was waiting for them outside the precinct. 

In a third case, police told ICE in advance they were going to arrest a man who had been arraigned in Greenburgh on grand larceny charges several weeks earlier, according to ICE’s own account of the arrest, which was submitted in court. It’s not clear why Port Chester police re-arrested the man, but once he was in their custody, they called ICE, who came and picked him up at the precinct. 

A spokesperson for the Port Chester Police Department didn’t return requests for comment on the incidents. 

Additional reporting by Rosalind Adams.

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