POLS MUSE ON COPS
But whoever becomes Queens borough prez will have little to say about NYPD
In a race for a job that’s largely ceremonial, the five candidates running for Queens borough president certainly have a lot to say about something the winner will have virtually no control over — the NYPD.
Two of the candidates want the Police Department stripped of $1 billion in funding.
One says that despite a $10 billion shortfall in the city’s budget, the NYPD should be subjected to absolutely zero austerity.
And two others are calling for more vague, incremental change.
In a sign of times marred by police killings of unarmed black people and marked by anti-police brutality protests, all five Democrats have been eager to offer their opinions this primary season on just how the city should handle the police.
They are running in a special primary election Tuesday to replace former Borough President Melinda Katz, who stepped down after she became the Queens district attorney.
City Councilman Donovan Richards, who has the backing of the Queens County Democratic organization, believes the NYPD needs to be reformed significantly and its budget cut by $1 billion, but his record is leavened with his calls for a new police precinct in southeastern Queens over the years.
“It doesn’t mean we hate the Police Department,” he said. “It just means we want the right police officers.”
Councilman Costa Constantinides — who, like Richards, will be forced from the Council when his term expires in 2021 — also favors diverting $1 billion from the NYPD budget.
Elizabeth Crowley, a former City Council member who has the Police Benevolent Association’s endorsement, acknowledged a need to trim the budget, but not to nearly the same extent her former colleagues have called for because she believes it could lead to longer police response times.
“That’s what’s going to happen if you defund the Police Department,” she said.
Dao Yin, a community activist who worked as a general manager at a robotics company, believes there should be no cuts to the department.
And former NYPD Sgt. Anthony Miranda said that while cops need to be held accountable, blame for the current size of the NYPD budget rests with rivals like Richards, Constantinides and Crowley, who voted to increase the size of the NYPD by a thousand cops in 2015.
“How did the Police Department become so big?” Miranda wondered sarcastically.
Borough presidents perform a largely symbolic role, but they do have power. They have the ability to vote on landuse matters, appoint community board members, and get a bully pulpit and position themselves for higher office. They’re also provided with money for capital expenses.
The NYPD doesn’t figure
into much of that, but it’s of course not the only issue on people’s minds in Queens. Health care, unemployment and housing are all front-burner concerns, especially because coronavirus has left so many dead, sick and unemployed.
Constantinides, who heads the Council’s Environmental Protection Committee, said he would use the $65 million in annual capital funding the borough president gets to install solar panels and plant gardens on the borough’s rooftops, which would also create jobs.
“This is an achievable goal,” he said. “We’re going to do as many as we can.”
Crowley is also focused on job creation. She wants to reactivate out-of-use rail lines for commuters in neighborhoods underserved by mass transit.
She described such an undertaking as “low-hanging fruit” — in spite of the logistical difficulties others, Mayor de Blasio most notably among them with his plans for a new light rail line, have faced.
“It doesn’t cost a lot of money,” Crowley said of her transit plan.
Miranda and Yin said they would focus on bringing relief to the borough’s small businesses. Miranda said he would do that through lobbying the city government to revive the Small Business Survival Act, a bill that would restrict landlords from passing property tax obligations on to tenants and which remains stalled in the Council. Yin wants to do it through securing more equitable allocations from City Hall.
Richards, like Constantinides
and Crowley, has stressed the importance of addressing the borough’s dire health care needs after an overwhelmed Elmhurst Hospital Center became a national symbol, at the peak of the conoronavirus pandemic, of how fragile public hospitals have become. He contends his expertise on land-use issues and his record of lobbying the mayor’s office for funding — whether it be for Hurricane Sandy relief or affordable housing — would serve him well in beefing up the borough’s health care infrastructure.
“The mayor and I have our disagreements,” said Richards, who has recently criticized de Blasio’s handling of the NYPD. “But you have to be able to keep those open lines of communication.”