Foot-drag on felons living in NYC housing
The NYPD does a good job alerting the city’s Housing Authority about dangerous criminal residents — but NYCHA routinely does little or nothing with the information, according to a Department of Investigation report released Tuesday.
The report said that although the NYPD’s communication with NYCHA has “improved significantly,” the Housing Authority is still failing to enforce its policies by removing the criminals, who include violent felons, drug traffickers and gang members.
It is a follow-up to a 2015 investigation that found that violent criminals living in public housing were getting a pass because the NYPD rarely alerted housing officials of their offenses — and when the department did, the Housing Authority seldom moved to evict.
“NYCHA has an obligation to protect the residents of its build- ings. Its failure to do so, even after DOI’s report in 2015, is inexcusable,” DOI Commissioner Mark Peters said.
The 2015 report found that neither the cops nor the Housing Authority were living up to the terms of a 1996 agreement requiring them to act when a tenant was arrested in order to keep law-abiding residents of NYCHA’s 328 public-housing complexes safe.
According to NYPD stats for 2016, 14 percent of murders, 19 percent of shootings and 13 percent of rapes were committed on NYCHA premises.
The follow-up report found the NYPD has made improvement in reporting most on-site arrests of public-housing tenants.
In 2016, the NYPD increased its