Jeffery C. Mays

The effort, known as Outreach NYC, is the latest attempt from Mayor Bill de Blasio to tackle perhaps the most intractable problem his administration has faced: street homelessness. The problem was highlighted in October when a homeless man, Randy Santos, allegedly bludgeoned four other homeless men to death in Chinatown.

Workers from the departments of parks, sanitation, buildings, fire and health and mental hygiene will be trained to use 311 apps to send detailed service requests to the new homeless services joint command center.

The information will help outreach workers identify the street homeless and begin the delicate and complicated work of persuading them to accept services and shelter.

The mayor has also committed $19 million to hire almost 200 new homeless outreach workers, bringing the total to close to 600.

City officials said de Blasio was committed to the strategy as a way to reduce the number of unsheltered people as he enters the last two years of his administration. Leading the effort will be Dr. Raul Perea-Henze, who will be announced Thursday as the new deputy mayor to oversee health and human services.

“We cannot attempt to address this issue in a vacuum,” de Blasio said in a statement. “Outreach NYC is our all-hands-on-deck approach to bring even more people in off the streets.”

De Blasio has dealt with record homelessness during his six-year tenure. The approximately 4,000 street homeless represent 5% of the 79,000 total homeless people in the city, most of whom are in shelters. As of Tuesday, there were 60,479 people in the city’s primary shelter system, including almost 22,000 children.

Perea-Henze said he hoped to “accelerate” Outreach NYC during the next two years.

“I believe there is progress being made,” said Perea-Henze, who dealt with veteran homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction when he served as the assistant secretary for policy and planning in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs during the Obama administration. “But frankly, for the next two years, I will be responsible for making sure that progress accelerates.”

Perea-Henze has a master’s degree in public health from Yale University and was the first openly gay Latino to be sworn in as a sub-Cabinet secretary. A Mexican immigrant, he speaks four languages and started his career at New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., where he developed the division of infectious diseases during the AIDS epidemic. His first partner died from AIDS.

Perea-Henze is replacing Dr. Herminia Palacio, who resigned in June to become the president and chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute. He takes over an agency charged with overseeing public health, with a particular focus on helping the most vulnerable New Yorkers.

He begins his tenure amid calls to set aside and build more housing specifically for the homeless as part of the mayor’s affordable housing plan. The city has so far struggled to keep pace with de Blasio’s plan to build 90 new homeless shelters, with many meeting opposition from neighborhood residents.

Although the number of people in shelters has been flat for the first time in a while, Perea-Henze said “we still need to turn the tide” on the issue.

“Coming in to tackle homelessness is probably the best thing that I can do to help New Yorkers,” he said. Asking city employees to be trained to identify and help the homeless is a natural progression, he said.

Giselle Routhier, policy director of the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group, said the city’s focus on this new effort was “frustrating” because “the problem with street homelessness is not a lack of outreach workers, the problem is they are not being offered something meaningful like housing or a low-barrier shelter.”

City officials say they have helped 2,200 people who were living on the street move into permanent and transitional housing since 2016. The number of beds in shelters with low barriers for entry, called “safe havens,” has tripled to 1,800 and should increase to 2,100 by the end of de Blasio’s tenure, officials said.

The coalition has called for the city to build 24,000 new apartments and preserve 6,000 more for the homeless and to speed up the creation of 15,000 units of supportive housing. There are not enough safe haven shelter beds because people are staying in them longer, Routhier said.

Outreach NYC follows the de Blasio administration’s “Home-Stat” strategy, a variation of the popular Compstat system that relies on daily canvassing and data to identify homelessness patterns.

Steven Banks, commissioner of social services, said the added step of enlisting city employees, who are at work across the city 24 hours per day, to identify the homeless will allow faster emergency response. The nearly 18,000 calls to 311 about homelessness so far this year matches the pace from 2018.

“It’s a force multiplier,” Banks said. “There’s no substitute for increasing the number of eyes and ears to identify people in need.” He added that outreach workers may need to have dozens of interactions with individuals living on the street before being able to gain their trust and persuade them to accept services.

Part of the issue is that many of the persistent street homeless may suffer from mental illness; de Blasio has faced regular criticism over the failure of ThriveNYC, the $1 billion plan to tackle mental health launched by his wife, Chirlane McCray, to help the most seriously mentally ill.

There are also new concerns about overpolicing of the poor, minorities and the homeless after Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced plans to hire 500 new police officers to help deal with homelessness and crime in the subways.

Routhier said the increase in police officers and the new outreach program would add “more points of contacts without solutions.”

“This looks like mass surveillance of homeless people,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

New York to Use 18,000 City Workers to Identify and Help Homeless

NEW YORK — New York City will direct more than 18,000 of its municipal workers to use 311 to give social service workers real-time information to help them steer the almost 4,000 people who live on the streets into shelters.

“This is a Democratic Party today that’s getting more progressive, that wants to address the concerns of working people, that does not accept the status quo,” de Blasio said. “There’s no way in the world we should nominate a billionaire who epitomizes the status quo.”

De Blasio portrayed Bloomberg as being out of touch with current Democratic values and suggested that Bloomberg’s 12-year tenure as mayor of New York was a showcase for some of his worst instincts.

“I think when he was mayor he had no understanding of the inequality crisis,” de Blasio said. “He was absolutely tone-deaf to what working people were going through in this city, and there were a number of other areas where he had a chance to do something and he just did not make it a priority.”

Bloomberg filed paperwork last week to run in Alabama’s Democratic primary contest. His advisers say he is likely to enter the race and may employ the risky strategy of skipping the four early primary states to focus on big states that hold later primary elections.

“I can be objective about some of his strengths and weaknesses — I can certainly prefer him over Donald Trump,” de Blasio said Monday, when asked about Bloomberg’s nascent campaign. “But does he represent today’s Democratic Party? Of course not. Not even close.”

He added that his own mayoral victory in 2013 came in large measure because he ran as the anti-Bloomberg.

“Obviously, when I got elected,” de Blasio said, “I think it was in large measure because people wanted a very, very different approach.”

The mayor’s comments, while consistent with remarks he made during the 2013 campaign, in which he blamed Bloomberg for turning New York into a “tale of two cities,” are actually a departure from his more recent and more measured stance toward Bloomberg.

The mayor has offered occasional praise for Bloomberg’s work on public health initiatives and efforts on gun control and immigration. And he has even given his predecessor credit for starting programs that the de Blasio administration has since expanded, such as selling air rights to fix the city’s decrepit public housing.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Bloomberg, declined to comment about de Blasio’s remarks Monday.

But Chris Coffey, who worked as a senior official in all three of Bloomberg’s administrations, was less reluctant to weigh in — and took a potshot at de Blasio’s penchant for showing up at City Hall well past 9 a.m.

When Bloomberg was running the city, “New Yorkers knew that the mayor was going to get up at 6:15 a.m. and work really hard for six or seven days a week,” said Coffey, who leads the New York practice for Tusk Strategies, a political and strategic consulting firm. “We don’t have that now.”

De Blasio, he added, may owe some of his success to his predecessor, who “put money into rainy-day funds and was a good steward of the budget.”

Should Bloomberg be in need of advice on how to handle criticism of his stop-and-frisk policing policies as he takes steps toward entering the presidential race, he could ask de Blasio how he dealt with similar attacks.

De Blasio was protested twice on national television during his run for the 2020 Democratic nomination over his refusal to fire the police officer involved in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man accused of selling loose cigarettes.

“Mayor de Blasio is right in the sense of what Mayor Bloomberg has done for low-income New Yorkers of color should disqualify him” from becoming president, said Alyssa Aguilera, co-executive director of Vocal-NY, a nonprofit that helps low-income people. “He exacerbated inequality and changed the DNA of the city.”

“But at the same time,” she continued, “Mayor de Blasio said a lot of the right things in the progressive space, but we didn’t see him being bold and taking on the police union and developers. Neither of them should be president.”

Bloomberg for President? 'No Way,' His Successor Says

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio, not far removed from his own failed presidential bid, said Monday that there was “no way in the world” that his predecessor in City Hall, Michael Bloomberg, deserved the Democratic nomination for president.

And so it was that Loree K. Sutton found herself one morning at the Trinity Boxing Club in Lower Manhattan, where many know her as the “general.”

The nickname came not because of her strong jab or command of the ring, but because Sutton, 60, the former head of New York City’s Department of Veterans’ Services under Mayor Bill de Blasio, is actually a retired Army brigadier general.

Now, Sutton wants to parlay her experience in the Army and in city government into her first run for public office, declaring Wednesday her candidacy to become the 110th mayor of New York City.

“I think it’s time for a new type of leadership, one that seeks to unite and think about old challenges and problems in new ways that benefit from the voices and perspectives of all New Yorkers,” Sutton said. “It’s not enough to have big ideas and introduce new programs, you have to set up world class operations.”

Sutton, a Democrat, said she was inspired when she saw hundreds of veterans running in the 2018 midterm elections, but did not consider her own candidacy until six months ago, when acquaintances kept urging her to run.

The most persuasive person was her wife, Laurie Leitch, the director of Threshold GlobalWorks; the couple was introduced by cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and married by him.

Her odds seem daunting: She has little name recognition or political experience, and will have to defeat well-regarded challengers who are expected to include the city comptroller, Scott Stringer, and the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson.

And although her tenure in the military and in the de Blasio administration is generally well regarded, she did suddenly resign as the director of the Defense Centers for Excellence in 2010, after news reports and congressional criticism that the military was failing to diagnose and treat soldiers with mild traumatic brain injuries.

That has not stopped some people from signing on to her campaign, which hopes to spend $7 million, the maximum allowed under the city’s matching funds program, for the 2021 primary. Tucker Green, founder of Tucker Green Consulting, and a well-known fundraiser, has signed on as a consultant.

Ken Fisher, a managing partner of Fisher Brothers, a family-owned real estate development and management firm with $8.5 billion in market valuation, is one of Sutton’s early financial backers.

Fisher said he met Sutton through his work as chief executive of the Fisher House Foundation, which houses veterans being treated for illnesses away from home, and as co-chairman of the Intrepid Sea, Air &amp; Space Museum.

“Being a general is like being a CEO: She’s good at working under pressure,” Fisher said. “She can manage the city and get along with the governor. Instead of demonizing businesses and corporations as a whole, she sees the value of bringing the public and private together.”

In her 30-year career, Sutton was the Army’s highest ranking psychiatrist, completed a tour in Egypt and then went to Iraq during the first Gulf War. She helped grow the city’s veterans’ affairs office into a full blown mayoral agency — the city’s first new agency in two decades — and advocates say she helped drive down chronic homelessness among veterans.

Unlike de Blasio, who describes himself as a progressive Democrat, Sutton, a lifelong independent who recently registered as a Democrat, is a moderate.

Kristen L. Rouse, founder and president of NYC Veterans Alliance, has worked closely with Sutton. She said Sutton took the job at the alliance when advocates were demanding the agency grow and then made strides in reducing veteran homelessness.

The agency sometimes struggled with staff turnover and having the right people to navigate a massive bureaucracy, but Rouse said that Sutton “always kept an open door to even her most frustrated critics and that is uncommon.”

Sutton has had other bumps in her career, most notably her departure from the Defense Centers for Excellence.

She says she was scapegoated by a branch of the government that was struggling to deal with a growing, complex problem of brain trauma, as she was seeking to make the changes necessary to address the crisis.

“We were dealing with the complexities of wounds and injuries that were way beyond the medical model,” Sutton said, adding that she “knew there was nothing to be gained by suing the military.”

The 2021 mayoral election is shaping up to be a crowded field. Besides Johnson and Stringer, other expected candidates include the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr.; the Brooklyn borough president, Eric L. Adams; and a nonprofit executive, Dianne Morales.

How Sutton’s moderate stance will play in a city that gave rise to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and where the Democratic Socialists of America are a rising political force, is unclear.

“If you’re a New Yorker with a heartbeat, I’m going to earn your vote,” Sutton said.

“It’s not so much that I want to be the mayor,” she added. “I want to do the things only the mayor can do.”

Martin Snow, the owner of Trinity Boxing Club and Sutton’s trainer, concurred. “She laughed when I said we need her in politics,” he said.

“After this mayor leaves, the city is going to hit a wall,” he continued. “When things get tough, you are going to need someone like her to handle the job.”

Could the First Female Mayor of New York be a Retired Army General?

NEW YORK — The boxing ring can be a weary, but trustworthy, motif for the underdog candidate, a place where would-be mayors and governors put on the gloves to show how they would fight for constituents.

They said they are trapped by a New York City Council that has fostered an environment where misconduct, harassment and abuse are tolerated, adding that the last straw was the Council’s decision this week not to expel Councilman Andy King, despite findings that he had intimidated his staff and misused city resources.

Now, in an open letter to the Council and its speaker, Corey Johnson, 95 current and former employees are calling for sweeping changes that better protect the well-being and safety of those who work for the legislative body.

“Over the years, certain Council members have regularly mistreated, intimidated and underpaid staff, while members are given near-unlimited discretion over the treatment of their staff,” the letter said. “We have few avenues to meaningfully launch complaints without fear of retaliation or intimidation.”

The letter, which will be posted on Medium on Friday, requests that the Council allow an independent authority to investigate claims of misconduct against its members; create clear guidelines on punishment for violating the rules; and usher in changes to help employees feel they can report issues of harassment.

“It’s a political body trying to regulate itself,” said one employee, who has worked for a Brooklyn Council member for more than two years. “It does not take a genius to realize that is not functional.”

The letter was not signed by current and former staff members; they requested anonymity for fear of workplace retaliation.

But one worker involved in the letter, Chloe Rivera, a policy analyst, said that the failed vote to oust King was a vivid illustration of how improper behavior was tolerated.

“It was a reminder that no one is looking out for us and that Council members are held to a different standard,” said Rivera, who recently came forward as the woman who filed a sexual harassment complaint against King last year.

“If anything, as elected officials, the standard should be higher,” she added.

King, a Bronx Democrat, was suspended for 30 days — one of the harshest punishments in the history of the Council. Johnson hired a respected outside former federal prosecutor, Carrie Cohen, to help compile a 48-page report that detailed King’s indiscretions.

King, who had previously been punished by the City Council after a substantiated complaint of sexual harassment, retaliated against staff members who cooperated with the investigation, sending them home without pay and eventually trying to fire two employees.

The report also found that King’s actions were part of a larger pattern of abuse endured by his staff members that included threats of violence; making them answer to and do work for his wife, a union executive; and ordering them to drive him around in their personal cars without recompense. King also used Council funds to plan a retreat in the Virgin Islands at the same time as the wedding of his wife’s daughter, the report found.

Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, a Queens Democrat, had said the punishment that the ethics committee recommended was not enough and introduced a resolution to expel King, but only 11 of his colleagues voted in favor of it.

“The behavior exhibited by Council member King is harmful and destructive to staff and morale, and calls for nothing less than complete expulsion from this body,” the employees’ letter said. “Thus, we call for the speaker and the members of the New York City Council to do what they should have done the first time this issue came to the Council floor: remove Council member King from this body.”

King has denied the charges in the report and has filed a lawsuit challenging the punishment, claiming that his rights to due process were violated.

But the behavior by King is just one example of a wider pattern of how City Council workers are sometimes treated, they said. Rivera, who still had to encounter King after filing the sexual harassment complaint against him, said she felt intimidated. Colleagues are regularly cursed at or have their intelligence demeaned by Council members, another worker said.

And many said they feel as if there is no point in filing a complaint.

“I’ve worked in stressful situations, but this was a level of stress where I felt expendable and I was treated as such,” said a former employee who worked for a Brooklyn Council member. “I felt like I could be replaced at the drop of a hat.”

Rivera said she had counseled many of her colleagues who came to her after she went public about the harassment she faced.

“There are staffers who have been harassed and who have not come forward,” she said, “because they don’t think there will be real consequences and they will be vulnerable to retaliation.”

Johnson has said that the City Council takes complaints from its staff seriously. As part of the resolution imposing sanctions on King, employees who were relieved from his office will have their employment with the city restored.

Van Bramer said that he was proud workers were “speaking truth to power” and that the legislative body must now act.

“Many of us started as activists, so we’ve got to be open to this and not be defensive,” said Van Bramer, who added the Council had already taken a powerful step by hiring an outside counsel to investigate allegations made against its members. “If we don’t, then we’re hypocrites.”

'Mistreated, Intimidated': City Council Workers Demand Changes

NEW YORK — They said they have been habitually mistreated and intimidated and have few meaningful ways to make their complaints heard without fear of reprisal.

Councilman Andy King, D-Bronx, seems committed to finding out: A 48-page report issued by the City Council’s ethics committee offered a portrait of a politician on tilt.

Investigators found evidence that King violated New York City’s anti-harassment policy and used council funds to plan a retreat in the Virgin Islands at the same time as the wedding of his wife’s daughter.

King not only refused to cooperate with the investigations into his conduct, but he also actively sought to thwart them by threatening and firing members of his staff who he believed were cooperating, the committee found.

“This is the most egregious thing I have ever seen in my six years in the City Council,” Corey Johnson, the council speaker, said. “Retaliation, a culture of fear, potential misappropriation of council resources, all of these things and not cooperating with the City Council all along, which shows total disregard for our process.”

By a 44-1 vote, the council agreed Monday to suspend King for 30 days without pay, fine him $15,000 and appoint a monitor to oversee his office for the remainder of his term. The penalties take effect immediately.

A motion to expel King for his actions was introduced by Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, D-Queens, but was defeated by a vote of 34-12.

King sat quietly as his colleagues criticized his behavior, then delivered a rambling 15-minute monologue, explaining that he was unfairly being “crucified” by council members as “the worst person on the planet” and an “oppressor” of his staff.

“Because people say things sometimes doesn’t necessarily make it true,” King said.

The only thing he was guilty of, King told reporters as he left City Hall after the vote, was being “too nice.”

The inquiry into King’s conduct is not the first ethics investigation he has faced. In 2018, King was ordered to undergo sensitivity and ethics training after a sexual harassment claim was lodged against him by a female staff member.

Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a good-government group, said King’s conduct should be examined by criminal authorities.

“I hope there would an independent investigation by criminal authorities to determine whether there was criminal activity or not,” Lerner said, adding that King’s conduct justified expulsion from the City Council.

“The council does not believe he has the ability to behave appropriately, so to ask the taxpayers to pay for a babysitter is inappropriate,” Lerner continued. “If I as a taxpayer would pay for anything, it’s a new election.”

No one has been expelled from the City Council, which requires a two-thirds vote, since the 1989 City Charter revision. Johnson and Mayor Bill de Blasio, both Democrats, have called for King to resign.

“How can you resign?” Pamela Hayes, King’s lawyer, said at a news conference Saturday. “The charges are unjust.”

Johnson, who this year hired Carrie H. Cohen, a former federal prosecutor and assistant state attorney general, to serve as the council’s special prosecutor, said that the ethics committee had referred its finding to the “appropriate” outside agencies. He declined to specify which ones.

King and Hayes had tried in court to seek a delay for the council’s vote, but the request for a temporary restraining order was denied, according to council staff members; they said that both sides were to return to court in December.

King is not the only council member to face public discipline for actions during Johnson’s tenure. The most notable case involved Rubén Díaz Sr., a Bronx councilman who resisted calls to resign after making homophobic remarks. Others were disciplined for sexual harassment and for saying that “Palestine does not exist.”

But King’s misconduct over the past two years is the most serious to be considered in recent years.

In 2017, King arranged for reimbursements for staff members to attend an annual retreat that he and his wife, Neva Shillingford-King, hosted on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands for the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus and labor leaders, according to the council report.

The wedding of Shillingford-King’s daughter was part of the official retreat itinerary, and King also allowed his staff to do work to promote Shillingford-King, an executive vice president at Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, and improperly gave her authority over his staff, the report says.

She did not respond to requests for comment.

Two of King’s staff members said he also authorized one-time council payments to staff members who “claimed to have insufficient funds,” so they could pay for airfare, food and lodging costs related to the retreat. One such staff member told investigators of a $1,500 payment.

King also showed a pattern of harassment and retaliation against his staff members, the ethics committee found.

On separate occasions, King held two meetings at his home where he demanded to know which staff members were cooperating with the various investigations he was facing. When some staff members admitted that they had spoken with investigators, King retaliated, the report says.

In July, he sent one staff member home and ordered that individual to wait for a call before returning to work. The staff member, whose email access was terminated, waited at home for five weeks, “too fearful of losing their job to speak to anyone” from King’s office or from the council’s legal and human resources staff, according to the report.

In August, when the ethics committee voted to open a disciplinary matter against King, he sent another staff member home and terminated that person’s email access. In September, King tried to fire the two employees, claiming that the purpose was “staff reorganization.”

Investigators also found that King had violated city harassment policies at a staff meeting when he referred to a photo from the Pride March that a staff member had posted on Twitter, likening it to “child pornography.”

The ethics committee chairman, Councilman Steven Matteo, R-Staten Island, said before the vote that the proposed discipline for King’s actions might not have been as severe if he had cooperated with the investigation, even in an attempt to defend himself.

Instead, King made a “mockery” of the process, Matteo said at a hearing last week.

Van Bramer, who introduced the motion to expel King, said King’s remarks about gay people were just as bad as his treatment of his staff.

“I believe Andy King is unfit to serve in the City Council and believe he should resign,” said Van Bramer, who is gay. “I also believe that what is included in this report is worthy of expulsion.”

Chloe Rivera, a policy analyst for the City Council, identified herself in an op-ed in The Daily News on Monday as the woman who filed the sexual harassment complaint that resulted in the disciplining of King last year. She said she was disappointed with the outcome.

“The sanctions don’t address the root of the problem, and that’s power dynamics,” Rivera said.

'Retaliation, a Culture of Fear': Councilman Is Suspended for 30 Days

NEW YORK — Just what do you have to do to get kicked off the City Council?

The message from Tiffany Cabán seemed clear: There was one set of rules for the privileged, and another far more punitive code for everyone else. And if she were elected as Queens district attorney, she would change that.

But Cabán had another target in mind: Melinda R. Katz, the Queens borough president.

Cabán and her progressive Democratic supporters sought to cast Katz as the villain, a product of old-school machine politics, rife with money and influence. That image, echoed in many social media posts, stuck.

In a matter of weeks, Katz’s 25 years as a public servant representing Queens — first as a member of the State Assembly, the City Council and now as borough president — had been diminished, her political career reduced to a symbol of everything wrong with the Democratic machine.

Katz seems to have withstood the attacks: A recount of the June 25 Democratic primary ended Thursday with Katz slightly widening her lead over Cabán to roughly 60 votes. The results are expected to be certified Tuesday, although legal challenges from Cabán’s lawyers are still pending.

Whether Katz wins the primary or not, she said she remained hurt and angered by her portrayal, and insisted that she was not beholden to the Queens County organization.

“My accomplishments are my own. I am my own woman,” Katz said in an interview. “I started like her,” she said, referring to Cabán. “I started running against the organization, which was an old boys’ club.”

Indeed, Katz began her political career by running against the Queens Democratic Party candidate in 1994 to win a seat in the Assembly.

Once in Albany, she took on women’s health issues and sponsored a law to extend the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse that was opposed by the Roman Catholic Church.

“I stood up at age 28 against the Catholic Church. I stood up against insurance companies who said women shouldn’t have access to health care,” Katz said. “I did all of this 25 years ago.”

Bruce Gyory, a political consultant and adjunct professor of political science at the University at Albany, was a lobbyist when Katz was first elected to the Assembly. He remembers her as “a challenger of the Queens organization,” and “a smart, substantive assemblywoman” who navigated toward “what would be called progressive approaches today.”

If Katz becomes district attorney, she “would be a reformer with a small ‘r’,” Gyory said, adding that he believed she “would try to bring substantive or evolutionary change to that office.”

But for a new wave of political reformers such as Yuh-Line Niou, an assemblywoman from Manhattan who previously served as chief of staff for a Queens assemblyman, Ron Kim, the idea of Katz as a reformer seems distant.

“I wasn’t around. I was like in third grade,” said Niou, who endorsed Cabán. “It’s not that you run against the machine once. It’s about persistently changing the system.”

If Katz wins, “there’s no guarantee there will be a different voice or different perspective at the table,” Niou said. “With Tiffany, it is a guaranteed change. She has taken a stance on so many issues that people who ran against her had to move their stance.”

It would be hard for Katz or her supporters to dispute that she benefits from her relationship with the county Democratic Party. During the recount process, Katz has received considerable help from two key lawyers for the county party, Frank Bolz and Michael Reich, at no charge. (The Working Families Party is also spending money on Cabán’s behalf.)

“I don’t think that’s a label she can dispute,” Robert F. Holden, a councilman from Queens who endorsed Katz, said of her being a machine politician. “But I don’t think Melinda checked with the county as to whether she would run. Melinda does what she feels is right for her constituents.”

Katz, 53, a mother of two boys, lives in the same house in Forest Hills that she grew up in. When she was 3, her mother was killed by a drunken driver and she and her three siblings were raised by her father, David Katz, the founder of the Queens Symphony Orchestra.

Being raised by a single father was not the norm then, and Katz remembers feeling like a victim for much of her childhood. “I always felt like something wrong happened and it wasn’t fair,” said Katz. “I now realize people go through a lot worse things.”

Katz lived down the street from Alan G. Hevesi, then just at the beginning of a 35-year career in public service as an assemblyman, the New York City comptroller and the state comptroller for four years, before leaving office in disgrace after pleading guilty to fraud.

Katz volunteered for his victorious campaign for city comptroller, and he decided to support her for his old Assembly seat. The county organization threw its weight behind a different candidate, but Katz knocked on doors and pulled out a tight victory.

She unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1998, losing the Democratic primary to Anthony Weiner, and also fell short in the 2009 primary for city comptroller to John Liu.

When Katz announced last year that she would run for district attorney, critics said that she had never expressed much interest in criminal justice and was just looking for her next job because she is barred by the term-limits law from running for a third consecutive term as borough president.

Cabán saw other motives, accusing Katz of running to “keep the status quo, take money from real estate and protect the machine.”

Katz strongly disputed that characterization, noting that her bid for city comptroller in 2009 came without her party’s backing.

She also asserted that her campaign for district attorney grew organically out of support from the largely black community of Southeast Queens, the residents most affected by the unjust portions of the criminal justice system that she wants to change.

Using her experience as an executive with close ties to the community from her time as Queens borough president, Katz said she would be able to marshal support for changes such as eliminating cash bail and not charging people for minor crimes such as possessing small amounts of marijuana.

She said that her relationships with borough leaders would help those reforms stick in Queens, a place with a reputation for law and order that was enforced by Richard A. Brown for almost 30 years, until his death in May.

Since the election, Katz has been back at the Queens borough president’s office. On the day she met with a reporter for an interview, she held a land-use hearing. She hurried away after an hour, wrapping up her half-eaten sandwich to take back to the office.

Katz said she is confident that after the recount, she will be the Democratic nominee for Queens district attorney.

“I do exactly what I did today,” she said. “I work.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/nyregion/melinda-katz-da-tiffany-caban.html" id="a84e8d31-c9bc-3559-a5df-104d36c5f525">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The political ad began with images of Michael Cohen and Harvey Weinstein, and the notion that as long as you had money and influence, you could “do whatever you want in the city.”

How Did a Loyal Democrat Become an Enemy of the Progressives?

That practice, which has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism in recent years, is now the subject of a proposed ban in New York. If the legislation is approved, it is believed that the city would become the first to forbid the sale of geolocation data to third parties.

The bill, which was introduced Tuesday, would make it illegal for cellphone companies and mobile app developers to share location data gathered while a customer’s mobile device is within the five boroughs.

Cellphone companies and mobile apps collect detailed geolocation data of their users and then sell that information to legitimate companies such as digital marketers, roadside emergency assistance services, retail advertisers, hedge funds or — in the case of a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&amp;T; — bounty hunters.

“The average person has no idea they are vulnerable to this,” said Councilman Justin L. Brannan, D-Brooklyn, who introduced the bill. “We are concerned by the fact that someone can sign up for cell service and their data can wind up in the hands of five different companies.”

In the absence of a federal law specifically protecting consumers’ location data, cities and states have stepped up to enforce privacy regulations and location data rules. In San Francisco, voters approved a ballot measure in 2018 that would require companies to disclose their data practices and secure customer data to win city contracts.

In January, the city of Los Angeles filed a lawsuit against the developers of the Weather Channel app, accusing it of deceptively collecting location data from millions of American users. The app tricked users into turning on location data by telling them that it would be used only to localize weather reports. Instead, the data was used for commercial purposes like analysis for hedge funds, the suit alleged.

The proposed legislation in New York will almost certainly be opposed by the ad tech industry, which has a strong presence in the city. Brannan said he did not consult industry leaders for input.

The bill would restrict cellphone companies and mobile apps from sharing location data to situations where they were “providing a service explicitly requested” by the customer. The language is designed to challenge the vague agreements customers click on when signing up for an app or a cellular service. The legislation would also exclude the collection of location data in “exchange for products or services.”

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the collection of location data was now the “primary technique to track people in physical space” and “raises far-reaching privacy concerns.”

“New York City is joining a growing list of cities that are not waiting for Washington to pass privacy legislation,” he added.

The bill provides for steep fines, ranging from $1,000 per violation to $10,000 per day per user for multiple violations, while giving customers who have had their location data shared without their explicit permission the right to sue.

David LeDuc, vice president of public policy for the Network Advertising Initiative, said he was concerned about allowing consumers to sue. The civil penalties under the law are “substantial” enough to force compliance, he said.

“Tacking on a private right of action is merely an invitation for unscrupulous trial attorneys to sue companies out of business, in many cases likely for merely making a compliance error where consumers have not suffered any injury,” LeDuc said.

Dave Grimaldi, executive vice president for public policy for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a national trade association, said that a better approach would involve “a uniform national data privacy law that protects consumers regardless of where they reside.”

Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, echoed Grimaldi’s remarks, suggesting that New York’s proposal would be an unwelcome addition to the “wide-ranging policy standards” in different states that companies must navigate.

“This is not an efficient way to solve this problem,” Wylde said.

It is not yet clear whether the bill will pass the full council, but the council speaker, Corey Johnson, said he was open to exploring solutions to the privacy issues addressed in Brannan’s bill.

“We live in an age where people’s private information is being sold to the highest bidder, and it is important for us to think of 21st-century fixes,” Johnson said.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, Freddi Goldstein, said that the mayor’s office will review the bill. If passed, the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications would enforce the law; a department spokeswoman, Robin Levine, said the agency agreed “wholeheartedly that New Yorkers’ personal information should not be surreptitiously collected and exploited.”

Exceptions to the proposed ban include information legally supplied to law enforcement agencies; data provided to emergency responders; data required under federal, state or city law; and situations where customers knowingly provide their location data. The legislation does not require that law enforcement agencies be given location data or provide them with an entitlement to collect it.

Before the bill can come to a vote, it would probably first be heard by the council’s Committee on Technology. Robert F. Holden, the committee chairman, called the bill a “priority.”

“Privacy is a serious concern, especially in a day and age where more and more of it is stripped from us as technology progresses,” said Holden, who added that he was interested in seeing “how municipal government can do better in protecting user data.”

AT&amp;T;, T-Mobile and Verizon have pledged to stop selling location data to brokers who may sell the information on the black market. But data on users’ whereabouts is lucrative: Location-targeted advertising sales brought in an estimated $21 billion last year.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California, a Democrat seeking her party’s nomination for president, has called on Congress to pass laws ending the sale of location data.

Brannan said the failure of cellular companies to police themselves was all the more reason for cities to step up.

“Why should we trust them?” he said. “Once municipalities know they have this tool in the arsenal, hopefully it will have a chain reaction.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/nyregion/cellphone-tracking-location-data.html" id="ce39cf74-a010-3592-ace4-e8fcc11b4449">The New York Times</a>.

New York City to Consider Banning Sale of Cellphone Location Data

NEW YORK — Telecommunications firms and mobile-based apps make billions of dollars each year by selling customer location data to marketers and other businesses, offering a vast window into the whereabouts of cellphone and app users, often without their knowledge.

In January, the city of Los Angeles filed a lawsuit against the developers of the Weather Channel app, accusing them of deceptively collecting location data from millions of American users. The app tricked users into turning on location data by telling them that it would be used only to localize weather reports. Instead, the data was used for commercial purposes like analysis for hedge funds, the suit alleged.

New York City May Ban Sale of Phone Location Data

NEW YORK — Telecommunications firms and mobile-based apps make billions of dollars per year by selling customer location data to marketers and other businesses, offering a vast window into the whereabouts of cellphone and app users, often without their knowledge.

Jeffery C. Mays

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