DOE tally omitted 99 sex-harass claims
City Hall officials admitted on Friday that they didn’t include 99 complaints of sexual harassment at the Department of Education in a tally released last week reporting 471 cases at the agency between mid-2013 and 2017.
They also said 14 sexual- harassment complaints at the New York City Housing Authority were excluded from a wider data set that counted 1,312 complaints across all city agencies.
Mayoral aides said the cases had been excluded because the two agencies don’t report to a central- ized complaint system.
They said none of the 99 DOE complaints were substantiated because all were recategorized as harassment or discrimination not of a sexual nature.
They could not immediately say if any of the 14 NYCHA complaints, which each included allegations of other kinds of misconduct, were substantiated.
Such complaints will no longer be excluded from overall tallies, officials said.
Mayor de Blasio was criticized this week when he suggested the number of sexual-harassment claims at the DOE had been inflated by the agency’s “hyper-complaint” culture.
On Friday, he vowed to better handle harassment claims across all agencies.
“I think the fact is this is now on everyone’s front burner where it belongs,” he said on WNYC.