Editorial Roundup: New York

Glens Falls Post-Star. February 23, 2021.

EDITORIAL: Crime rates have fallen dramatically, expensive prisons are closing, it’s all good

It’s never good when major upstate employers close, and it’s never bad when reductions in the criminal population allow the state to close prisons.

Those competing truths define the debate over the ongoing closure of prisons in New York, where the number of prisoners (this figure does not include inmates in county jails) has fallen from more than 70,000 in the late 1990s to less than 40,000 last year.

The state has experienced a corresponding drop in crime, a trend that began in the early 1980s, when the state’s violent crime index hit a high of almost 7,000 per 100,000 residents. After four decades of decline, the violent crime index has dipped below 2,000 for the past several years. Last year - 2020 - was a difficult one, with the pandemic and nationwide protests and social upheaval. Still, although some violent crimes, like murders, did increase in New York City and the statewide rate may go up a little, it won’t come close to the highs of 30 and 40 years ago.

Fewer crimes have meant fewer criminals, which has given the state the opportunity to close prisons, saving hundreds of millions of dollars. This hasn’t meant wholesale layoffs - staff levels in the Corrections Department have been adjusted mainly through attrition (not replacing employees who retire or quit).

Although the North Country is home to numerous state prisons, most of the closures have taken place elsewhere. Of 20 prison facilities closed since 1999, three - Camp Gabriels, Chateaugay Correctional and Lyon Mountain Correctional - were in the North Country.

The state has also announced plans to close three more facilities this year - medium security prisons in Gowanda (south of Buffalo) and Watertown, and the Clinton Annex, which is a small part of the maximum security prison in Dannemora. In 2014, Mt. McGregor in Wilton was closed.

Although our state senator, Dan Stec, doesn’t have much to complain about as far as closings in his district, he has been complaining. But what would he and others who have criticized prison closures have the state do? Should it run inefficient half-empty institutions, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year?

New York taxpayers need every dollar in savings they can get, and there are many dollars to get in prison operations, which are notoriously expensive.

It’s understandable that the people employed in particular prisons will fight the closing of their workplaces, and so will politicians who represent them. But as a principle, the state should be closing expensive, superfluous facilities.

As a principle, too, the state should be doing everything it can to reduce the size of its inmate population - emphasizing treatment over incarceration for drug users, for example. This benefits everyone - the lawbreakers, the taxpayers and the law-abiding citizens who want addicts to become constructive members of society.

The closure of prisons can be painful for communities that have come to rely on them for jobs. But the closure of prisons is a consequence of lower crime rates, and it saves New York lots of money. From a broader perspective, it’s all good news.

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Newsday. February 18, 2021.

Editorial: Don’t renege on NY’s 50-a

What it comes down to is accountability.

State lawmakers last year repealed section 50-a of New York Civil Rights Law, which for a long time prevented the public from seeing law enforcement disciplinary records in full.

Accountability was the issue Tuesday when a federal appeals court in New York tossed out a bid from NYC police, firefighter, and corrections officer unions to go back to the old days. The unions wanted to place unnecessary restrictions on what the public finds out when some members of this essential workforce are accused of doing something wrong.

It’s a bad idea, and the court agreed, knocking down objection after objection:

Would officers be stigmatized and have a hard time getting future jobs if people saw records of unproven complaints? The court noted that each record would reveal the outcome of the investigation.

Would officers be endangered by complaint information being released? State law prevents release of personal data like home addresses. Police unions claim that Googling an officer’s name can yield some information, but the decision said that in general “many other States make similar misconduct records at least partially available to the public without any evidence of a resulting increase of danger to police officers.”

Police unions and allies across New York State have brought up these and similar arguments for months, from the allegation that police, who have the power of deadly force, are unfairly scrutinized to the idea that the release of complaints threatens morale.

The rationale for hiding complaint information can no longer be shielded in the wake of George Floyd’s death under the knee of an officer with multiple misconduct complaints logged against him. Floyd’s death was the event that finally galvanized Albany lawmakers to change 50-a.

Accountability is why Newsday is trying to pry loose the disciplinary records for Nassau and Suffolk police officers involved in highly publicized cases, some many years old, where credible concerns have been raised about how the county police departments police their own.

To take just one example, as many as 22 Nassau police officers “ignored, downplayed or mishandled” Jo’Anna Bird’s repeated pleas for protection from an abusive ex-boyfriend, a confidential informant for the department who tortured and killed her in 2009. “The Nassau County Police Department has never provided a full public accounting of the actions, or inaction, that led to the young mother’s murder,” Newsday wrote last week, after announcing a lawsuit seeking the release of a 700-page report from 2010 into the department’s lapses in the case.

Long Islanders deserve to know the consequences of these failures by their public servants. Yet Nassau and Suffolk police leaders - and their brethren across the state - seem to be looking for new ways to block their secrets despite the clear intent of the law for transparency.

State law includes plenty of important, and needed, privacy protections for law enforcement officers. Releasing information about officer wrongdoing - and following up with consequences for that wrongdoing when appropriate - is not particularly onerous. It’s just accountability.

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New York Times. February 19, 2021.

Editorial: The Lessons of the Texas Power Disaster

The entire nation’s energy delivery system needs an overhaul.

There is a great deal of nonsense being written and spoken about this week’s power failures in Texas, which left a number of people dead and millions without power or potable water, sometimes for days.

Among the more prominent nonsense peddlers was the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who blamed the mess on wind power and other renewable fuels, while warning that proposals like the Green New Deal - which would zero out fossil fuels - would more or less be the end of civilization as we know it. There was also Rick Perry, the state’s former governor, who seemed to suggest that using more renewables would lead to socialism, and Representative Dan Crenshaw, who blamed the whole thing on that liberal bastion otherwise known as California. “Bottom line,” Mr. Crenshaw wrote on Twitter, “Texas’s biggest mistake was learning too many renewable energy lessons from California.”

These statements were catnip to progressives, who mainly blamed the state’s libertarian energy system, which, they claimed, sought to keep prices low at the expense of safety.

None of the poppycock from Texas politicians is of any help to the scores of Texans who spent long hours and days freezing in their homes. It has also obscured the real reasons for the disaster and diverted attention from an important lesson: that the nation’s energy delivery system, not just in Texas but everywhere, needs a radical overhaul if it is to withstand future shocks and play the role that President Biden has assigned it in the battle against climate change.

Both sides have elided an interesting piece of Texas history. The person who put wind power on the Texas map was a Republican named George W. Bush. As governor, in 1999, Mr. Bush signed a law deregulating the state’s power market, at which point Texas started building loads of wind turbines. Wind now supplies about a quarter of the state’s energy diet - natural gas is about twice that - and Texas is far and away the biggest supplier of wind energy in the country and among the biggest in the world.

But wind, which supplies a smaller fraction of power in wintertime, had little to do with this week’s disaster. The simple truth is that the state was not prepared for the Arctic blast. A few wind turbines froze up, but the main culprits were uninsulated power plants run by natural gas. In northern states, such plants are built indoors; in Texas, as in other Southern states, the boilers and turbines are left exposed to the elements.

There are two lessons here to be absorbed and acted on. First, the country’s energy systems must be robust enough to withstand whatever surprises climate change is likely to bring. There is little doubt that a warming climate turned California’s forests into tinderboxes, leading to last summer’s frightening wildfires. The scientific connection between climate change and extreme cold is not as well established, but it would be foolish to assume that it is not there. (The dominant hypothesis is that global warming has weakened the air currents that keep the polar vortex and its freezing winds in check.) As the Princeton energy expert Jesse Jenkins observes in a recent Times Op-Ed, we know that climate change increases the frequency of extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires, heavy rains and coastal flooding. We also know the damage these events can cause. To this list we should now add deep freezes.

If building resilience is one imperative, another is making sure that America’s power systems, the grid in particular, are reconfigured to do the ambitious job Mr. Biden has in mind for them - to not just survive the effects of climate change but to lead the fight against it. Mr. Biden’s lofty goal is to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury and to eliminate fossil fuel emissions from the power sector by 2035. In the simplest terms, this will mean electrifying everything in sight: a huge increase in battery-powered cars and in charging stations to serve them; a big jump in the number of homes and buildings heated by electric heat pumps instead of oil and gas; and, crucially, a grid that delivers all this electricity from clean energy sources like wind and solar.

This, in turn, will require from Congress a cleareyed look at the climate-driven calamities that have beset California, the Caribbean and, most recently, Texas. It will also require an honest accounting of their great cost, in both human and financial terms, and of the need to guard against their recurrence in the years to come.

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Dunkirk Evening Observer. February 20, 2021.

Editorial: Louder chorus needed for music

Members of the Westfield Academy & Central Schools are striking all the right notes. If sports can come back during the COVID-19 pandemic, why not the music program? Last month, music teacher Helen Ihasz called the school board - and state - to allow bands and choruses to be able to perform again in closer quarters.

“I think if high risk sports are going to happen, then we need to make some changes,” she said. “All band directors feel that this has been a struggle. My kids really want to play.”

A return of sports, as we have seen, has not been perfect. Attendance is not allowed while some local teams have had to go into quarantine due to a risk of infection.

Let’s face it. If it can happen with million-dollar professionals, it’s likely to occur with youth.

Which makes Westfield’s plea for the music so significant. Currently, the state requires 12-foot spacing. This limits participation and, as the board noted is “killing music education.”

Those restrictions are obviously not being enforced with sports. If they did, competition would be very strange.

That is why it is time for New York, with school music, to change its tune.

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Niagara Gazette. February 18, 2021.

Editorial: : DiNapoli should look into school security project

The New York State Comptroller’s Office has been petitioned to investigate the process by which Lockport City School District acquired its controversial, and now shut-down, facial recognition-powered surveillance system. The petitioner, system critic and Gazette contributing writer Jim Shultz, has a well-founded suspicion that the process was not entirely above board, and even though the cameras are turned off at least until July 2022, he’s not content to claim partial victory and let it go.

The Gazette supports Shultz’s request to the state’s fiscal “top cop” and hereby adds its signature to his administrative petition.

Respectfully, we ask Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, whatever authority and ability you have to get to the bottom of a situation that’s seemed sorta shady from the get-go, please use it. District taxpayers, district parents and the state, which financed Lockport’s $2.7 million, not-foolproof surveillance system, deserve honest answers to questions raised by skeptics that have been ignored willfully by top agents of the district including administrators and board trustees.

Shultz’s petition asks the comptroller to investigate possible violations of LCSD’s fiduciary responsibilities as it acquired a facial- and object recognition-capable surveillance system in the approximate period 2016-2019. The petition cites three process-related areas that warrant scrutiny:

• An apparent “financial conflict” on the part of Anthony Olivo, a security consultant to the district who was shown top have a financial stake in Canada-based SNTechnologies, the company that developed the Aegis software suite that powers the system.

• The apparent absence of a fair and open, competitive bidding process for obtaining the system.

• The apparent use of district resources to investigate Shultz after he began asking questions about the system.

These are weighty assertions made downright startling by Shultz’s inclusion, in his petition, of electronic links to televised Board of Education meetings, documents obtained through Freedom of Information Law requests and other supporting evidentiary pieces - on top of his references to documents sought and not obtained, or questions asked and simply not answered by the district: What was the basis for selecting SNTech’s system over others? Who were the others? What did the Aegis licensing agreement cost and did some portion of that fee go to Olivo, the consultant, for securing LCSD’s business for SNTech? And, last but not least, was it proper for district officials to expend district resources looking into Shultz’s personal background, opposition research-style?

Now here’s our question: When a publicly funded entity is doing the spending and making the deals on behalf of “the people,” which of Shultz’s questions does any member of the public not have a right to ask and get answered forthrightly?

None of the above, as far as we’re concerned.

That’s why we hope Comptroller DiNapoli’s office will pursue answers to all of the same questions and more. Lifting of the veil of secrecy draped over this public “project” is long overdue.

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