INSECURITY GUARDS IN CHARGE AT SOME CITY SHELTERS
21 lawsuits allege a wave of violence Poor oversight of nonprofit operators
THE VIDEO IS silent, but the body language is clear: The security staff at the Pamoja shelter in Brooklyn is engaged in a conversation with a 25-year-old homeless man that is headed in a very wrong direction.
A supervisor in a white shirt and two security guards in light blue shirts tightly circle Alexander Singh, getting in his face. A burly resident of the Bedford-Stuyvesant shelter joins in, stepping in between to cool things down.
And then Singh, his slight frame backed against the wall, makes a mistake — and tosses a rolled-up paper ball at the guards.
The possibility of peaceful resolution is over.
A guard throws a lightning punch to Singh’s head. The burly resident shoves Singh against the wall, and Singh’s head bounces off it like a tennis ball. The resident smacks Singh in the head, and Singh collapses to the shiny linoleum floor.
The supervisor pushes the resident away, but behind his back a guard winds up and kicks Singh square in the face, then stomps on his prone body.
Singh now lies unmoving as the guard walks away. Yet another shelter resident now jumps in, and just for good measure throws a punch at Singh’s body. The guards and the supervisor don’t move an inch to stop him.
All of this occurred at 2:40 a.m. on Nov. 29 inside a shelter that’s 100% funded by city taxpayers. Yet none of these guards or their supervisor work for the city.
Instead they work for a private firm, FJC Security of Long Island. The city did not pick FJC or any of the other private firms currently providing security at shelters across New York. Instead, it leaves that job up to the nonprofit groups it hires to run most of the city’s shelters.
Since 2014, when Mayor de Blasio arrived at City Hall, the city Homeless Services Department has awarded more than $3.1 billion in contracts to these nonprofit groups. As of January, there were 89 of these contracts.
At that time, an analysis of the shelter system by state Controller Thomas DiNapoli estimated that the nonprofits running city-funded shelters were spending $78.2 million on security. That included security equipment and staff employed by the nonprofits, but most of it — $46.1 million — went directly to the for-profit security firms.
None of the private security costs are visible to the public. Homeless Services Department peace officers are in charge of handling security at city-run shelters with oversight by the NYPD. At the shelters run by the nonprofits, Homeless Services oversees security that’s handled onsite by the private companies.
And at some shelters, that hasn’t worked out so well.
That’s because the firms in charge of security at most cityfunded shelters, FJC and Sera Security, have in the past three years been accused repeatedly of enabling and in some cases aggravating violence inside the shelters, a Daily News investigation has found. Since 2015, 18 shelter residents or staff have filed 16 lawsuits against FJC over violent incidents inside shelters; Sera has been sued five times. Most alarmingly, security staffers are named as assailants in some of these suits.
An FJC guard at the Stockholm Family Shelter in Bushwick, Brooklyn, sexually assaulted a female staffer in the facility’s fax room, one lawsuit alleges.
A Sera guard dragged a wheelchair-using client who’d locked his chair in place outside a shelter in Morrisania, the Bronx, damaging the man’s prosthetic legs, a suit charges.
FJC guards beat a resident of the Barbara S. Kleiman Shelter in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after mistaking him for a man they were chasing, another suit alleges.
The News requested contract information from Controller DiNapoli and found that in January, FJC was collecting $26.6 million and Sera $13 million. FJC says it provides security at 100 cityfunded shelters. Sera did not return calls.
In response to The News’ questions, Homeless Services Department spokesman Isaac McGinn said Friday the agency was investigating the incidents referenced in the 21 suits and “will take prompt disciplinary action.” The nonprofits are supposed to notify the department of each lawsuit, and McGinn acknowledged several were not reported as required.
“These allegations don’t reflect our values, and New Yorkers working hard to get back on their feet deserve better,” McGinn said.
In an audit this month, DiNapoli charged that gaps in oversight make it impossible for the city to truly account for how all the security money is being spent.
Examining four shelters with the biggest security budgets, DiNapoli found $2.2 million of “insufficiently documented or questionable security expenses” in the last two years.
Sera, for example, got a contract based on its promise to hire six guards per day at its Bronx Park Ave. shelter for a cost of $252,632. Instead, auditors say, Sera billed for 10 guards per day, adding an additional $189,073 to the contract for a new total of $441,705 — a 75% spike.
Auditors found FJC won a hefty $824,000 contract that was 16% higher than the lowest bidder. There was no documentation to justify the higher cost, DiNapoli determined.
This lack of documentation afflicted Samaritan Village, one of the biggest nonprofits running city shelters, DiNapoli found.
Samaritan — which has won $308 million in contracts from the Homeless Services Department since 2016 — could not account for 4,171 hours of the 6,560 it billed the city for security at one shelter on Myrtle Ave. in Brooklyn.
Samaritan, like all shelter pro-
viders, is required to seek competitive bids for services. In fiscal years 2015 and 2016, Samaritan had no records of bid proposals for $1.07 million spent on security expenses. Samaritan declined to comment.
“Relying on outside vendors increases the need for strong oversight,” DiNapoli told The News. “The (Homeless Services Department) needs to do a better job of making sure it’s getting what it paid for with taxpayers’ dollars.”
McGinn said the agency is “already implementing the report’s recommendations: retraining providers, better tracking inventory, and more closely scrutinizing contractors’ performance so that, together, we can hold bad actors accountable.”
Pamoja, the city-funded shelter where Singh was assaulted, is run by the nonprofit Black Veterans for Social Justice, which has received nearly $60 million in Homeless Services Department shelter contracts since last year. Black Veterans did not return calls seeking comment.
Singh — who was hospitalized after the attack — sued Black Veterans and FJC in March, charging that the guards who attacked him “were violent, dangerous and posed a direct threat to residents” of Pamoja.
“They operate like thugs,” he said. “If you complain, they label you a snitch. They harass you and make up false claims. FJC knows that management, (Homeless Services) and the NYPD always takes their side.”
His attorney, Marc Freund, obtained video of the attack and immediately recognized the security firm involved.
In 2013, Freund sued FJC over an incident at the city-funded Tillary Street Women’s Shelter in downtown Brooklyn. There, social worker Valerie Lewis was attacked by an assailant ejected hours earlier for threatening staff.
A jury found FJC had allowed the assailant back in shortly before the attack and awarded Lewis a $13.1 million verdict. It was later reduced to $7 million.
In Lewis’ case, FJC “took extraordinary measures to cover up the attack, including deleting the surveillance footage and concealing documents,” Freund said.
Angela Burrell, a spokeswoman for FJC’s parent company, Allied Universal, wouldn’t discuss specific lawsuits, noting that the litigation is pending.
Instead, she issued a written statement defending the firm’s overall performance at city shelters: “FJC has staffed each of these locations with trained security professionals, whose primary focus is the safety and security of residents, many of whom often confront difficult hardships and challenges.”
McGinn said the conduct exposed by the video “is absolutely unacceptable. The matter was reported to the NYPD management team at (Homeless Services), who reported it to FJC leadership for disciplinary action. The guard involved was terminated and the supervisor was demoted and removed from FJC’s contract with (Homeless Services).”