Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin, March 21, 2021, p. A12
Bill Martin Guest Columnist
The teenager who got hit by a bus and missed a meeting with his probation officer? Sent back to the county jail and then the state prison.
The youth who wants to live with his family rather than his assigned adult shelter? He dare not, for that will violate his probation and send him to the Broome County jail.
The local SUNY student who relapsed in his recovery from alcohol, or the women who went back to using drugs? Both are now parole violators, so back to the county jail and then a stint in a state prison.
It’s a common story: A person is incarcerated not for committing a new felony, but for violating technical rules imposed by the courts and parole or probation officers. It’s a plague across the state that cost $683 million last year alone.
It’s also very costly here. Broome County is spending over $1 million a year on jailing technical parole violators. Even prior to COVID conditions and the trimming back of bail reform, the annual costs were running at $770,000 per year.
In a period when the county cuts public health nurses and mental health funding year after year, our elected officials, judges and parole officers continue to spend millions to incarcerate local residents who break technical rules and most often need treatment, not further incarceration.
Judges and parole officers often claim they have no alternative, leading them to administratively decide to incarcerate multitudes — without considering the $70,000 to $80,000 cost of doing so. Is it any wonder that Broome County regularly has the highest incarceration rate in the state? The Less is More bill before the Senate (S1144) and Assembly (A5576) offers an alternative. It proposes moderate reforms that would cut back incarcerating people for technical parole violations. It would reward persons who comply with parole requirements. It would still allow incarceration for serious violations, but would end automatic incarceration based on mere accusations of a violation. Parole officers would follow new rules and no longer fear retribution for not automatically imposing incarceration, ending an easy administrative decision that ends up costing the county $70,000 or more.
In the coming months, local faith and community organizations will be working to urge adoption of the Less is More bill. Assembly Member Donna Lupardo is a cosponsor, while Sen. Fred Akshar’s position is not known, as yet.
It’s time to vote for justice and sensible fiscal reform.
Bill Martin is a Bartle Professor at Binghamton University and founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier.
2017 Protest at Broome County Jail Photo Credit: Kojo Senoo
Faced with unrelenting waves of protest against police brutality, elected officials have mobilized in response. Local sheriffs, police chiefs, and mayors first proposed and then enacted new laws to incarcerate those who “annoy” the police, arresting protestors in the process.[1] Governor Cuomo, facing larger Black and Latinx insurgencies and voters, responded with an executive order in August that required all police departments—except state police departments including SUNY state police—to conduct a review and send a final reform report to the state by April 1, 2021.[2] The cudgel: an open threat to cut state aid to cities and counties that don’t comply.
Local departments led by the Binghamton Police Department and the County Sheriff started late on their reform review, with a top-down, hand-picked set of commission members.[3] Public (Zoom and phone) call-in meetings for both the city and the county have been swamped by demands to downsize police operations and fund alternative health and violence prevention programs. From the thin public records available,[4] it appears the commission proposals will be limited to recommendations that police departments increase their efforts to hire more diverse officers, expand cultural competency and de-escalation training, team up with mental health and addiction counselors, and expand community policing.
All these measures have been recommended by national and local commissions for over 30 years and have failed us–as any one who dips their toes into the subject through a Google search comes to know very quickly. George Floyd was killed in a city whose police department had undergone a deep set of these reforms.[5] Data shows that hiring more officers of color does not alter police violence and brutality.[6] Despite diversity and sensitivity training Binghamton’s police force has faced protests alleging abuse of children of color.[7] Proliferation of teams of police officers and medical counselors, under direct police control, along with restricted medical treatment in the jail has only increased the use of the police as the primary means to address substance use disorders.[8] Indeed such programs threaten to expand and cement the use of the jail as the county’s primary drug and mental health treatment center and increase drug overdoses.[9] Pledges by the City of Binghamton to hire and deploy a more diverse force are heard year after year,[10] but little progress takes place; at last count the city force was 1.5% Black.[11] The Broome County Sheriff simply states “We don’t hire by race”[12]—and supervises a 160+ person force that is 98% white (as far as we can uncover[13]). Why not Black officers? Harder recently blamed the local NAACP for not acting better as a recruiting arm for him.[14]
Community Actions
June 2020 Recreation Park Community Consultation on Police and Budget Photo Credit: Bill Martin
What is the local community to do? Actually a lot has been done at the grassroots. For over five years many community organizations have called and rallied for change in mass policing and mass incarceration policies, most prominently Citizen Action, Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier, Progressive Leaders of Tomorrow, and Truth Pharm. For over five years people have rallied at the local jail, protesting over-incarceration and deaths in the jail.[15] Black residents have rallied against police abuse of local Black youth.[16] Last summer over a thousand persons marched through town demanding change as part of a Black Lives Matter rally launched by local Black high school students.[17] Over 400 persons met later in Rec Park to discuss and hammer out a collective plan to change local policing priorities and practices.[18] A local coalition of community groups—Divestment, Accountability, Reinvestment in Our Community (DAROC)—advanced these discussions at community meetings in multiple city parks, and is now presenting the results to elected officials.
City and County Responses
All to no apparent avail. The City of Binghamton and Broome County officials refuse, in direct opposition to the Governor’s recommendations, to speak with the most active community organizations. The Governor’s guidebook is quite clear that it would be a mistake “to impose to-down solutions” and that reform efforts and meetings should “involve the entire community in the discussion” including interested non-profit groups.[19]
Neither the City nor County have done this. Commissions have been composed and imposed by the mayor and the sheriff, with the mayor calling the community groups who have led local protests “hate groups” and the sheriff simply refusing to discuss the issue.[20] To date the only forums for public comment have been call-in Zoom meetings which permit short statements by outsiders with no response by committee members.[21] The mayor and sheriff, and most commissioners, are either silent or absent completely.[22] This has made it impossible of course to consider, again as Cuomo’s guidelines dictate, “what grievances your community has had with its police force in the past and what you can learn from those instances.”[23]
Questions to Ask
There is no sign that either city or county meetings are pursuing even the most elemental questions raised by the state guidebook for all reform efforts:
How often are complaints made about the police?
Do complaints come from a particular portion or portions of the community?
Should you deploy social service personnel instead of or in addition to police officers in some situations?
Do you want police to respond to mental health calls?
Do you want police to respond to substance abuse/overdose calls?
Do you want police to respond to calls regarding the homeless?
Are there other matters for which the community currently turns to its police for assistance that might be better addressed by others with different skills and expertise? (pp. 12-13)
Neither the city nor the county seems to have considered alternatives raised in the state guidebook, including alternative investments of public funds in:
Community violence interruption
Parent support
Youth development
Addressing trauma and violence at home (pp. 14-16)
Nor is there any sign that local meetings will consider any changes demanded by community organizations or discussed in the state guidebook, including cutting police in schools (p. 18), demilitarizing police forces (pp. 20, 21), collecting and making available stop data, ending shooting at moving vehicles (p. 31), and cutting back on racialized facial recognition data (p. 34).
As currently composed, the city and county reform initiatives are stillborn: they are unrepresentative, exclude community groups and individuals who have been most active in dealing with police issues, fail to address racialized policing and incarceration, and are directed to suggest only initiatives that lead to greater funding and control of the police over social illnesses, most notably mental health and substance use disorders.
Where to start
Community organizations through DAROC provide an alternative agenda, most notably in their January 28, 2021 letter to the mayor and city council members. It recommends many initiatives the city and county would do well to consider, including
Ending racial profiling
Implementing mandatory date collection and reports on stops, tracking, and surveillance
Ending police in schools
Increasing transparency and compliance with state laws on disciplinary records and freedom of information requests
Eliminating the militarization of the police, especially military grade weapons and armored personnel carriers
Diverting funding and resources to independent mental health/substance use counselors, reentry programs, food, youth and educational programs
Creating an empowered oversight board
A similar set of proposals are targeted at the much larger budget and operations of the county sheriff.[24]
These are not radical demands. They have been adopted by large and small cities across the country. One might go further and argue as many do for a more substantive transformation of how we define public safety and work to counter violence and harm (see suggested readings below).
The bottom line? All current indications are that the city and county will generate a report that fails to meet even the minimal standards of the state mandate, with state aid cuts to local county and city budgets being the only credible state response.
Binghamton and Broome County residents deserve better.
[3] For an early evaluation of the late start see Tarik Abdelazim, “Binghamton’s Police Reform Panel: Not Even Started, and Already a Failure,” The Bridge (blog), November 18, 2020, https://binghamtonbridge.org/binghamtons-police-reform-panel-not-even-started-and-already-a-failure/. The Johnson City, Endicott, and Vestal police departments are considerably smaller and have barely begun the reform process as of early February 2021. The SUNY-Binghamton State Police department is larger than those of the smaller cities but is not subject to the state mandate.
[14] “It’s up to the minorities to sign up to take the [civil service] test. I’ve even given paperwork to the NAACP to hand off to people. They didn’t even hand it out. No, they criticized us for not hiring minorities.”
[22] Biviano, “How Police Reforms Are Taking Shape in Broome, and What’s Stopping Them.”
[23] New York State, “New York State Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative: Resources & Guide for Public Officials and Citizens,” 12.
[24] The sheriff’s budget is $40 million ($10m for law enforcement, and $30m+ for the county’s mental health and substance use detention center, aka the Broome County Jail). The Binghamton Police Department’s budget is runs around $10 million.
For its first five decades, security for the SUNY-Binghamton campus was provided by an unarmed security patrol force. This came to end throughout the State University of New York system in 1998. The creep towards this objective started in the turbulent 1960s and advanced steadily: a statewide SUNY security force was established in 1968, the jurisdiction of campus officers was extended beyond campus boundaries in 1969, security officers at SUNY Albany were armed in 1974, security officers were designated “public safety” officers in 1978, and the powers of these officers throughout the state were slowly expanded throughout the 1980s. It was in the early 1990s however that legislators floated proposals to transform campus safety officers into a fully-empowered, armed state police force. These years would set the stage for the growing calls today to defund police forces.
Binghamton students and faculty mounted a vigorous opposition over several years. Flyers were posted around campus alerting students that “ULED might get guns. Just thought you would like to know.” In 1992 a coalition of student organizations rallied hundreds against the move, eventually occupying a campus administration building and proposing alternatives forms of safety, including a student patrol, sensitivity training, and a student-faculty oversight board.[1] Pipedream, the campus newspaper, editorialized that “Guns for ULED (university law enforcement) are dangerous for minorities.”[2]
Local officials countered these calls, arguing that the campus needed real police power to fight crime and, especially, the ability to work with and in surrounding cities. The Johnson City Chief of Police and the Broome County District Attorney both advanced the argument that campus officers needed to operate as full-fledged police force on- and especially off-campus. SUNY-Binghamton’s Director of Public Safety railed against regulations that served to “narrowly restrict their law enforcement authority” to campus residents. Even worse, as Binghamton Review, the conservative campus newspaper put it by citing Public Safety:
“We cannot ‘stop and frisk’ potentially dangerous suspects encountered on our campus.”[3]
Black students’ expressed fears about racial profiling and police harassment were, Binghamton’s Press & Sun-Bulletin newspaper editorialized, unwarranted:
“Is it fair to assume that because some cops have mistreated minorities that all cops are prone to? Isn’t that a stereotype like most college professors are Marxists or that most black students are beneficiaries of affirmative action?”[4]
By the mid-1990s the forces pushing mass policing and mass incarceration won this battle: in 1998 Governor Pataki signed into law legislation that created the State University Police force.[5]
Policing Campus Protest
Closing the doors to protestors in 2019: Police to the left, UDiversity to the Right
Clashes between students and campus and municipal police forces invariably erupted around campus protests as any number of examples over the years demonstrate. When the white nationalist Student Association President in 1996 closed Student Association meetings to progressive representatives, the campus dispatched ten police to guard the doors. Students rallied to force their way in and campus police intervened with pepper spray and arrests. A sit-in and protest by 800 students followed. An anti-Iraq war march in 2008 also resulted in the use of pepper spray and the arrest of eight students by the Vestal police. Students protested: “You mace a rapist, not students that are protesting.”
In 2016 campus police surrounded the France Beal Society occupiers of the public lobby of the Couper administration building for days on end. Students were protesting campus funding for the City of Binghamton Police Department, which they charged had “continually failed to serve the Black and Brown members of our community.” Funding more police, they contended, would deepen “the divisions between BU students and Binghamton residents, which actually could make our community less safe.” They urged resources be redirected to health services on and off-campus, especially counseling.President Stenger refused to meet with the students, closed all the offices in the building including his own for the duration of the protest, and had officers patrol the corridors inside.
This hardening stance continued into the spring of 2018, when Black graduate student Dominic Davy was threatened with arrest by campus police as he and others passed out leaflets against racism in campus programs and departments. The police were allegedly operating at the behest of administrators under a Dean who refuses, following the campus President, to meet with protestors.
This past November over 200 students once again rallied against the campus police, who had come to the rescue of illegal right-wing tabling on campus. Chanting “Who are you protecting?” and ““No justice, no peace, no racist police,” the predominantly Black group regrouped at an evening teach-in where students spoke to a long history of racial harassment. This protest was followed in the following week by the campus police removing two protestors who had interrupted a speech by the conservative economist Arthur Laffer. The students were hauled from the lecture room to the basement of the building and arrested and charged there— a process watched over by the newly appointed Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs who was also the Chair of the new Town and Gown Committee, which had been formed to diffuse the demands of Frances Beal Society. The next week President Trump denounced Binghamton’s protesting “mobs.”[6]
Mass expansion: the Stenger Years
Behind these episodic protests lurked a hidden, linear increase in mass policing on campus. What is most startling is the sheer growth of the Binghamton University Police Department (BUPD) in the last decade. The expansion of the force under President Stenger has far outpaced buildups in surrounding municipalities under even the most resolute law-and-order elected officials. For in ten years the BUPD force has increased in size by 50 percent:
Source: NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services
President Stenger now commands a state police force larger than any of the surrounding towns of Vestal, Johnson City and Endicott—and matches that of the larger City of Binghamton in the number of sworn officers who carry a firearm and can arrest persons, if not in total staff.
Just how disproportionate is the size of the SUNY-Binghamton force? In relation to residents it outweighs all the surrounding cities by a high margin:
Crime and Policing
Equally puzzling are the workloads and outcomes of policing on this scale. Where is the crime and how is it policed? SUNY-Binghamton, like all universities in the nation, is required each year to report incidents of criminal acts to the Federal government and to place these on the campus website for students, parents, and others to read. To examine the latest report reveals a steady pattern: there is very little crime on the campus according to official reports.
For the main Vestal campus, the 2019 report lists no instances of domestic violence, no racial hate crimes, no arrests for alcohol offenses, two weapons arrests, and no motor vehicle thefts. There were eight rapes reported, five burglaries, two weapons arrests, two hate crimes related to sexual orientation and national origin, and the first murder on campus in many years. There were no criminal offenses officially at its downtown campus located in the heart of Binghamton.
What do campus police then do besides watch over protests, property and buildings? From official reports their main activity would appear to be referring students to disciplinary committees rather than local courts. There were 345 referrals for drugs and 352 for alcohol—offenses that in many cases would result in tickets and arrests in poorer areas of surrounding towns.
Policing the Colorblind Campus
What we do not know is the impact of this extensive campus policing. Did the fears of students twenty-five years ago of racialized policing come to pass?
The SUNY-Binghamton administration prides itself on its diversity and equity. Throughout campus posters of distinguished people of color proclaim “UDiversity.” The cost of senior diversity and equity administrators now easily exceeds $1 million annually. Yet in practice this appears to be a colorblind diversity, charting the good works of the institution while asserting the decline of racism and white supremacy. No evidence or data is provided towards these ends. Indeed basic information is hidden or purposefully not collected. It is exceedingly difficult to find publicly celebrated diversity plans despite every administrative unit officially having a diversity officer; a Freedom-of-Information request returned the response that no plans existed, even though a well-known if largely ignored study by Harpur College was produced in 2015.
Requests in recent years by students and faculty for an accounting of faculty diversity, especially faculty hiring, have yet to produce official replies. Letters, meetings, and protests by Black and Latinx students and faculty over racial harassment are a constant feature of almost every semester, and are offset periodically by official proclamations of concern, more training, and more committee work. With few racial hate crimes ever being reported by the police, despite the evidence, this has become a standard response. Still, a 2015 campus climate survey that probed racial tensions produced dismal results and has not been repeated—and has been removed from the campus website. Lacking faculty and counselors of color, students today turn to their peers for assistance.
Similarly, when the campus newspaper reported in fall 2017 that the first-year enrollment of new Black students had fallen by 20%, there was no comment; for decades Black students have constituted only between 4 and 5 percent of the undergraduate student body.[7] For an institution that promotes itself as the “Premier Public University,” this seems remarkably low. Public schools in its main recruiting areas in the state are far more representative, with New York City’s public schools being 26 percent Black and Binghamton High School being 26 percent Black. Increased diversity officers and multiracial committees appear to have a negative relationship, if any, with the numbers of students and faculty of color.
Policing and its relationship with racial and gender representation and inequalities remains equally impenetrable. The university reveals neither the diversity of the force over time nor its budget. No records are kept of stops by race, ethnicity, or gender. The campus administration has rejected equipping officers with body cameras.[8] No records are kept on the number of students of color who have been referred either by the police to disciplinary committees on campus or by unknown faculty to be monitored as “persons at risk.”
One data set does exist: the number and nature of arrests by campus police. These are spotty and uneven data. Here as elsewhere official, standardized data would be most welcome. What I have for 2016 from a Freedom-of-Information request is hardly encouraging: Black students are heavily, disproportionately, arrested by comparison to all other ethnic and racial groups on campus no matter how charted:
This is a highly gendered police practice: Black men constitute 90 percent of the Black students arrested.
Defund or Dismantle?
The Black Lives Matter rebellion has openly instigated a debate over the defunding and radical shrinking of municipal police forces. The long record of campus policing at SUNY-Binghamton underpins this call for the campus community. Based on the historical record outlined here, and the thin data that the administration has revealed to date (often under the pressure of Freedom on of Information Act requests), the SUNY-Binghamton police force cannot be legitimized by its purported anti-crime activity, an ability to provide safety especially for Black campus residents and staff, or its relation with racial harassment and inequalities in the campus criminal justice system. There is no independent oversight, and lines of authority between police officials and the administration are excessively close and opaque. Indeed, as elsewhere, greater security would be provided by downsizing the campus’ private police force and investing the funds elsewhere. Less police would mean more safety. But we need more. It is time to begin a conversation on how to disarm and dismantle the campus police and construct a representative safety organization, designed by and accountable to the community.
Endnotes
[1] “Students Protest Arms Recommendation,” Newspapers.Com, December 4, 1992.
[2] Mitchell Berger, “Year in Review,” Binghamton Review VI, no. 1 (Orientation 1993): 9, citing a December 1992 Pipedream editorial.
[3] Joe Martn and Paul Torres, “A Campus Up in Arms,” Binghamton Review, December 1995, 5.
[4] Editorial, “Arm SUNY,” Press & Sun Bulletin, February 4, 1996.
[5] As public libraries and archives reopen, this history will be updated.
[6] “So earlier this year, at Binghamton University, a few conservative students were promoting an event featuring the renowned economist at Art Laffer… They were surrounded by hundreds of radicals, screaming at them in vile terms… A mob flooded the place wearing masks and red armbands, and acting tough. They swing clubs. They swing bats. They swing everything.” No bats or clubs were ever seen by anyone. “Remarks by President Trump at Turning Point USA Student Action Summit | West Palm Beach, FL,” The White House, accessed June 14, 2020, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-turning-point-usa-student-action-summit-west-palm-beach-fl/.
[7] “The racial composition of BU hasn’t changed much since the class of 2010 was admitted, when 6 percent of students identified as black or African American. In this year’s class, just 4 percent of freshmen identify as black. Among all SUNY institutions, the percent of students who identify as black is 10.8 percent.”
[8] David Julien, “BU Police Choose Not to Implement Body Cameras despite SUNYSA Resolution,” UWIRE Text, May 9, 2019, Gale OneFile: News.
Unmasked Sheriff Deputy Trying to Shut Down Distanced Protest
Suspected of COVID? You get punished. That’s the rule at the Broome County Jail. Under the current administration it can’t be otherwise. There are too many persons in the unsanitary jail, on too many minor charges. Too many persons are kept locked up due to untreated substance use and mental health illnesses. Too many are awaiting trial, often for over a year; refuse to plead guilty and accept a punishing criminal record, and you will stay seemingly forever. And above all too many are housed, in crowded COVID conditions, for other counties, the state, and the federal system–all to make money for the county, from $100 to $300/person per day.
Mass Solitary
What happens if someone reports they are ill? They are dispatched to isolation in the medical unit, a fate worse than formal solitary. There they lose all communication with the outside world, access to regular exercise, conversation and contact with other human beings. Test positive, if you are tested–for very few tests have been administered and the county refuses to release positivity rates–and you remain in super-solitary for 10 to 14 days. After that period in medical solitary, you are sent to an intake “pod” or section of the jail, to quarantine for another 10 to 14 days with more restrictions. Facing a month of solitary, quarantine, and restriction, is it any wonder that so few will admit to being ill?
And it’s group punishment: your friends and fellow incarcerated in your home pod are deemed as threats, ill or not, and put in lockdown. For most people that means being locked in your cold cell alone for 23 hours and 15 minutes a day—you will have 45 minutes at best to phone someone to tell them you are still alive, shower, exchange a book, grab a very short conversation. It’s simply solitary on a mass basis. Its so widespread that correctional officers have regularly been forced to deliver food across the facility, facilitating even more spread out into the community.
It’s a cold fate literally, for cells, especially in the women’s sections, are by multiple accounts very very cold. Persons inside report the heat seems to have been turned off and they have been provided an extra blanket as compensation.
There is one exception to the solitary rule: there is a big dormitory room, now split into two quarantine sections, one for men and one for women. There you sleep and live on a bunk bed, less than 3 feet from everyone else, sharing communal showers and toilets.
Pain and Protest
December 12th 2020 JUST Protest Outside Jail
To people inside and friends and family outside, unable to help, these are painful times.
Is it any wonder that women speak out from inside the jail at inhumane conditions, the lack of basic hygiene, privacy and clothing needs, the inability to access any programs? What official decided to stop friends and family, even before COVID times, from sending in from Amazon bras and basic Christian crosses? Should it surprise anyone that threats of retribution and more are meted out regularly to grievances over food by teenagers and diabetics, the lack of masks and sanitizer, the failure to provide adequate time out of cells and access to phones and tablets to contact loved ones? Or that hunger strikes have now broken out in the jail?
So many persons are suspected of infection, and so few tested, that most of the jail has been in COVID solitary conditions for weeks on end. People inside have called out to multiple community organizations, the press, their lawyers, and the courts for relief. Protests occur regularly still outside the jail and county offices. To date, to no avail: our elected officials and health department see no evil, hear no evil, fail to act at every turn. Meanwhile the pain, and protest, build.
April COVID Peak: Sheriff dispatches unmasked deputies to shut down distanced protest
As recounted by the local media (WSKG and WIVT) on December 2nd, Sheriff Harder and County Executive Harder have one response to volatile reports of COVID in the county jail from Citizen Action and other community groups: don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.
Don’t believe the county officials. Willingly or unwittingly, they’ve told us lies before, and are doing it again.
Despite the claims that less than a handful of persons in the jail have COVID, more and more reports come out from persons inside (and their families with whom they speak) regarding symptomatic and unknown cases.
Who are we to believe?
Neither the Sheriff nor the County Exec will reveal how many tests have been done of the thousands of persons who have been in the jail during this epidemic. In yesterday’s WSKG story Republican Sheriff Harder says only 2 incarcerated persons and maybe 2 or 3 (which is it?) Correctional Officers have COVID. According to Democrat County Executive Jason Garnar “the new cases are the first at the jail since July.”
We’ve heard this dissembling before, as in May when after multiple protests Garnar said there were no new cases—and then we got, after much waiting, data from a freedom of information act (FOIA) request that showed there were indeed cases.
This week is a repeat. Contrary to what Garnar states and WSKG and others pass on to us, another FOIA request submitted in mid-October finally came in showing three staff tested positive in the first two weeks of October alone. No new cases they tell us since July, really? Did Garnar not know? Here it is:
Of course if you don’t test, you won’t know. The state reports regularly how many persons have been tested in all its prisons with total negative and total positive results. In Elmira over 600 persons out of 1500 tested positive. But for Broome? How many Correctional Officers have been tested with what results? How many incarcerated persons have been tested with what results? We don’t know.
Here again the County has an explanation: they apparently don’t keep the information on the number of tests. While everyone else acrosst the state and coutry report positivity rates, the County formally tells us in response to another FOIA request: “Please note the following from the Broome County Health Department, ‘Since we do not log details of negative test results, we cannot provide that information.’”
We hear multiple persons from multiple sections of pods of the jail have been symptomatic—and not just one pod as Harder allege. Aand why did they test a whole pod? Was it because it was H pod which contains all the coerced workers who do all the cooking, cleaning and laundry? Meanwhile the Sheriff has issued a seemingly permanent solitary confinement order for almost everyone in the jail—an unprecedented punishment.
Meanwhile the jail fills up with yet more innocent persons awaiting hearings given the closed courts: of the over 370 persons inside, only 47 last month were reported by the state as sentenced. Meanwhile the County’s refuses to provide confidential telephone or video communications between lawyers and the incarcerated as is done elsewhere around the state. With a $30 million budget they can’t put in a telephone?
In short: we don’t know how many persons have COVID, how many Correctional Officers move in and out of the jail with COVID, how many incarcerated persons have had and now have COVID, and how many persons come out of the jail and go home with COVID—with little or no provision for housing and food for those who need to isolate or quarantine.
In short: don’t believe the hype. The media should stop believing Harder and Garnar (and Trump), and demand some transparency and basic human treatment.
Published in the Press and Sun-Bulletin, 10/25/2020, p. A12
At a recent public hearing on the Broome County budget, person after person protested cuts in the public health budget. The director of the Broome County Health Department, Rebecca Kaufman, replied that no one was let go.
Where is the truth? The answer tells us much about why Broome County was so ill-prepared for COVID-19 — and the next viral emergency headed our way.
The numbers in the proposed budget are stark: three public nurses in maternal and child health are zeroed out on page 234; the three directors of the STD/HIV/TB/Maternal Child clinics are gone (pp. 226, 234), and eight positions are to be removed in the Clinic and Infectious Disease division (p. 226). It is true that many of these positions were left vacant in the last few years and are to be “abolished in 2021.”
That’s little comfort. For this year testifies to a dismaying trend: clinic and disease control staffing, so badly needed now, is half of what it was five years ago. Maternal and child health has been cut 10%. The mental health division has gone from 55 staff positions in 2010 to seven in 2015 to but three today; funding is down 75%. There’s not much help to treat the explosion of COVID-related mental illness.
This isn’t a problem of lack of resources. It’s legislators’ priorities. While public health was being defunded, county officials went on a mass incarceration spending spree. Crime rates have dropped, and the county jail is half empty, but jail staff has increased by 25 in the last 10 years (to 194), with half of that coming in the last four years. Jail funding has increased by 50% to over $30 million. Five more staff were added to the sheriff ’s road patrol force recently, with two more proposed for 2021. The District Attorney’s Office has grown from 31 to 45 positions since 2017, with two more to be added nest year.
Is it any surprise that when COVID-19 hit the county, we had no plan, few staff and fewer resources? Or that many of those with substance use and mental health problems were not in treatment centers but in the county jail? The result: The jail became quickly a COVID hotspot. Since the H1N1 and SARS epidemics, a state law requires all counties to have an emergency plan that covers crowded nursing homes, college dorms and jails. Other counties post theirs on their websites. Broome County’s website has a two-page flyer last updated in 2008.
We can do better. We need to fund public health. It is not by chance that Broome County has the highest incarceration rate of all 62 counties in the state, and also ranks 52nd of the 62 counties on health and wellbeing measures. It is time to shift the county’s priorities away from armored cars and expensive, empty jails to well-stocked and well-funded health facilities.
Bill Martin is a Binghamton University professor and a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier.
Its a miracle budget for Broome County. Following a hiring freeze and furloughs earlier in the summer due to COVID-19, the County Executive Jason Garnar has just announced only minor budget adjustments for the coming year.[i] How has the county offset plummeting revenues from falling sales taxes, closed casinos and restaurants, and empty hotels? Garnar says he will tap the reserve fund he has built up and take on short-term debt. Surprisingly, there was even good news: a cut in property taxes for the third straight year. And hope remains for federal aid. By all official accounts there are no serious cuts in county services.
Garnar’s announcement, however, is deceptive and far too reassuring. Dig a little beneath the surface and you find a savage budget that deepens long-term cuts to public health services and funds more incarceration and policing. It threatens to push many county residents into further debt, destitution, homelessness, and medical crises. The budget certainly does not provide the resources we need to fight COVID-19.
Defunding Public Health
Hiring freezes and furloughs sound reasonable when facing the loss of $ millions in county revenues. But who was furloughed? We weren’t told. What positions aren’t being filled? We weren’t told. What are the county’s priorities under COVID? We don’t know.
It took a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the county personnel department to find out.[i] County employees working in public health and social services were the clear targets. Of the 57 positions the County Executive furloughed:
26 were in the health and social services departments (e.g. Medicaid and food stamp (SNAP) support)
14 were in the departments of public works and public transit
2 were in the already thinly staffed county library
Not a single person was listed among the hundreds employed by the Sheriff (with a half empty jail?) or the recently expanded District Attorney’s office (with falling crime and closed courts?). No one with administrative or legislative duties was listed.
A quick skim of the proposed 2021 budget reveals the advancement of these priority choices:
public health sees 8 positions abolished this year in the Clinic and Disease Division — i.e., those assigned to monitor and address infectious diseases (during COVID times?)
3 public nurses are eliminated in Maternal and Child health
all the Directors of the STD/HIV, TB, and Maternal Child Health have been swept away.
This continues long term trends in cutting health services, year after year.[iii] Mental health has been particularly hard hit.
Funding Policing and Incarceration
What new positions are being funded? More employees for the Sheriff. In the last 5 years the county has added 25 new correctional officers (194 total staff). It costs $80,000+ on average for jail staff, with some COs earning $110,000+. And with only 300 local residents regularly in the jail (and only 35 convicted persons in total), the Sheriff has been spending $2 million or more a year on overtime. It’s a puzzle. In just five years the County has added $7 million to the jail budget alone, continuing a long trend.
The same pattern holds for the Sheriff’s law enforcement department, which supplements our already large city, university, and state police forces. In the last five years the county has added 6 new officers to reach a total force of 71 before this year’s new additions. This isn’t cheap: each new officer costs $114,000 or more per year. Meanwhile the county has been adding $200,000+ each year for new vehicles, $300,000 for overtime, $700,000 for a new garage, and many hidden items from $25-40,000 for dry cleaning wash-n-wear uniforms to the costs of stocking up and maintaining old and unused US military vehicles.
COVID-19 failures
These defunding and funding patterns endanger us. They certainly left the county woefully unprepared for COVID-19. We continue to spend tens of millions of dollars on arresting, prosecuting, and jailing thousands of persons for non-violent misdemeanors, particularly Black and Latinx residents.[iv] Headed into the ninth month of the epidemic we still find ourselves unable to provide PPE and tests for use in our clinics, hospitals, nursing homes, and the county’s big jail. The result has been repetitive “hotspots”[v] and now a yellow-zone alert and a looming shutdown.
October 6th: Governor Cuomo’s Yellow Hot Zone
This is particularly the case for the jail, where we were told on May 4th that there were no more cases,[vi] yet a later FOIA request and reports from inside reveal continuing positive tests among staff and inmates.[vii]
Meanwhile the City of Binghamton has finally introduced a testing site, but it uses rapid antigen tests that generate many false positives.[viii] SUNY-Binghamton students and staff, returning in the tens of thousands, are little better served. In contrast to Cornell and other universities where testing of students is frequent, available to all, and often mandatory, testing at SUNY-Binghamton is only allowed for a small fraction of the student body. Have you been exposed to a fellow student with COVID in an in-person classroom? You cannot make an appointment for a test, and the teachers and students in the class are not told of their exposure—contrary to what is done at even nearby SUNY colleges. The fear in student voices is palpable and justified.
Preparing for COVID-20
June 7, 2020 Community Rally for Budget Reform
The fears and dilemmas we face reflect past county decisions. Federal, state, and county authorities have all confronted viral epidemics for decades, most recently the 2002 SARS and 2009 H1N1 epidemics. In their wake public health authorities began to plan on how to handle new outbreaks, especially in crowded nursing homes, colleges, and prisons. And laws were passed requiring this: every year, every county in the state has to provide the governor with an emergency services plan that includes planning for viral pandemics. Many counties have been posting theirs on their county websites.[ix] Broome County, however, has only a two-page flyer last updated in 2008.[x] Meanwhile the county has been cutting public health positions to ensure the lack of preparedness. What will happen with the next wave of COVID 19, or some years down the road when the next epidemic predictably appears?
This year’s county budget is the result of years of defunding public health and social services and funding mass incarceration and policing. Public protests across the county have marshaled hundreds and thousands calling for a rethink of what constitutes public safety, of what meets community needs. It’s time for legislators to listen to the hard facts and the voices of the public.
Notes
[i] Ashley Biviano, “Garnar Delivers $402M Broome Budget Plan. Here’s What You Need to Know.,” Press & Sun-Bulletin, accessed October 11, 2020, https://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/local/2020/09/10/what-you-should-know-broome-county-budget-covid-19-pandemic-economy/5743466002/. The full budget is here.
[iii] Data from “Budgets | Broome County,” accessed July 24, 2020, http://www.gobroomecounty.com/countyexec/budgets.
[iv] Data from New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, Statistics, accessed October 11, 2020.
[v] As reported by the press: Bob Joseph, “Binghamton Nursing Home Identified as COVID-19 Hotspot,” WNBF News Radio 1290, accessed October 11, 2020, https://wnbf.com/binghamton-nursing-home-identified-as-covid-19-hotspot/; Amy Hogan, “Willow Point Nursing Home Details Battle Against COVID-19,” accessed October 11, 2020, http://www.wicz.com/story/42409543/willow-point-nursing-home-details-battle-against-covid19; WBNG, “Vestal Park Rehabilitation and Nursing Center Identified as Coronavirus Hotspot, Other Broome County Updates,” WBNG (blog), April 20, 2020, https://wbng.com/2020/04/20/vestal-park-rehabilitation-and-nursing-center-identified-as-coronavirus-hotspot-other-broome-county-updates/; Anthony Borrelli, “Broome County Jail Is a ‘hot Spot’ for Coronavirus. How Is the Facility Limiting the Outbreak?,” Pressconnects, accessed April 21, 2020, https://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/public-safety/2020/04/20/coronavirus-broome-county-jail-inmates-quarantine/5158860002/.
[vi] WBNG, “Garnar: Broome County Correctional Facility No Longer COVID-19 Hotspot, Other Updates,” WBNG (blog), May 4, 2020, https://wbng.com/2020/05/04/garnar-broome-county-correctional-facility-no-longer-covid-19-hotspot-other-updates/.
[vii] The report may be accessed here. The county could not (would not?) provide any information on the total number of tests given in the jail.
[viii] Alexis C. Madrigal Meyer Robinson, “Why Trump’s Rapid-Testing Plan Worries Scientists,” The Atlantic, October 9, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/10/do-rapid-antigen-tests-have-accuracy-problem/616681/; Ken Belson and Ben Shpigel, “Nursing Homes in Nevada Told to Stop Using Rapid Coronavirus Tests,” The New York Times, October 8, 2020, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/07/world/covid-coronavirus.
[ix] For example, Monroe county’s pandemic plan is here, Warren County’s plan is here.
Why does the Broome County jail, which incarcerates 4% of the statewide county jail population, have almost 4 times that number of the reported positive COVID cases? We were told in May there were no more cases in the jail, and yet now we learn from a freedom of information law request that positive tests keep occurring. Why don’t we have more information on this admitted “hotspot”?
Broome County, which has 4% of the persons incarcerated in county jails using the July 2020 data, has 15% of reported cases—a figure available only after a persistent FOIL request finally got a response.
On April 20th it was declared a “hotspot” for Broome County along with local nursing homes. By early May the public was told told that all cases there were resolved, and no public comments or the data have been released since then.
We now know that positive test result cases continue in the jail, with over dozen positive cases in quarantine/isolation among both staff and the incarcerated since late April. New cases keep cropping up right until the present.
And this is only a partial count: we don’t know how many tests have been conducted, and how many persons have been put in solitary due to possible contact with others in the jail who have COVID. Many, many persons report being put in lockdown, from all new arrivals to persons who live in pods with one infected individual. As for contact tracing of staff and persons they come into contact with, there has been no information at all.
President Trump, Governor Cuomo and local officials in Binghamton, Broome County, and the State University of New York at Binghamton have all conceded that we need police reform–if only to quell unrest in the streets. But what to do? They have one time-tested response: propose costly reforms that extend policing ever deeper into our lives and community institutions.
This is an old story. In the 1970s liberal and civil rights reformers responded to urban uprisings by appointing commissions on race relations, commissions on poverty, and commissions on violence and policing. This was followed by laws and policies promoted to secure equality before the law and modernized, community police forces. The result was mass incarceration and mass policing. To steal from the title of another scholar’s book: liberals built the house of mass incarceration. Will the same happen now?
We can see the effort in front of us. Ten years of pressure from below have forced resisting city, county, and state officials to constrain the most public forms of racialized policing and, reluctantly, to reduce prison populations in many states. These have been real victories for anti-policing and anti-mass incarceration movements.
Yet these reforms have often led to more, not less, funding of police. From such efforts have come a new web of police and court power. Reform proposals today threaten to accelerate this trend, even as the Governor, county, and city officials in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis begin to savage health and education budgets. One need to look no farther than Binghamton and Broome county to see this process in full flower.
Reform in the Service of Building City Police Power
2020 Black Lives Matter Community Discussion on Criminal Justice Demands
Have no doubt: resistance to significant reform remains firmly in place. Binghamton Mayor Richard David has rejected legislation to collect data on police operations, gutted the human rights commission and repudiated growing complaints about police brutality. He has proudly, steadily, added more police to the payroll.
This has not stopped growing demonstrations in the last five years, culminating in the recent march by a thousand supporters of Black Lives Matter. A follow-up community discussion attended by 400 persons generated a list of demands calling for the defunding of the police and the funding of community-based health, food, education and housing services. Governor Cuomo, facing his own rebellious electorate, has issued a tepid requirement that local police forces must develop new policies or face the loss of state funding.
The mayor’s response? He has proclaimed the city police are ahead of the reform curve while increasing funds for a playground upgrade, committing $100,000 for better police training, and providing $50,000 for a police mental health team. There is little pretense here of community engagement and participation: his advisory panel was constructed in private and operates behind closed doors. There is no input or representation from the major community organizations that have been mobilizing across the city and county in recent years.
The additional $150,000 bears scrutiny. It’s not a lot of money for the mayor: far more has been committed for the additional police he has been adding over the last few years. As for the $100,000 for more training in cultural and racial sensitivity, the evidence is clear: more training and more community policing aggravates police-community relations, particularly the harassment and detention of Black youth. The Binghamton Police Department has had years of de-escalation and sensitivity training by some of the best trainers in the state. Federal monies have been deployed through Lourdes hospital’s Youth Services to fund summer activities to bond “at-risk” youth with the police. Over $1.3 million is spent every year on police in local schools.
Will $50,000 spent on putting yet more mental health services in the hands of police assist? Rather than fund mental health care providers to respond to persons in crisis, Mayor David aims to further channel mental crisis services through officers who have neither degrees nor experience in dealing with mental illness. Locally there has been a steady underfunding of mental health, disability, and substance use services, and a growing reliance upon the jail and cycling persons through mental health and substance use programs that report directly to the police, probation offices, and courts. Expanding mental health crisis intervention teams, currently headed locally by a retired police officer, institutionalizes this system.
This is a problem across the state. The result is a waste of dollars and the criminalization of those with treatable illnesses. And it’s dangerous: bringing armed officers to confront unarmed persons in a crisis episode can and has resulted in deadly violence and the loss of life locally. Nationwide, over 25% of persons killed by police are having a mental health crisis. Even with the greatest training and substantive funding, as in New York City, these crisis intervention programs have failed, moving forward alternative models designed by mental health providers.
Broome County: Expanding Sheriff Power
2019 Jail Deaths Protest at County Legislature Meeting
Broome County faces the same prospect as the city: more reform has meant more funding for the county sheriff, jail, District Attorney, and courts. There is little prospect here of substantive change; the Sheriff’s response is inevitably one word: “No”. Reform announcements by the county executive and legislature have been concentrated on new programs that have made the jail the county’s public health center. Rather than treat mental health, disabilities, and substance use as medical problems needing medical treatment, the county has closed public health facilities and subcontracted treatment out to unaccountable private providers. 80% of the incarcerated have these medical problems–while only ten percent have been convicted of any charge. The result: Broome County regularly has the highest incarceration rate of all the counties in the state and is near the very bottom in health rankings.
When medical care in the jail became an issue, the county funded a $7 million expansion of the jail, opening up new pods for women and medical services. Protests soon ensued over the Sheriff’s refusal to fix the new facilities that let male guards sit and watch naked women in open showers and toilets. Protests inside and outside the jail accelerated, as did the number of deaths and successful wrongful death lawsuits. As demands for substance use treatment accelerated, the county responded by spending another $400,000 on treatment–in the jail.
When the county in 2018 lost a lawsuit for physically and mentally abusing disabled youth in the county jail, and the state at the same time raised the age for legally treating 16 and 17 year-olds youth as adults, the Broome County jail pod for youth was closed—a sterling development and a victory for youth in the county. But there were no savings. Instead the Sheriff received funding for additional correctional officers, at an annual cost of over $250,000, to deal with the occasional transport of youth out of the county. More district attorneys, parole officers, and judges were to be added as well. (The statewide cost of raise-the-age was, by my admittedly rough estimates, at least $500 million.) Institutionalizing central arraignment at the jail in early 2019, far from town and officially justified by cost efficiencies, required the hiring of yet more correctional officers with no offsetting costs elsewhere.
2019 was a banner year for expanding the criminal justice system while cutting public health care for the county: the Sheriff got four new correction officers and two new staff, while the probation office got five new officers. Where did the money come from? The county budget eliminated six public health positions. The county mental health division, having lost over 70% of its budget in the last 15 years, is simply reported to have “requested a 1.3% cut in County Support”.
SUNY-Binghamton: Health vs Police Power
2017 Student Occupation Couper Administration Building
The same battle over health versus policing has faced the commander of the second-largest police force in the area, President Stenger of SUNY-Binghamton. Under his watch the Binghamton University Police has grown in size by 50% and is now larger than the police departments of the surrounding cities of Vestal, Johnson City, and Endicott. When he proposed in 2017 to provide $200,000 more per year to Mayor David for policing in Binghamton, students occupied the lobby of the administration building. Their demands were straightforward: defund the police program and fund health care and counselors on campus and community services in town. The President refused to meet with students and locked down the building.
In response to recent student and faculty pressures invigorated by Black Lives Matters protests, the President has issued new force guidelines, formed a ”Campus Citizens Review Board to work with the Binghamton University Police,” and promised more funding for “minority” students and diversity programming. Little of this addressed the historic record and specific concerns documented by faculty and students in their letters to President Stenger. Defunding the campus police, much less de-privatizing and de-arming it, remains outside the vision of the administration.
Less is More
And so it goes. Crime rates decline in town and barely exist on campus, protests accelerate, and the Governor, Mayor, and County Executive announce and implement reform measures. But more rules for good behavior, more training, and more funding for the police, courts, and incarceration have not and will not lessen racial harassment on our streets, schools and overstuffed jail. Indeed, implementation of city, county and campus reforms as currently proposed will expand rather than shrink the widening web of mass policing and mass incarceration.
As Mariam Kaba has written, our police forces are beyond reform. We don’t need more commissions of inquiry, more toothless oversight committees, more diversity administrators, or more “modern” jails and police forces. We need to dismantle what we have inherited and invest in alternative, community-based health and safety programs.
reprint from 2014 BGM Published 12:44 a.m. ET Aug. 28, 2014 |
(Photo: AP)
In the 1980s in South Africa, I witnessed firsthand the apartheid state’s ferocious attempt to crush rebellion in local townships and wars with neighboring states. Central to this effort was the South African Defence Force’s home-grown equipment, most notably Casspirs, armed personnel carriers designed to shelter white troops from stone-throwing students at home and roadside bombs in neighboring states. One of them crushed to death one of the most promising black graduate students I ever met there.
Almost 40 years later, I was shocked to see that one of these Casspirs, after service in South Africa and then Afghanistan, had found a new home in Broome County courtesy of the 1033 federal program that has transferred used military equipment to local law enforcement agencies all across the country. Broome County and local police have added to their equipment inventories not only the Casspir but also armored Humvees, large military trucks, night vision equipment and a wide assortment of military rifles.
These are weapons of war, not policing — and as in Ferguson, Mo., their possession inevitably triggers military responses to civil protest, which in turn only magnifies violent resistance. State officials in Missouri eventually realized this and replaced the militarized city police with state police, who quickly removed this equipment from the streets. This is a lesson being debated now around the country. It is equally hard to see where military equipment, repaired and maintained at considerable expense, has any use here. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have yet to be spotted on our streets. Equally absent are armed, infiltrating guerillas (from neighboring Canada to the north or Mexico to the south?).
More serious is the response to protest with excessive force and a warrior mentality. This is not mere speculation. Protests in Binghamton over racial harassment downtown in the last year and charges of racial profiling and brutality by individual police officers over the years, raise this prospect and draw the comparison with Ferguson ever closer. What we need, as in Ferguson, is not a militarized and isolated police force, but one that engages, interacts and is responsible to the local community.
Martin, a Johnson City resident, is longtime resident of Broome County and a professor in the sociology department at Binghamton University.
Mayor Richard David, State Senator Frederick Akshar and the BPD Swat team with their new “Bearcat”
As continuous rallies show, Broome County residents have joined the national movement to defund bloated police and incarceration budgets. Local commercial media are now rushing to respond, broadcasting on how impossible it is to lower police funding. This morning WBNG reports that while police budgets are a significant share of local municipality budgets, little change can be expected. Why? “None of the municipal leaders interviewed for this story outright supported the idea.”
Johnson City’s Mayor said his police department is already frugal, while Binghamton’s Mayor Richard David declaimed that no changes in the budget could be made. Broome County Executive Jason Garner told WBNG that “the county sheriff’s office’s budget has remained stable over the past few years and accounts for a low percentage of the overall budget.” Endicott Mayor Jackson was blunter: “They’re taking away our guns, and now they’re taking away our police”!
City and county budgets can be confusing. Yet a little investigation would help here. Funding under Mayor David for the largest police force, the Binghamton Police Department (BPD), has been increasing year after year despite falling crime rates.
Take the largest budget: the Sheriff’s budget of $40 million. Can any of that be cut? Is it all necessary? The largest proportion is for the jail, which was expanded in 2015, despite community protests, at a cost of $7 million. It is designed and staffed to incarcerate 600 persons. Last month it held 277 persons. Expenses are out of control: $30 million annually for a jail at half capacity, housing only 27 convicted persons, and still budgeted for $2.5 million of overtime pay?
And contrary to County Executive Garnar’s claims, funding has not been “stable.” Far from it. Every year Garnar has added new officers, highlighting five new officers in his 2020 budget announcement alone. As detailed here earlier, the jail budget has rapidly increased in every budget Garnar has proposed and the legislature has approved. It’s a longstanding trend under both Democratic and Republican County Executives in the mass incarceration era.
Dig a little deeper into distant capital and other budget lines and you find more suspect $ millions. Does the Sheriff really need $250,000 this year, almost every year, for new vehicles? Do the City of Binghamton and the Sheriff really need multiple armored personnel carriers? To do what? These are weapons of war. Has anyone counted the pension costs for hundreds of surplus jail officers? Should we continue to spend well over $1 million a year on cops in schools across the county, rather than on teachers and counselors?
In sum, the claims of our elected officials don’t hold up. We have bloated incarceration and policing budgets. Its time for a change.
Can we scrap it? Used to patrol South African townships during Apartheid. Now patrolling Broome County.
For Broome County, its been quite simple: year after year, by Republicans and Democrats alike, funding for the county sheriff has been aggressively expanded particularly for the massive jail complex. Year after year the number of guards and the jail budget have grown.
In 2014 county legislators voted for a $7million expansion of the jail despite protests. They built a jail and staffed it with officers to incarcerate 600 persons daily.
Yet despite the best efforts of city and county police, district attorneys, and local judges to incarcerate as many local residents and especially as many Black men as possible, the official crime rate has been falling. Propelled in part by growing pressure by community organizations, the number of incarcerated persons is falling. In recent months the jail has held fewer than 300 persons. It’s half empty.
And now big budget cuts are coming to the state and county.
Here is one place to start: defund the jail. It is a threat to public safety.
Last month only 34 persons of the 277 housed in the jail were convicted of any crime. And for this we pay $30 million a year?
The vast majority inside are arrested for misdemeanors. And by all accounts a majority have been criminalized for substance use and mental health diseases. Many more have disabilities. Instead of treatment they get locked down and punished, and come home to us in much worse health. And now the jail is a local hotspot for incubating the coronavirus among not just the incarcerated, but also the hundreds of guards and medical and food staff who daily move into and out of the sheriff’s complex and then into the community.
It is really quite simple: defund the jail and use the funds for community-based and controlled health and education services that have been so severely cut by successive county administrations.
A reader asked for figures today on local youth and education, recalling past postings here. After yesterday’s impressive rally organized and led by Binghamton High School students we might ask again:
For Binghamton:
Why are Black students in the Binghamton school district suspended at a rate 2 ½ times more than white students?
Why do we have a 26% drop rate for Black students at Binghamton High School?
Why is the Black drop out rate 50% higher than the white rate?
For Broome County, Black youth are 10 % of local youth. Why are they:
over 40 percent of those classified as Juvenile Offenders?
over 40% of the youth surveilled by family court?
almost 50 % of the youth tied to probation?
The end result: a county incarceration rate for Black residents over 2,000 per 100,000 (vs. 270 for whites).
If you had to design a system to spread COVID-19 in Broome County, how would you do it? Follow the sheriff and county officials in three, easy steps.
Step One: Local officials have sought to isolate the county, terminating all bus service into and out of Binghamton, closing hotels to visitors, and demanding that any newcomers quarantine for fourteen days. This is all reversed when it comes to Sheriff Harder making $ millions for the county by bringing in persons from distant areas and renting out cells at $85 to $250/day. Over the last year over 50 cells on average were rented to federal and state agencies:
Step Two: You mix this influx with COVID-19 in the jail, as inmates move between pods and everyone shares tight quarters for eating and living. There is no possibility of the county’s mandatory social distancing being applied in the jail. There is no ready provision of sanitizer to inmates, and the recently-supplied masks are handed out so infrequently as to be useless according to CDC regulations. Symptomatic persons quarantined in isolated medical cells are moved out and mixed with newcomers with unknown COVID-19 status. Persons working in the kitchen and laundry are reportedly moving across the jail, with some having been transferred into medical isolation.
Inmate:Social distancing? The bunk beds are 18” apart!
Step Three: Having created the jail as the “hotspot” with the highest rate of infection in the county, you then spread this into the community with no constraint or followup. Over 150 correctional officers work at the jail, daily moving in and out and going home to their families. Well over another hundred persons work in the Sheriff’s complex doing the same (which is likely the reason the County Executive Jason Garnar moved his daily press briefings out of the complex after testing revealed the high rates inside). Since jails hold persons on short sentences, persons are released regularly, with few if any reentry services provided by the county and no provisions for self-isolation. As far as can be determined there is absolutely no tracing at all and no testing after people leave the jail.
Is it any wonder that the county never reports on the number being tracked or quarantined after being infected with COVID-19 at the jail, including correctional officers, civilian staff, medical workers, food contractors, and transferred or released persons?
There is a reason other sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges, and even Trump’s attorney general, have released short-term, medically compromised, non-violent and other offenders: jails and prisons are petri dishes for COVID-19, incubating and then inexorably spreading the virus into surrounding and distant communities. Broome officials have however other designs, for which we are all paying dearly.
County Executive Garnar: “He has done a really good job in preventing the spread of the virus”
There are at least 22 positive COVID-19 tested persons in the jail with a population of approximately 450 persons (COs and incarcerated), and 290 positive cases in the county with a population of 190,000.
April 12th: Sheriff deputies practicing social distancing with PPE while attempting to shut down a public protest over COVID-19 in the jail
Why is it so hard to get basic facts about the extent of COVID-19 infections and their spread in Broome County? Weeks and weeks of protests and public pressure have finally produced a few details and the naming, reluctantly, of a few local hotspots. Prime among these is the jail, as predicted for months by local community organizations and activists. But what is being done? To listen or watch most local media reports we hear only the official line: don’t worry, be happy, all is good!
The local NPR station WSKG has written and broadcast successive defenses of the Sheriff and the jail (e.g. by Natalie Abruzzo here) as has Channel 12 WBNG (e.g. here). Not to be outdone, today the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin published an article by Anthony Borrelli on the front page of the paper. It is as fine a defense as one might imagine of the wonderous work done by the county to make the jail, in the Sheriff’s words, the “safest place“ in the county. (One does wonder how it could be so, given the reportedly 22 COVID-19 cases and the many more–numbers unknown–waiting to be tested if the county ever gets an adequate number of tests.)
The article is a clear counter to the New York Post piece from last week which cited the incarcerated at some length about the spread of infection and the lack of safety in the jail. Of course no person inside was apparently interviewed by Borelli (or WSKG and others), no criticism or critic referenced (JUST’s website and social media list many quotes from persons inside on the coronavirus threat), no physical layout of the jail noted or observed, no oversight body contacted.
Incarcerated: “Social distancing? our beds are 18″ apart!”
Well, the last is understandable since there is no real oversight, neither by the state nor local authorities like the Broome County Health Department even though the jail is now the prime incubator and spreader of COVID-19 locally. Denialism today has a history: for years the county has has turned a blind eye to medical malfeasance and excessive deaths, even as the county and jail have been steadily losing wrongful death and abuse lawsuits.
All these claims can be denied now as in the past. For as reported by Borelli,
“Harder, on Monday, said the inmates’ claims were false.”
That’s all the public needs to know.
This follows the media’s earlier felicitous reporting of the Sheriff’s words that:
“Medically everything is going well, there’s been no infection whatsoever.” (March 24)
and
“[Inmates] are safer inside our facility. They aren’t out in the general public where the disease is prevalent” (March 26)
What do we do now? Even the county has to acknowledge the widespread spread of coronavirus in the jail, while over 300 people move into and out of the building every day. Perhaps someone might ask the County Executive a few pointed questions at his next, closed to the public, press conference? Or really listen to those inside and their families, and investigate in some detail? Denialism now as in the past comes with deadly consequences.
April 14 protest: Who has masks on? Who is practicing distancing?
Activists from three community organizations rallied in public on April 14th to demand that local officials release as many persons as possible from the Broome County jail. Filling the parking lot outside the Taste New York store where County Executive Jason Garnar was holding a press conference, members from Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier, Citizen Action, and Truth Pharm called on the County Executive Jason Garnar, Sheriff David Harder, and District Attorney Michael Korchak to prevent further COVID infection and death in the jail and across the county.
The county Sheriff responded by deploying a phalanx of officers and patrol cars, with multiple officers demanding protestors leave the site as it was “private property.” Protestors stood their ground, pointing out that this was state property, with the store still open to the public, and the parking lot and sidewalks unimpeded. The protest proceeded surrounded by officers and their vehicles.
Family members spoke at length of loved ones lingering in infected cells and pods at the jail, without sanitizer, masks, and essential, prescribed medicines such as asthma inhalers. Inmates who complain, they told the crowd in their cars, are being threatened with isolation and denial of any contact with family outside by expensive phone or tablet—jail visitation is closed.
The groups’ demands are straightforward, and have been repeated for months:
Provide daily counts of tests, positives, quarantine and deaths in the jail
Immediately release anyone at high risk for infection
Release anyone held on non-violent charges
Provide testing, sanitation supplies, medical treatment, and adequate nutrition
Make phone/video calls free and end predatory commissary pricing
Ensure those coming home have a discharge and treatment plan, including medical and housing resources that enable self-isolation
In reply County Executive Garnar stated, in a line taken from his Sheriff’s public statements: “I don’t have anything to do with it…. I can’t let people out of jail.” The county DA Korchak says the same. As one reporter pointed out at Garnar’s press conference, this is not the case in other counties where Sheriffs, DAs, and County Executives have all acted, individually and often together, to release persons with short sentences, those at high risk for infection and death due to medical conditions, and those incarcerated on technical parole violations like smoking weed or missing a parole meeting. Cases of these conditions were all recounted by family members at the rally.
When pressed on this at the press conference, Garnar said he couldn’t agree with the groups’ demand to “release all prisoners.” This too was a blatant fabrication, as the longstanding list of demands shows –and as a reporter quickly pointed out.
Meanwhile COVID-19 continues its march through the jail, with the Sheriff recently reporting 11 officers and 11 incarcerated persons testing positive. This would be over 20% of existing cases in the county, where little testing has been done.
No one has been able to confirm these numbers, much less answer questions on how many tests in the jail have been done, how many persons have been discharged or hospitalized with the virus, and how many current or recently released persons have died (the Sheriff and local judges have the habit of releasing persons from the jail just prior to hospitalization and death as in the case of Rob Card). When asked for this information by reporters, Garnar said, as he has when asked for information on other county COVID “hotspots” like local nursing homes: “I don’t know.”
The car rally is just one of recent protests pressing the County Executive, the District Attorney (who suffered a phone zap/call in on Monday) and the Sheriff, and the organizations promise to continue their work in the coming weeks.
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A sample of local media coverage may be found here, here, and here.
And locally? Officials preach it, but practice it not so much.
Broome County Executive Jason Garnar certainly, repeatedly, appropriately stresses that “if there’s one thing people in Broome County can do is strictly follow social distancing, staying home.” Still, “there is a small percentage of people that refuse to follow the social distancing and just a small percentage of people are going to really make the whole community sick.”
It is puzzling therefore that WNBF produced this photograph as part of its report on Garnar’s press conference last Friday. Here is social distancing as practiced by Garnar, Director of the Health Department Rebecca Kaufman, and Emergency Services Director Michael Ponticiello:
They are not alone. On the previous Friday Garnar was emphatic. We will punish those who don’t follow county COVID-19 orders: “The Sheriff’s office and Broome Security are going to be stepping up their enforcement of emergency orders. No unnecessary travel. You can’t be on playgrounds, athletic fields. There are no gatherings allowed of any size.”
Garnar did announce that he is cancelling the Small Grants Program to save $150,000 to buy protective equipment–perhaps for training recruits? What was cut? Well, the grant gave the grand total of $50k a year ago for health and opioid crisis programming to The Boys and Girls Club, BOCES-Compass Academy High School, Southern Tier Aids Program (STAP) and Truth Pharm.
Perhaps the county might downsize the jail, expanded in 2014 and still staffed for 600, and now holding less than 300 county residents, and costing the county $30 million per year? And yes the staffing has grown steadily, and budget increased by $millions under Garnar. Or might the county cut out the new $700,000 garage for the Sheriff’s toys, including his armored personnel carrier? You know, the one used to suppress Black rebellions in South Africa?
Broome County Sheriff David Harder repeatedly tells the media there is no safer place to be than in his jail. How safe? Flouting COVID-19 state regulations, he puts his own officers and recruits in deadly danger.
We now hear directly from inside that at least two officers have tested positive for COVID-19. At least 9 persons have been pulled from their general population cells, ill and coughing, and been sent to “medical.” And this from only one of many pods.
No county official will confirm or deny these reports. How many persons, staff and incarcerated, have been tested, tested positive, and put in quarantine inside the jail itself? We don’t know. The Sheriff, the County Executive, and the Director of the County Health Department refuse to tell us. Other counties, cities, the state, and the federal government provide answers to these questions, but not local officials.
Denialism has its costs: you don’t protect persons inside, the virus incubates in crowded cells and dormitories and then spreads out into the community as scores of people move in and out of the jail daily, to and from work, to and from court, and through daily releases. Indeed one of the infected COs was reportedly a transport officer.
Denialism puts everyone in danger. Our schools, universities, and playgrounds have been shut down; we must all wash our hands, sanitize, keep our social distance. If you don’t believe the virus is a threat, you don’t do these things. And so our Sheriff in the last two weeks continues to train future officers from across the region in closed rank files, with no protection equipment, on the jail grounds, on public playgrounds nearby. Clusters of persons continue to hang out in his parking lot. Here is the evidence in living color:
The rules don’t apply to the Sheriff. He gets a waiver to putting his people in danger.
This is denied of course. Listen to Broome County Executive Jason Garner at this past Friday’s press conference (April 3, 2020), held in the Sheriff’s building itself:
The Sheriff’s office and Broome Security are going to be stepping up their enforcement of emergency orders… You can’t be on playgrounds, athletic fields. There are no gatherings allowed of any size. These are state emergency orders. They are going to be enforced… We will do anything we can to enforce them. Anything. Because it is a matter of saving lives.”
Indeed: it is a matter of saving lives, and local denialists are putting us all in danger.
Do they really not know? Or why won’t they tell us?
When posed the simplest questions at his daily press conference, Broome County Executive Jason Garnar has a standard answer: “I don’t know”
How many tests are there in Broome County? “I don’t know”
How many ventilators are there in the county? “I don’t know”
How many ICU beds in the county? “I don’t know”
Why don’t we have tests like the 10,000 available in Ithaca? “I don’t know”
What are the profiles of persons who tested positive? “I can’t say”
What is being done to inform and help isolate those who come into contact with persons who have COVID-19 or die from it? We Don’t Know.
The Director of the county’s Health Department can’t seem to help him either. How many persons at the nursing home with so many cases–and how have their families been followed, or tested, or had their contacts tracked? “I don’t know, ask them”
We do know, thanks to press reports from family members, that the second person who died from COVID-19 died without the county informing the family of the death or county officials asking who came into contact with the family or the loved one they lost.
And what of the hundreds of staff, inmates, correctional officers and visitors to the BC jail in March, which had a working and infected correctional officer on duty? We don’t know. Scores of persons outside and inside report no questions asked, no persons followed, only two persons inside apparently tested.
County residents are smart. They can see through these daily evasions and diversions. Look at only a few of the comments on Jason Garnar’s facebook page:
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