NYCHA Is Still Failing To Keep Criminals Out Of Public Housing, Report Says
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- The New York City Department of Investigation said in a new report Tuesday that despite being told by the NYPD, the city's Housing Authority continues to allow violent criminals and gang members to live in public housing.
NYCHA has the power to bar or evict criminal offenders from public housing. But in 2015, an investigation found that the NYPD had failed to report arrests of violent or criminal public housing residents to NYCHA, and also that NYCHA had failed to ensure criminal offenders were removed from public housing projects.
The new investigation set out to determine whether improvements and reforms had been made with regard to the situation since 2015. The report found that the NYPD is now much better at sharing information with NYCHA, but NYCHA is still dropping the ball, the DOI said.
The report said NYCHA is still failing to enforce its policies to remove criminal offenders and has even overlooked repeated violations of its policy requiring that they be removed.
DOI Commissioner Mark Peters told WCBS 880's Rich Lamb that some dangerous people have lived in public housing.
"People who have shot at police officers, people who have been registered sex offenders, people who have engaged in drug and narcotics trafficking" are among them, Peters said.
The new DOI report found that NYCHA settled only 32 percent of tenancy termination cases through permanent exclusion last year, and brought only 1 percent of cases for possible evictions – even though the DOI identified numerous public housing resident arrests for serious crimes.
The report also indicated that NYCHA is not taking strong enforcement actions when tenants come back into public housing projects despite being banned.
Further, NYCHA's system for protecting field investigators' safety is not adequate, the report said. Investigators do not have bulletproof vests or radios, and they are forbidden by NYCHA policy from carrying guns – even if they are retired police officers, the report said.
