Students protest as Bratton urges business community to help with street homeless

New York City Police Department Commissioner William Bratton urged business leaders to get involved with assisting the homeless and others on the street. While speaking at a corporate responsibility event today, the commissioner said businesses are critical to preventing a return of the disorder that pervaded the city from the 1970s until the 1990s.

Bratton told close to 200 gathered at CUNY’s Hunter College that police did not focus on stemming disorder in the 1970s and 1980s, and consequently, “literally abandoned the streets to the criminal element.” His adherence to so-called broken windows philosophy – the theory that cracking down on minor infractions prevents larger ones – has been questioned by some officials and criminal justice advocates. And in such an environment, Bratton said manifestations of disorder have re-emerged with the street homeless population. The commissioner said emotionally disturbed people, those with substance abuse issues and others on the street deserve a humanitarian approach. And he urged the business community to get behind a series of initiatives to be announced in 2016 that will target this population.

“We continue to deal with manifestations of (disorder) around the issue of the street people,” Bratton said. “That has once again become an issue similar to the issue we addressed within the ’90s – more difficult to address now than it was back then. The tools I and my offices get to work with have changed dramatically, and those tools are the law. We are working very aggressively, understanding the limitations of the law, to address this problem on our streets. And we will be announcing a series of new initiatives after the first of the year that will need your support.”

Bratton said police have been working in an “extraordinary” environment since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But he said the department has never before been so well-funded, noting the City Council and mayor have recently “approved the hiring of what effectively is 2,000 additional police officers.” And he expressed optimism that businesses would bolster police work.

 This embrace of social responsibility rang hollow for some CUNY students.

About 20 students gathered outside Hunter following the speech said they had just finished protesting CUNY for giving the police commissioner a platform. 

Daniel Dunn, who is studying computer science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, said he and several campus advocacy groups, including CUNY Prison Divest, Revolutionary Student Coordinating Community, New York City Students for Justice in Palestine and Students Without Borders, view NYPD practices as promoting oppression in poor communities of color, citing the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island. More generally, Dunn contended CUNY was not taking a responsible approach to criminal justice concerns because its endowment has invested in the prison system and it had authorized an undercover NYPD operative to survey Muslim students. CUNY’s general counsel has said the university had no knowledge of any undercover NYPD operations probing pupils.

“They really need to consider who they’re serving, and who they need to meet the needs of,” Dunn said of CUNY leadership. “Blacks and Latinos actually go to these two-year schools, these community colleges, but it’s like they’re actually funding their own genocide every day by mass incarceration. ... Look at tuition in itself. … The first freshman class that was black and Latino, they imposed tuition. So we see tuition as something that’s actually a racist implementation.”

CUNY did not immediately respond to a request for comment.