DAs: Let cops keep probing big crashes
Gov warns of lurking virus danger
The city’s five district attorneys have penned a letter opposing a City Council bill that would take away the NYPD’s power to investigate serious vehicle crashes and hand it to the Transportation Department, the Daily News has learned.
The bill will be considered in the Council on Wednesday.
“Our main concern is that the proposed bill vests DOT with the ‘primary’ responsibility of investigating collisions,” the DAs wrote in the Feb. 22 letter.
“We believe that it is critical to street safety and driver accountability that collision scenes be regarded as potential crime scenes. Accordingly, highly trained law enforcement personnel must first secure the scene and collect evidence for use in any possible criminal prosecution.”
Last summer, Transportation Alternatives wrote a report that noted the NYPD crash unit only investigates about 5% of all serious accidents.
“The NYPD has failed to sufficiently investigate serious traffic crashes and repeatedly engages in harmful victim-blaming,” Marco Conner DiAquoi, the deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, said Tuesday.
The bill would sharply expand the number of crashes that must be investigated, the letter from the DAs says. “If DOT is required to investigate all crashes with serious injury, that would be approximately 3,600 cases a year; by comparison, there are approximately 71,000 crashes resulting in injury citywide each year,” the letter states.
New York’s overall COVID numbers continue to fall, but Gov. Cuomo and city health officials warned Tuesday that viral mutations are a major cause for concern.
The Empire State reported its second known case of a dangerous South African variant, on Long Island, as the number of detected U.K. variant cases soared to 154, 54% of which are in the five boroughs, Cuomo said. City labs have so far found 59 cases of the highly contagious English strain, according to the Health Department.
The strain, known by the scientific name B.1.17, “is likely more transmissible than other currently circulating or predominant strains in NYC and may cause more severe illness,” the department said.
City Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan), chairman of the Health Committee, said the spread of mutations means that New Yorkers need to remain vigilant as vaccination efforts continue.
“It means in any interaction you have with other people who have this virus, you are significantly more likely to catch it in less time,” he said. “New Yorkers can’t let their guard down even though the outlook for a few months from now is quite positive because of the pace of vaccination.”
Hospitalizations and overall cases are still falling in the state following a postholiday surge last month. There are currently 5,977 people being treated for coronavirus in the state. Another 88 New Yorkers died from the virus Monday, according to the governor’s office.
Concerns about the viral strains come as the U.S. reached a grim milestone this week with the nation recording more than 500,000 COVID deaths.
New York is also entering a new phase of reopening as Barclays Center and Madison Square Garden host a limited number of fans for the first time in nearly a year and movie theaters are slated to follow suit.
Cuomo urged caution and touted efforts to increase access to vaccines in minority communities that have been hardest hit by the pandemic.
“As our rates continue to decline, we are opening back up our economy and proving that vaccine distribution can be fair and equitable,” he said. “The light at the end of the tunnel is brighter and brighter each day, but we’re not there yet. I encourage New Yorkers to remain vigilant until the war is won: Wear a mask, socially distance and wash your hands.”
A pair of vaccination sites run in partnership with the federal government are scheduled to open on Wednesday in Brooklyn and Queens, at Medgar Evers and York colleges, respectively.
The sites will be able to administer 3,000 doses a day and will be staffed by both federal and state employees. The MTA is also launching a pilot program to provide additional bus service that will help residents get to the mass sites from NYCHA developments and neighborhood community centers.
“The state is committed to vaccinating all New Yorkers, and that means making a concerted effort to reach those communities which have been underserved by the traditional health care system,” Cuomo said.
The city Education Department illegally held up court-ordered tuition reimbursement payments for families of private school students with disabilities during the pandemic, a Manhattan federal judge ruled.
The city is legally obligated to pay private school tuition for special education students that it can’t accommodate in public schools.
But the Education Department abruptly halted payments for at least 1,000 students when the pandemic hit last March, demanding their private schools submit remote learning plans for DOE approval before the city released funds, according to legal filings.
That policy resulted in monthslong payment delays that forced families to either go out of pocket for tens of thousand of dollars in tuition costs, or — if they couldn’t afford it — pull their child out of school until the payments came through, according to advocates and legal papers.
“It’s just been really horrible,” said Mary Fernandes, the parent of a 10-year-old with autism who at one point last year was owed $20,000 in tuition payments from the city. “With COVID, they’ve gotten even worse.”
Ferandes, a case manager at a law firm, has had to open multiple credit cards and borrow off of her retirement plan to keep up with the $3,300-a-month tuition costs at her son’s specialized Manhattan school for students with autism.
“Pretty much my credit has been destroyed,” Fernandes said. “It’s just been nonstop, constant stress.”
One high school student with multiple disabilities was forced to temporarily drop out of her court-approved Manhattan private school for a month last summer because the city failed to deliver its reimbursement payments and the student’s single mother couldn’t front the cost, according to Rebecca Shore, the family’s lawyer.
“This loss was demoralizing for our client, and put at risk her ability to graduate,” said Shore, an attorney with Advocates for Children.
City officials argued they were being fiscally responsible by thoroughly vetting the remote learning plans of the private schools and making sure they were still offering the same level of service before releasing millions of dollars from drained city coffers.
The city “made common sense adjustments to tuition reimbursements so that private schools wouldn’t be paid for services that weren’t provided during the pandemic, such as busing and food service,” said Education Department spokeswoman Danielle Filson.
But in a sharply-worded decision issued last Friday, Manhattan Federal Judge Loretta Preska admonished city officials for second-guessing legal orders from special education judges.
“It would be backwards indeed if DOE — the ‘public school system that failed to meet the child’s needs in the first place’ — could refuse to fund a student’s placement at a private school ‘simply because that school lacks [DOE’s] stamp of approval,’ ” Preska wrote.
“The economic bind in which DOE finds itself does not afford it a roving commission to re-evaluate the propriety of Orders that the IDEA [Individual with Disabilities Act] and New York law make plain are final and binding,” Preska continued.
The pandemic-related tuition reimbursement delay is yet another wrinkle for families navigating the maddening journey of securing a city-funded slot in a specialized private school.
The process can take years and involve costly legal services, expensive outside evaluations and frustrating bureaucratic delays — and favors families with time and resources.
Even when families do manage to win a private school placement from a judge in the city’s severely overburdened special education hearing system, it can take months or years to get fully reimbursed for tuition that can exceed $100,000 for a single year.
The city’s slow response to special education court orders is the subject of a nearly two-decade-old class action lawsuit.
In 2011, the Education Department created an entire office to speed up its implementation of court orders — but families and advocates say it hasn’t solved the problem.
Wait time for tuition reimbursement has grown longer in recent years, lawyers and parents say, and the DOE’s pandemic policy exacerbated an already serious problem.
For low-income families, borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to front tuition costs while awaiting city reimbursement isn’t an option.
DOE officials say roughly 130 private schools enrolling about 1,000 students on the city dime were required to submit remote learning plans for city approval last year before officials released tuition payments, though advocates say the number is likely higher.
As of December, about 300 of those students had been approved for full reimbursement, 300 were approved for a reduced reimbursement, and another 400 were still being reviewed, according to court papers.
Education Department spokeswoman Filson said “no student should be denied special education services because of payment delays. We’re committed to improving the impartial hearing process.” The DOE is considering appealing last week’s decision, she added.