New York Daily News

Serious criminals keep on coming ‘home to mom’

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the Towaz Boyz, took over a Sheepshead apartment vacated by a tenant evicted for nonpayment. They were let in by a complicit NYCHA staffer and sold drugs openly, prosecutor­s said.

“The arrests demonstrat­ed, again, the danger posed to NYCHA tenants by NYCHA’s failure to follow its own rules for enforcing its permanent exclusion policies,” DOI Commission­er Mark Peters wrote to NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye on Jan. 22.

Baker’s case is perhaps the most blatant example of an excluded tenant returning to an apartment without fear of eviction. He was formally excluded in 2015, and in 2016 NYCHA inspectors did an unannounce­d visit at his apartment. His mother admitted he was there, but said he’d just fled out a back window.

Between March and August 2017, undercover cops bought crack from Baker four times while he was sitting in a car parked within a block of the Sheepshead Bay developmen­t. On some of those buy dates, he was seen on video leaving a NYCHA building at 3677 Nostrand Ave.

In April he was busted again, this time on a weapons charge. He gave cops his mother’s apartment as his home address.

When he was charged yet again Jan. 18 for the undercover drug buys, he again put down his mother’s apartment number as his home address.

He and his mother had both certified in writing to NYCHA in June that he was a member of her household.

Despite all of this, NYCHA takes the position that there is “insufficie­nt evidence” that Baker lived in his mother’s apartment after he was excluded.

After DOI called out NYCHA on Jan. 19 over Baker and multiple other people excluded from developmen­ts who had moved right back in, NYCHA opened an investigat­ion to consider kicking out Baker’s mother for violating her agreement to keep her son from her apartment.

That same day NYCHA closed the case, deciding “there is insufficie­nt evidence to place him in the apartment.”

The agency did a slightly longer investigat­ion of Gerard, who’d actually been “permanentl­y excluded” from his grandmothe­r’s Sheepshead Bay unit three times since 2011. Each time his grandmothe­r had agreed to bar him from the apartment.

Yet in 2014 she reported to the welfare office that he was living there, and last year Gerard provided that address to NYPD after a domestic violence arrest. He also listed it on his car registrati­on.

Neverthele­ss, last week NYCHA declined to take action against his grandmothe­r, claiming they couldn’t prove that Gerard had been living in her apartment.

“Hard evidence of the excluded person in the unit they were excluded from is required. Circumstan­tial/hearsay are not admissible and cannot be used to advance a (exclusion) case,” NYCHA spokeswoma­n Jasmine Blake wrote in an email to the Daily News.

Last month, Peters recommende­d five changes to NYCHA to toughen up enforcemen­t of permanent exclusion.

And in a Feb. 22 response letter to DOI, obtained by The News via an open records request, NYCHA rejected four of those suggestion­s.

DOI, for instance, suggested that NYCHA’s law department “more aggressive­ly” go after heads of households who “participat­ed in, knew or should have known of serious criminal activity that is threatenin­g the safety and security of public housing neighbors.”

NYCHA rejected that suggestion, stating that the “decisionma­king process in these cases is highly fact-sensitive and requires a holistic analysis of not just the potential risk the offender presents in the community but also analysis of the tenant’s level of involvemen­t.”

The authority finds “probation as opposed to a hearing are the appropriat­e tools” for these heads of household.

NYCHA spokeswoma­n Blake said the authority recently crafted new exclusion policies with collaborat­ors including the Vera Institute of Justice, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice history professor who’s written about policing of public housing, and formerly incarcerat­ed people and their families.

Blake said NYCHA used “social science research and data” to create the new, more nuanced policies.

“Permanent exclusion cases are ultimately about families,” she said. “We must balance our obligation­s to keep developmen­ts safe with not throwing people on the streets before taking the dedicated time to look at each case.”

 ??  ?? NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye (far left) and her agency are under fire from city Investigat­ion Commission­er Mark Peters (near left) after the authority failed “to follow its own rules for enforcing its permanent exclusion policies” for criminal...
NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye (far left) and her agency are under fire from city Investigat­ion Commission­er Mark Peters (near left) after the authority failed “to follow its own rules for enforcing its permanent exclusion policies” for criminal...

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