Teamsters Local 237 union president Gregory Floyd stood by and expanded on recent public comments he made about safety concerns presented by the city’s migrant shelters, including claims that gang members were among those staying in such facilities. 

The union’s representation of 24,000 local government agency employees includes unarmed peace officers such as school safety agents. Some members are security staff at city homeless shelters where asylum seekers are placed, but there are none at the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs) that are directly designated to house the city’s incoming migrants. 

“I’m not going to have a discussion with the city about a better arrangement. It’s not my place to have a discussion with the city,” said Floyd to the Amsterdam News. “I made my opinion known and the city has opened up shelters outside of where our members work, and our members are not employed there, so we’re fine with the current arrangement.”

Such an arrangement includes Health + Hospitals (H+H) opening up bids for security staffing at the HERRCs by private, non-union vendors earlier this month. The contract is expected to start in October. 

According to Floyd, his anxieties about gang members at such facilities stem from a single altercation between a Teamster security guard and a migrant, who other shelter residents later warned was an MS-13 gang member before coming to the United States. But Floyd argues that his comments aren’t intended to demonize or generalize migrants.

Floyd added that union members are not trained to work in migrant shelters, nor “do they speak the same language[s] as the migrants.” There’s a specific emphasis in the city’s request for proposals on seeking staff who speak Spanish, Wolof, French, and Creole, along with Russian, Turkish, and Georgian. 

Last year, southern border states began busing significant migrant populations to New York City, leading to the creation of multiple HERRCs, including the now-defunct “tent city” on Randall’s Island. The arrivals grew in number due to the end of Title 42—a Trump-era policy preventing the legal right to asylum under the pretense of COVID-19 spread—earlier this summer. 

Anthony Gentile, associate director of the John Jay College Center for Private Security and Safety, said Floyd’s comments bely a potential for underlying concerns over unarmed guards thrust into an unfamiliar environment, along with the hefty, around-the-clock duties required to oversee a migrant shelter. He pointed to a blend of school safety agents and NYPD officers at New York City schools as a potential short-term model for migrant shelters, although he acknowledged the current police staffing issues.

“The [school resource officers] are being supported by the public safety officer in a school environment, and I believe that would be the most effective and best way forward for the shelters, at least initially,” said Gentile. 

The Request for Proposals details security duties at HERRCs as 24/7 coverage without gaps “even in the event of call outs, holidays, extreme weather scenarios, or other possible disruptions.” An exact number of staff was not divulged. Instead, manpower (and womanpower) requirements for security teams will be determined after vendors tour the shelters with H + H personnel. 
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.

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“Easy as riding a bike” means different things to different New Yorkers, depending on their skin color and ZIP code. The nonprofit Transportation Alternatives (TransAlt) recently determined that New Yorkers of color are overwhelmingly ticketed for bicycle-related offenses. Em Friedenberg, the organization’s senior research coordinator, funneled NYPD numbers from last year into a spatial data map that pointed to significant disparities in cyclist enforcement. 

“We analyzed every bicycling on sidewalk citation from 2022 and the results were appalling, yet unsurprising,” said Friedenberg. “More than 90% of these tickets were given to New Yorkers of color and 90% were issued on streets without a separated or protected bike lane. When the city builds safe places to bike, biking on the sidewalk drops dramatically.” 

Friedenberg noted that a two-way protected bike lane on Prospect Park West reduced sidewalk riding by 97% and said by designing streets that give options for all road users, traffic fatalities go down. She believes that the mayor must invest in self-enforcing streets and protected bike lanes.

“Instead of ticketing people just for getting around, the city should build essential, lifesaving infrastructure,” she said. 

Last year, 47.5% of people issued a “bicycling on the sidewalk” ticket by the NYPD  were Black and 8.3% were  white, per TransAlt. The biking law states that New York City cyclists must remain on the streets at all times, with the exception of youngsters age 12 and under with 26-inch diameter wheels or smaller. 

Of the NYPD’s 722 total bicycle-related tickets, 102 were issued by Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct, which covers Midwood, Fiske Terrace, Ditmas Park, and Prospect Park South, where 61% of residents are nonwhite. Of those, 60 were for bicycling on the sidewalk—with 40 issued to Black cyclists. That’s a significant departure from second-most, Harlem’s 28th Precinct, with 42 tickets issued, and only one for bicycling on the sidewalk. 

Most tickets issued by 70th are clustered just outside Prospect Park, where there are safe places to bike. When cyclists spill out onto the nearby streets, there’s little dedicated infrastructure to keep them safe and off the sidewalks, said a TransAlt spokesperson. 

The NYPD responded to the disparities arguing that the department “does not engage in racially based enforcement,” adding that body-worn cameras capture police interactions and are reviewed by supervisors.

“There has been an increase of enforcement of bicycle-related summons year-to-date in the confines of the 70 Precinct due to both community complaints involving bicycles being ridden on sidewalks in a reckless manner and the use of bicycles in violent crimes by suspects,” said the department spokesperson. 

Community Board 14, which largely overlaps on the map with the 70th Precinct, ranks 43rd out of 59 in protected bike lanes. 

But  in Greenpoint, 37% of residents bike at least once a month, according to the Health Department, although the study did not indicate whether hipster unicycles were included. 

That is more than double the citywide average, according to TransAlt, yet not a single ticket was issued in the Brooklyn neighborhood last year. Greenpoint is majority white and only 3.8% of residents were Black in 2017–2021 when counted with Williamsburg’s population, according to American Community Survey data examined by the NYU Furman Center. 

Despite the disparities in ticketing for “bicycling on sidewalk” offenses, there was just one more crash between bicycles and pedestrians in the 70th Precinct last year than in the 94th, where Greenpoint is located, according to the DOT. The 78th—which contains the actual Prospect Park—and 84th were the only two Brooklyn precincts with double-digit crashes between bicycles and pedestrians, easily ranking first in incidents borough-wide. Between the two, 17 bicycling on the sidewalk tickets were issued. Both are majority white neighborhoods. 

Of tickets for bicycling on sidewalk, 13.5% were also issued within 50 feet of NYCHA developments, which only cover roughly 1% of city land, and 95% of those ticketed were nonwhite.

And the absence of bike lanes can be deadly: The New York City Department of Transportation found in 2017 that nine out of 10 citywide cyclist fatalities occur where there’s no dedicated space for bicycles, and 15 of the 18 New York City bicyclists killed last year were involved in a crash involving a motor vehicle, according to the NYPD. 

“All New Yorkers deserve access to bike infrastructure, and DOT is on target to install a record number of bike lanes and protected bike lane miles this year,” said DOT spokesperson Monica Bruno. “Under the Adams administration, equity is a key factor in how we locate new bike lanes, with a new formula for determining project locations that considers community demographics and whether neighborhoods have been historically underserved.”

The half-century-old TransAlt is a long-time proponent of bike lanes and critic of “car-centric” infrastructure. 
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.

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New York-based science writer and famed bird enthusiast Christian Cooper was at the 92nd Street Y on July 12 to talk about his hosting of Nat Geo WILD’s new show, “Extraordinary Birder,” and writing his memoir, “Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World.”

During a talk hosted by actress Whoopi Goldberg, Cooper spoke about how bird-watching became a central part of his life at a young age and how he got caught up in the world of birding.

When Goldberg asked Cooper to explain the difference between a “spark” bird and a “life” bird,

Cooper said in birding lingo, a spark bird “is the bird that got you started—the bird that made you say, ‘Wait. What is this? What is this bird? And why am I noticing birds now and why can’t I stop?’” 

His own spark bird was a Red-winged Blackbird. “When I was a kid, at about 9 or 10 years old, I put a bird feeder up in the backyard and kept wondering what all these crows with red in their wings were. I thought for a couple of seconds that I had discovered a whole new species of crow,” he said. But his research led him to understand that he was actually seeing a Red-winged Blackbird. 

RELATED: Central Park birder Christian Cooper is turning his viral video fame into a memoir and TV show

A life bird is a bird that you’ve never seen before, Cooper said. These are the birds that dazzle bird enthusiasts and draw them in, because it makes them realize there will always be a new bird to watch out for. No birder has seen every bird in existence, so there’s always a new life bird to pursue. “Some of them become like Holy Grail birds: You really want to see it one day,” he mused. “And then, one day, here it is and it kind of blows your mind. And that’s one of the best feelings in birding.”

On his “Extraordinary Birder” program, Cooper was able to see one of the life birds he’d been searching for:  the small, brightly colored, Puerto Rican tody. When the series went birdwatching in Puerto Rico, Cooper got to see the tody and was blown away. “It is adorable: it’s kind of green above, white-ish below, some red on it,” he reminisced. “And this oversized head with the oversized orange beak––it’s just the cutest thing alive. The great thing is this bird wanted to try and lead us away from its nest, so it was putting itself in our face so that we would follow it instead of going toward its nest.”

Being able to travel across the nation with his new show has exposed Cooper to a larger variety of birds than had become routine when he mostly did birding activities along the U.S. East Coast. Some of the other locations his show takes viewers to are Alabama, Hawaii, Palm Springs, and Washington, D.C.

The sounds that birds make add to the attraction. “First of all, birds definitely have different dialects,” Cooper said. “I was down birding in Maryland a couple of years ago when I heard this bird sing and I was like, ‘What the heck is that?’ It was a cardinal. I know the cardinal sounds cold, but this cardinal was a southern cardinal. It literally had a southern dialect.”

Birds across the U.S. are as distinct as the people and the environments they live in. Birding and learning about birds is fascinating, and it’s a peaceful pastime that many Black bird enthusiasts and ornithological professionals participate in. Cooper lauded some of the less popularly known but important Black birders who are contributing to the field: Clemson University’s wildlife ecologist, J. Drew Lanham, who last year won a MacArthur Genius award on the basis of his writings about Black birders and Black nature enthusiasts; Scott V. Edwards, a Harvard University professor of organismal and evolutionary biology; and the self-styled “Hood Naturalist” Corina Newsome, who is one of the co-organizers of Black Birders Week.

“I may be, at the moment, the most visible,” Cooper said about being a recognized Black birder. “But you know, there are tons of us. There should be more. And that’s one of the things I hope that I am carrying forward. I’m hoping that with a Black man––a Black person––being the face of this major birding show, that a lot of Black and brown kids might look at it and say, ‘Maybe I can do that too.’”

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