Introduction

Thank you.

I am very pleased to have an opportunity to be here at Pace University to talk about what may be the most important task the mayor of this great city faces every day: keeping New Yorkers safe and secure.

Today, I will give the eighth in a series of addresses outlining how a Weiner administration would improve the lives of middle class New Yorkers.  The policy solutions I’ve proposed in these speeches augment the 40 ideas I proposed in “Real Solutions: Renewing the Promise of New York City” which you can find on my website, www.anthonyweiner.com.  To date, I’ve outlined my plans to reduce the tax burden on middle class New Yorkers and bring economic development to all five boroughs, proposed a series of good government reforms and called for an end to backroom deals and pay to play at City Hall, described my vision for our schools, unveiled a plan to end childhood hunger in the City, and detailed how we can help to provide quality healthcare to New York’s 1.8 million uninsured.

Today, I want to talk about an issue that is foremost on many New Yorker’s minds in part because of the events that took place a few blocks away from this spot a little more than three and half years ago: the second attack on the World Trade Center.

I grew up in Brooklyn, taking mass transit to and from public school when crime and graffiti were the rule and not the exception.  And as someone who cut his teeth in politics working for Chuck Schumer, spent seven years in the City Council, and is now a member of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, I have been fighting to keep New York City safe for my adult life.

As mayor, I will make security a top priority.

Security is a Continuum 

A comprehensive approach to keeping New York City safe requires that we focus on everything from keeping our streets safe to securing our buildings from terrorism.  Anyone who wants to be mayor needs to put security atop their agenda.   We need to fight crime in our neighborhoods, ensure that our infrastructure is prepared to withstand attack, and press the federal government in Washington to adopt a smart foreign policy that identifies nascent threats to New York before they become real.

We Know What Works: Proactive Rather Than Passive 

Experience has shown that we are kept safe when our leaders take an active approach to security – and that passivity leaves us vulnerable.  Each of the mayors who have governed this city have left their mark on New Yorkers’ safety and security.

Mayor Koch faced down the crack epidemic which engulfed New York during the 1980s by dramatically refocusing the NYPD’s efforts.

Mayor Dinkins’ “Safe Streets, Safe City” program augmented the NYPD’s force strength, and ushered in a policy of “community policing.”

Mayor Giuliani and his first police commissioner, Bill Bratton, established the “CompStat” system to track crime and target resources.  Bratton also adopted the “broken windows” approach which helped to catch smalltime criminals before they could commit more serious crimes.    

Mayor Bloomberg’s Commissioner Ray Kelly, has reorganized the NYPD again by developing new units of “terrorism cops” to deal with new threats unique to the post-9/11 era.

Keeping Our Eye on the Ball

New York City has the best police officers in the world and this is not about politics or finger pointing.  But we need to refocus on every point on the continuum of safety and security by responding to smaller “quality of life” crimes, mandating the construction of safer buildings, and speaking out against the roots of terror.

Using Technology to Fight Crime

The first thing that we should focus on in our efforts to ensure that New Yorkers are safe and secure is the technology that we provide to our police and other first responders.  We can’t afford to fall behind the curve.

The first instance is DNA.  In 2000, 16,000 untested rape kits were discovered in a warehouse in Long Island City.  Each rape kit represented a victim, and many of those victims were living with the fear that their attacker would return, or that he would escape justice.  Each of them, having suffered through the horrible ordeal of a sexual assault, deserved better than to have the evidence that had the potential of identifying their attacker sit on a shelf.

That is why I worked hard to pass the first ever legislation to provide federal funding for testing rape kits – and why I fought again last year to win even more funding.  The stories of how invaluable DNA testing can be are gut wrenching.  In 1999, after a young NBC producer was dragged into an open alley and raped in midtown, she offered to withdraw money from her bank account so she could walk her attacker in front of an ATM camera.  When even the visual image didn’t help to identify him, the DNA sample taken from her rape kit did: the DNA profile of her attacker, Lashange Legrand, was put into the state DNA database when he was put on parole for attempted robbery.  It matched the profile from her rape kit, he was immediately arrested, and subsequently pled guilty to the rape.

DNA is also an invaluable tool in protecting the innocent.  The five teenagers who confessed to attacking the Central Park Jogger were exonerated after DNA evidence connected Matias Reyes, who had already been convicted and jailed for other attacks, with the brutal crime.

What more can be done?

Currently, an individual who had completed their sentence for having committed a DNA qualifying offence before that offense became a qualifying offense, does not have to register their profile with the DNA databank.  That means that if you were convicted of rape in 1989, and completed your sentence in 1993, you would not be included in the database – because the database only includes rapists who were under parole, incarcerated, or convicted after 1994.  That also means that a subway fondler who committed his crime in 2001, convicted of “forcible touching” in 2002, and completed parole in 2003, you would not be included the DNA registry.  The legal justification for civil confinement – which serves as the basis for our efforts – is that individuals who have committed crimes represent a danger to the public, and that requiring them to submit a DNA sample is not a punishment, it is simply a precaution.

The law should be changed so that residents of New York State who were once convicted of an offense that currently requires registry in the DNA database are required to submit a sample.  Furthermore, qualifying offenses should be expanded to include all crimes that require submission of fingerprints.  This means that the following individuals would have to submit samples: juveniles convicted of a sex crime, subway fondlers who completed their sentence before July 2004, white collar criminals, and those convicted of misdemeanor drug possession.

In addition, we should ensure that the NYPD’s “Sex Offender Monitoring Unit” is given all of the resources that it requires.  Commissioner Kelly has done an admirable job of providing “SOMU” with the officers and equipment it needs.  But we need to re-double our efforts to make sure that we know when someone with a history of sexual violence enters a community with vulnerable children.

At present, only 19% of rape kits are tested within 30 days.  A year ago it was 47%.  If a rape kit is not tested by the city within 30 days, it should be sent elsewhere for immediate testing.  We cannot wait while criminals remain unprosecuted and the evidence that could bring them to justice collects dust.

And finally, we need to do just as District Attorney Morgenthau has prescribed: lift the statute of limitations that prevent us from prosecuting sexual predators for crimes that they have committed more than five year before prosecutors are able to identify them.  DNA evidence now allows us to identify perpetrators years after their crimes.  The law shouldn’t prevent us from putting them behind bars.

Cell Phone Accessibility and Reliability 

Next, we should focus on the reliability and accessibility of mobile phones.   Cell phones have the potential of being a great crime fighting tool.  In too many places – the innumerable dead zones around the City, and particularly on subway platforms – cell phones do not receive a signal, leaving those who depend on them unnecessarily vulnerable.

First, cell service providers must do much more to ensure that New Yorkers who sign contracts for service under the promise of universal access throughout the five boroughs get what they pay for.  We know that service providers have very sophisticated maps that layout where exactly a consumer can reasonably expect to receive service.  Those maps should be made available to the public.

Furthermore, it has been more than two years now since four teenage boys tragically drowned off City Island because the cell phones they were using did not connect them to E911, the technology that allows a 911 dispatcher to pinpoint the exact location an emergency call is made from.  New York City has done extensive testing with each of the cell phone service providers to ensure that they provide an accurate location to police, fire and rescue teams responding to a call.  The results of those tests should be made available to consumers.

Finally, even as other cities, like Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong, and Washington, DC have completed projects to ensure that riders are able use their phones within the transit system, New York has not even committed to building the required infrastructure.  Each time newscasts show footage of smoke pouring out of a subway station – as was the case when a fire forced the closure of the Seven Train earlier this year – we should be reminded of just how important it is that those in distress have a way to contact those who could come to their rescue.  I’ve been working in Washington to mandate that the MTA develop the required infrastructure.  As mayor, I would mandate that platforms be outfitted with the required equipment by the year 2010.

Police / Fire Radios and the Office of Emergency Management

More than three-and-a-half years after the 9/11 attacks, New York City’s first responders still do not have the communications equipment that they need.  Not only have the departments failed to develop  a unified system that would allow them to communicate in the event of an emergency, we still have not outfitted New York’s bravest with equipment that operates consistently in settings like subways and high-rises.

Last year, a Cornell University survey found that almost two-thirds of New York’s firefighters still could not communicate using the department’s radio system “when necessary.”  The NYPD has a much more advanced system of repeaters that allow officers to communicate throughout the City.  Firefighters ought to have the same capabilities.

Furthermore, it is time to end the confusion about whether the NYPD and FDNY have interoperable communications systems that will work in the event of an emergency.  We have been blessed not to have been attacked since 9/11 – but we ought to be sure that the same problems which plagued both forces three-and-a-half years ago not leave other first responders vulnerable in the face of another disaster.

The Office of Emergency Management should take control of the issue, and solve the problems in a holistic way.  Unfortunately, the Mayor plans to cut the number of employees at OEM by 50% by 2006, and cut funding by almost 75%.  OEM should to be provided with the budget and resources required to ensure that first responders in each and every department of the City’s government are provided with exemplary communications equipment.  No more excuses.

Refocusing on More than the “Big 7” Crimes

GRAFFITI

It is crucial that we refocus on “quality of life” crimes that so often serve as a criminal’s gateway to more serious offenses.  Efforts to combat graffiti, for instance, should not be focused exclusively on a handful of neighborhoods throughout the City as the Mayor has proposed.  They should be universal.  And while finding the perpetrators is important, there is much more that we can do.

We ought to make sure that each time we catch a tagger, we force them to clean up their own mess.  Important as it is that they be given a traditional punishment, our first goal should be to force the criminal to paint over or repair the surfaces that they have defaced.  I would seek to eliminate the Desk Appearance Tickets in favor of supervised clean-up.

HATE CRIMES

More focus and attention should be given to the ongoing problem of hate crime in all five boroughs.  Just this weekend, when I convened a town hall meeting with the Sikh community in Queens, higher ups in the administration sent instructions to the Police Department not to send a representative.  Since 9/11 the Sikh Coalition has reported 62 hate crimes against Sikhs in New York City.  And yet the mayor decided to put politics above public safety.

Two years ago, when I released a report detailing that anti-Semitism was on the rise – in the wake of a three month period where 57 crimes against Jews were committed within New York’s five boroughs –

the Mayor criticized me for bringing attention to an issue he claimed he had under control.  It’s not under control, and we ought not ignore it.

Last week, cars in Fresh Meadows were vandalized with: "Kill the Jews, 7-14-05" a reference to the day Adolf Hitler banned all political parties except for the Nazi Party in Germany.  Also, a swastika was found on a storage locker in a staff building at Jamaica Hospital and in Co-op City, a swastika was etched into a bench.

We need joint investigations into bias and terrorist crimes.

Bolster Our Cops 

In 2001, there were 38,630 full time cops working for the NYPD.  Today, that number has dropped to 34,824.

The loss is a cause for concern.  This City’s needs are at least as dire today as they were before the 9/11 attacks.   The number of officers we have defending the City should not have dwindled.  We ought not sacrifice our effort to fight against “quality of life” crime because cops are deployed on other assignments having to do with homeland security.  And without the adequate manpower, we may be unable to do both.

For that reason, in a speech I gave two months ago, I proposed that we return the NYPD to its force level at the beginning of the Bloomberg administration.  I would use the revenue generated by creating a new tax bracket for millionaires to offset the $267 million cost of ramping the NYPD up to the staffing levels before 9/11.

Dealing with the Challenge of Gang Crime

Recently, the nation has begun to focus on the growth of gang crime throughout the United States.  Some federal officials believe that a new Salvadoran gang, Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13), is the greatest threat to the United States after al Qaeda.  And while MS-13 does not yet have a significant presence in the five boroughs, its pattern is to gain a foothold in the surrounding suburbs – the gangs are growing on Long Island and upstate – before expanding into urban areas.

The fight between two rival gangs at this year’s New York Auto Show at the Javits center should have served as a wake up call.  And the NYPD’s refusal to make statistics on gang activity in New York public – or even available to the federal government’s center on gang violence – suggests that we do not yet know how serious a problem we may be facing in the future.

We do know that arrests for Gang Assault Offenses have increased 36.7% since from 2000 to 2004 throughout New York City and 45.6% in the outer boroughs.  And we know that gangs are working harder and harder to recruit younger members – initiations now begin in middle schools for some.

So we need to do more to combat the threat.  The most important thing we can do is provide the NYPD with the manpower it needs to devote officers to the type of community policing that will keep kids away from gangs.   But we need to press the federal government to provide sufficient funding for the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program which defers the costs that states and cities incur when incarcerating criminal illegal aliens – many of whom are gang members.  Further, the INS should have expedited deportation abilities for convicted felons.  And finally, we ought to make sure that the information that school resource officers accrue about gang activity is relayed to officers on the street who are working to combat gang violence.

New Yorkers have been very lucky in the past that gang crime has not scoured the City’s neighborhoods to the same degree that it haunts parts of other big cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.  But that certainly does not mean that we shouldn’t keep up our guard.

Building Safer Buildings

Keeping New Yorkers safe isn’t just about more cops on the streets.  It is about being smarter in everything we do.  We need a ground up approach, to securing the safety of New Yorkers, and it must include the safety of the structures around us.

Because the Port Authority is a quasi-governmental agency controlled by the governors of New York and New Jersey, the buildings it constructs within the five boroughs are not subject to the standards of the New York City building code.  There is a growing concern that the towers built on the World Trade Center site will not adhere to the City’s exacting standards.

City Hall’s influence should be brought to bear to ensure that the buildings constructed at Ground Zero do not sidestep the guidelines which govern other buildings in New York.

National Institute for Standards and Technology

In the wake of 9/11, Congressman Sherwood Boehlert and I worked together to craft legislation that would create a central repository for expertise on the construction of buildings.  We believed that a signal federal agency had to be designated as the chief investigative agent in the effort to understand why buildings like the Worth Trade Center failed, and how future designs could be improved.

We designated the National Institute for Standards and Technology as the agency to do that, and we passed legislation that designated NIST as the agency which would investigate building collapses, and report out recommendations for future designs.  Next month, NIST will issue its final report on the World Trade Center collapse.  With it, the agency will publish recommendations on how architects and developers can ensure that future designs perform better in the case of a disaster.  

What may come as a surprise to all of you is that the developers of the World Trade Center site – the Port Authority, the Mayor’s office, the Governor’s Officer, and Silverstein properties – did not meet with the experts at NIST until earlier this month.  Despite the fact that NIST has been issuing periodic reports with their findings, those planning to build on the site of the disaster never consulted with NIST’s experts.

While we haven’t yet got the final set of recommendations, we have some ideas about what NIST will publish next month: we know that they will recommend that staircases be built further apart in future buildings; that fireproofing be fastened to the steel frame of a building more securely; and that instruction on how to evacuate a building be made more clear.  Those recommendations ought to be incorporated as soon as possible into New York’s building code.  But more to the point: those recommendation should be at the centerpiece of whatever design emerges for the World Trade Center site.

WTC Site

Over ten months ago, on July 4, 2004, the Mayor and Governor ceremonially unveiled the cornerstone of the Freedom Tower.  Two months later, the NYPD’s raised concerns about the design’s vulnerability to future attack.  

Unfortunately, it took six months for the Governor to announce that the NYPD concerns would force planners and architects to redesign the Freedom Tower entirely.

How could it have happened?  The only explanation is that the Mayor and Governor simply weren’t paying attention.  This Mayor’s near obsession with the West Side Stadium blurred the focus required to ensure that lower Manhattan was being developed aggressively.   

City Hall needs to reassert control over the development of lower Manhattan.  We ought not dismiss Donald Trump’s proposal out-of-hand.  The Mayor’s office ought to be the central repository of information about the development of ground zero and the area around it.  The Mayor needs to ensure that the mismanagement which led to the delay of construction of the Freedom Tower does not repeat itself.

An Enlightened Strategy in Washington, DC.

By now, much of the public is aware of the fight that the Congressional delegation has waged to get the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress to distribute funding on the basis of threat, and threat alone.  While we have made some progress on that front, we face another, much more daunting battle: fighting to convince Washington to allow us to spend our homeland security dollars on the things we need most.  Now is the time for a new enlightened bipartisan approach to D.C.

Overtime

Each year, the NYPD spends more than $200 million on overtime costs associated with homeland security.  And yet the Bush administration, this year, put a restriction on the percentage of high threat funding that a city can use for overtime.  During a “code yellow,” a city can only spend 10% of its “high threat” funding on overtime costs.  And during a “code orange” – the designation that New York City maintains even when the rest of nation is at “code yellow” or below – the city can only spend a quarter of its expenses on overtime.  Considering that the police department alone spends almost as much on overtime as the federal government provides the city in its entirety each year, the restriction is a tremendous burden.  And efforts to ensure that New York gets its fair share of the homeland security pot will be undermined if the City is prevented from spending the funding as it needs.

Terrorism Cops 

Two police forces in the nation – the NYPD and the LAPD – have devoted police officers exclusively to efforts to combat terrorism.  New York has 1,000 such cops – officers who work exclusively to gather intelligence, analyze threats, and prepare to respond to another terrorist attack.

But the Bush administration prevents New York from using any of its homeland security funding to offset the costs of hiring these officers.

We need to bear down and force the Bush administration to lift that restriction.

C.O.P.S. Program 

In order to combat the rise in crime which plagued the nation in the 1980s and 1990, President Clinton and Democrats in Congress like Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden worked diligently to win passage of the C.O.P.S. program – to put more than 100,000 more police on the street.

The program was a tremendous success.  Today, over 10 years later, more than 118,000 police officers have been hired as a result of C.O.P.S. grants – 7,000 in New York City alone.

But the Bush administration has virtually zeroed out the program.

I have fought hard for the C.O.P.S. program in Washington – sponsoring legislation that would boost funding to levels that would allow the NYPD to hire 900 new cops a year.  It is crucial that we revive the C.O.P.S. program to ensure that NYPD has the force strength to cover the entire continuum of crime and homeland security needs.

Badges 

Just two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security discovered a man the Bronx preparing to distribute 1,300 counterfeit badges purporting to represent various law enforcement agencies.   The badges represented the U.S. Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Air Marshal Service, the Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New York Police Department, the former U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Army Military Police and the U.S. Marine Corps Military Police.

Unfortunately, federal law often makes it nearly impossible to prosecute individuals attempting to sell or buy fake law enforcement insignias.  Existing statutes include loopholes that allow people to purchase badges for “decorative” or “recreational” purposes.  We ought to close those loopholes – as legislation that I have proposed in Washington would do.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, let me reiterate what I said when I began: as mayor, safety and security will be a top priority.  We must not relax our effort to keep New Yorkers safe and secure, and that means focusing on every item on the continuum – from graffiti to terrorism, from funding in Washington to the drafting of blueprints for buildings at ground zero and throughout the five boroughs.

I will work with anyone on these issues, regardless of party affiliation.  My vision is a New York with more cops on the street, a renewed focus on “quality of life” crime, mayoral leadership in downtown Manhattan, and a commitment to ensure that our first responders have the resources that they need to keep New Yorkers safe and secure.