Justin Meyers, Chief of Operations, Office of Public Safety: Good afternoon and welcome. Of course, this is our weekly Public Safety briefing that we hold every week. It gives New Yorkers an opportunity to hear from leaders from the Public Safety space here in the city of New York about the hard work that's going on behind the scenes to protect the city each and every day, but also gives New Yorkers an opportunity to learn a little bit about their city and ask some questions of the folks who are leading these efforts. Today, we've got some great folks from the public safety portfolio, and a newcomer to the public safety briefing who very much their agency has to do with public safety, but not necessarily a traditional law enforcement agency.
We have today our sheriff, Anthony Miranda, a fan favorite of the public safety briefings. Anthony comes very often to share all the hard work that the New York City Sheriff's Office is doing. He's going to be here talking about his office's recent enforcement efforts to crack down on the illegal sale of baked goods containing cannabis here in the City of New York. We also have commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services, Jess Dannhauser, who's going to give us an overview of the critical work ACS does to protect children here in the city of New York, and then provide some important safety tips for anyone who has or cares for children.
Before we get started, I thought it would be fun today to just share just a really quick piece of information that New Yorkers see every week during this public safety briefing, but don't necessarily, may not know about it. Right behind us, we're in what's called the Blue Room here in City Hall. City Hall is a beautiful, beautiful building if you've ever walked by it, but it's also home to some incredible American historical artifacts. It's really an honor for those of us who get to come here from time to time or work here to get to see some of these things. I just wanted to share it with New Yorkers, because it's in the background of these Public Safety briefings and it actually is something of rather significance.
Right behind me is a painting, a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers, of course, of the United States. And it's painted by John Trumbull, who is a very, very famous painter. It was known at that time that if you were a Founding Father, John Trumbull did your painting. You had made it at that point. And this painting is unique, because Alexander Hamilton was known for not really wanting his painting done, so it happened very infrequently and there's not a lot of original Hamilton paintings. And this painting, this specific one right here is actually the painting that was used to frame the $10 bill. That face on your $10 bill that you've seen a thousand times literally comes from this painting that lives right here in City Hall, in the City of New York. So, just a fun little fact that I thought we'd share with New Yorkers today before we get started with the briefing.
So, now onto our regularly scheduled briefing. We're here. We do these briefings, as I said, to let the public hear directly from leaders throughout the city government on the public safety work that we're doing. And if you're watching from home, our hope is that you learn something here today or that you hear something that you may think is useful to a friend, a neighbor, a loved one that could help them be safe. Safety is really about more knowledge, more information. Those little tiny tidbits that help you have a safe and productive day, day in and day out are the things that ultimately lead up to public safety. So, our hope is that you'll hear some things that help keep you safe and that you'll share that information with your friends and family.
Before we chat with our team members here today, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize and thank the organizers, performers, and police officers, and of course, the New Yorkers that took part in this past weekend's free Hip Hop 50 concerts that were announced earlier this month by Mayor Eric Adams and took place over the weekend across the city. I think it's important to just take a moment and recognize that this past weekend, we had tens of thousands of people across all five boroughs attending concerts together. Really, I think, underscoring the fact that New York City is back. We went through a lot during Covid, but we have completely come back.
We're out in the streets, New Yorkers loving each other, celebrating hip-hop's 50th anniversary, going to concerts. And what was remarkably amazing about it is as we had these massive events all over the city, not a single incident occurred; no violence, no arrests, no massive issues whatsoever. So, I think it really underscores the progress that we've made coming out of Covid, that we as a city are able to come together, have these celebrations, gather in masses, and do so without any incident. So, just want to give a shout-out to the organizers, the performers, the police officers who went out and protected those events over the weekend, and of course, the New Yorkers who came out and enjoyed themselves and did so in a responsible fashion.
The next thing that I want to just quickly share before we get to our guests is that the NYPD recently released crime statistics through the first half of 2023, which showed that crime is down overall as compared to 2022. We've seen reductions in five of the seven index crime categories, including murder, which is down 7.9 percent, rape, that is down 9.9 percent, robberies are down 4.8 percent, burglaries are down 9.9 percent, and grand larcenies are down 1.3 percent. We have seen, as we've talked about previously at these briefings, a slight increase in felony assaults, 3.4 percent increase. And we have also continued to see an increase, 18 percent in grand larceny autos, which is driven specifically by a number of specific make and model vehicles that have some programming issues that make them fairly easy to steal.
These are Kias and Hyundais models from 2011 to 2021, so if you own a Kia or a Hyundai 2011 to 2021, your car may be vulnerable to theft. The NYPD and Mayor Eric Adams have set out to do a broad scale, multi-pronged approach to dealing with the rise in grand larcenies. We've talked about it before on the show. We're doing a lot of different work through the NYPD, through other outreach to car manufacturers, to community folks, and to the owners of these vehicles to notify them that you may be at risk. There are some really simple things that you can do to significantly lower your risk of having your vehicle stolen.
You can use Bluetooth or GPS tracking device that you can put in. You can also bring your car to a manufacturer, to a dealership for a free software upgrade that will help eliminate that. Or you can get yourself a good, old-fashioned wheel lock, which will certainly assist in doing that, preventing your car from being stolen.
As you can see, Mayor Eric Adams and his Public Safety teams have been making great progress through the beginning of the year. But of course, we know that during summer months, not just in this city, but across this country, we sometimes see an uptick in crime. In May, at the advent of the summer season, the NYPD's Crime Control Strategies Bureau analyzed crime from across the city and identified 65 specific areas where we see crime increasing. We use data to try to drive down crime, and use specific targeted police actions in areas where we see that increase in crime to try to prevent it from ever happening, and then of course, respond timely if it does. In these 65 locations between the 5:30 p.m. and 4 a.m. each night, additional officers have been deployed to those areas to support those neighborhoods and make sure they are safe.
We're proud to report that those efforts thus far this summer have been incredibly successful. Since the summer violence reductions plan's inception in May, major crime in those areas are down 6.2 percent. As I said, normally you see an increase in those areas in the summer months, but we've actually seen a reduction in major crimes by 6.2 percent in those areas. Shooting incidents are down 27.5 percent in those areas, and shooting victims are down 35.1 percent year-over-year in those zones that we've been working on. So I want to thank and commend the NYPD for their great work and for continuing to deploy resources in a strategic and effective way to combat crime in our most vulnerable communities. And later on, we're going to hear from Chief Beltran on some interesting ways that the NYPD's been leveraging data to be able to make those data-driven decision-making that's led to some of those very impressive numbers.
Now, we have our first member of the Public Safety team, Sheriff Anthony Miranda here. The Sheriff's Office has been working hand-in-hand with the NYPD, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, and other city agencies over the past year and a half since recreational adult use cannabis was legalized in New York state, to crack down on unlicensed and illegal cannabis sales here in the city of New York. We know this is an issue for New Yorkers. We've seen this explosion of unlicensed cannabis retail resellers in neighborhoods all across the city. 311 complaints have gone through the roof on this particular issue, and Sheriff Miranda and his team are really leading the way to try to enforce the illegal sale of cannabis.
Cannabis is legal. It's legal to purchase. It's legal to utilize cannabis in the city and the state of New York now, but there are dangers to having unregulated sales. Just the same way as you're not allowed to cook moonshine in your bathtub and sell it on the street, you're also not allowed to start a restaurant without having the right requirements and licenses in place. You have to have the right licenses in place to sell cannabis as well. And when you don't, what ends up happening is you can attract crime to a particular community.
When people talk about marijuana or when law enforcement talks about marijuana driving crime or driving violence, it's not the use of cannabis that drives the crime. It's the fact that the illegal sale generates a tremendous amount of cash. And anytime you have an illegal business sitting on a lot of cash, that's going to attract wrongdoers who may want to use violence to try to take that cash away from you. And so the sheriff's been doing an incredible job to do enforcement. He recently did a special targeted enforcement on shops that are selling illegal baked goods that have cannabis in them. The sheriff's here today to talk to us a little bit about the work that they're doing. Thanks so much, sheriff.
Sheriff Anthony Miranda: Thank you for having us, and it's always a pleasure to be here. I want to first start by clearly stating that the Sheriff's Office has a number of responsibilities. Smoke shop enforcement is just one of those responsibilities. We have a compliance task force, and it's made up of the cooperation of several different agencies. I want to start by giving some of the general numbers, and then I'll talk about the enforcement about the edibles. So far in the month of July 2023, our actions have resulted in civil penalties totaling close to $4.5 million in seizure of products and seizure of products of value, over $2 million in products that were seized. And year-to-date, the city actions have resulted in $22 million in civil penalties against the locations, and products valued at over $12 million have been seized year-to-date from the efforts of the task force and the other agencies.
Most recently, we had the opportunity to join forces with the Department of Health, who went out to do inspections on locations that were baking with cannabis and other products. And when we went out with them, they clearly had more significant authority about closing down some of the locations. But we went in with them and they were able to enforce the imposing civil penalties of over $34,000 at one location, and they ended up closing down those two locations who were selling baked goods. The Department of Health had a significant amount of inspection authority to go into these locations. We accompanied them about doing additional enforcement, looking for additional products that may have been sold in these locations as well. We were able to secure locations that did result in two arrests at two different locations, and the seizure of all the baked goods.
People often ask what we do with the baked goods. All of those products get destroyed, and they were disposed of. But the efforts are ongoing and the partnership will continue going forward. Community complaints are extremely important. We want to make sure that you understand that we're hearing the complaints and we're actively investigating those complaints. And we not only do the enforcement on the street level, but we also do follow-up investigations, tracking the financials of a particular business, and finding out where the money's going and who's funding these locations. So what you see on the street is our street level enforcement, but there are different levels of investigations that are ongoing through the Sheriff's Office with the joint partnerships, with the different agencies we work with. But the commissioner from the Department of Health has been tremendous in their efforts to be able to identify these locations with information they receive from the community, and they partner with us to go out and do the inspections of these locations and to make sure that we remove these products from the street.
Again, these are unregulated products. There's no certainty as to how much product is contained inside these things, so there's certain health risks to the community. The same thing happens with these illegal smoke shops. These are a health risk to our community because they're unregulated and we don't know what's being mixed in them or how much product is being sold in them. So we don't know what the impact will be when people are using the product.
Again, the effort here is to make sure that the community who wants to participate legally in this market has the right opportunity, the right places to go to and that they are protected. And at the same time, we want to make sure we're protecting the health and safety of the other communities and the young adults that they're targeting for selling these products as well.
Commissioner Jess Dannhauser. Administration for Children’s Services: Thank you, Chief Myers, it's a pleasure to be here to talk about the work of ACS and the unsung heroes, our child protective specialists. All of our folks who do work in our juvenile justice system, our nonprofit provider partners, and so many staff at ACS that we are grateful. Out every single day, day and night, making sure that we are protecting children and supporting families.
I want to start with the tips for families. The headlines are often dominated by sensational stories about children that have been hurt. But most child injuries are actually accidental. They happen with well-meaning parents who just maybe not know the best way to protect their children. It's hot this week, it is a time where we open windows. So I want to talk to you a little bit about window guards. It is essential that families have window guards. If you are struggling to have window guards, call 311. They can help you with your landlord to make sure that you have what you need. Too often, we've seen children be hurt by climbing out into windows and god forbid, falling. What's really key is that if a child is 10 years or younger, there needs to be a window guard.
An air conditioner that is appropriately installed is an appropriate alternative to a window guard. But you have to make sure that there's a very, very narrow entrance between the air conditioning so that young people cannot get out of it and that it is appropriately installed. 311 can be a resource for this. You can also go to our website and to the Department of Health's website to get more information to make sure those window guards are appropriately installed.
We also see from time to time children who are lost because of unsafe sleep conditions. There are three really key tips for parents. Children should always sleep alone. That's the A. Children should always sleep on their backs, which is the B. And they should always sleep in a crib, which is a C. We know as a parent, my child is now a teenager. But when she was little, the stress of getting them to sleep, it is difficult to really sometimes abide by these principles, but they save lives.
To make sure that your child is not sleeping with clutter. Sometimes, especially as the winter months approach, we want to put more and more blankets on our children. We're worried about their temperature. It's really, really important that we don't do that, and we make sure that they are sleeping in a clutter-free environment so that we can protect them. We've done a lot to get out pack and plays to families, and different equipment. ACS has sleep sacks that are really appropriate for those winter months. So we really want to share with families that the A, B and C of safe sleep are key. Not only is ACS endeavoring to protect our littlest ones and to support families, parents are their children's most important protectors, and so our job is really to support families in doing that.
We're also investing in our young people. We have launched a program over the last few years. The mayor has invested over $30 million in a program called Fair Futures. This is a program that provides coaches to young people in foster care until they're 26 years old. I'm really pleased and proud to share with you that we just had an implementation study done by Chapin Hall that found the implementation to be remarkable. We've reached over 4,000 young people in foster care, including young people who have aged out and come back for supportive services. This includes education, college, all of the things that they need to support a career housing supports.
We've expanded this to our juvenile justice continuum, and ACS has a robust juvenile justice continuum of preventative services, mostly called our Family Assessment Program or FAP. If families are struggling with a young adult in their home, they can reach out to our FAP offices. They're in each borough, they're available on our website. We just added Fair Futures to that continuum because we heard from parents. We really appreciate the services that FAP provides, but we want something that our young people are going to gravitate towards. And these coaches are credible messengers, they are really allies to young people, can help them navigate towards success. So I'm pleased to answer any questions, and just wanted to provide those key tips.
Meyers: Thank you so much, commissioner, it was really great to have you here. I think that was some really important information, particularly as you said in the summer months with windows being open. Let me ask you just a quick question. So if I'm somebody watching the public safety briefing today and I know an expecting mother or have a friend who is a new parent, I said, "Hey, I just saw there's this great commissioner at Child Services in the City of New York, was just talking about all these services that you have. You're about to have your baby, you just had your baby." What's the next step? What should folks do? Is there a website? Is there somewhere they can go to understand the resources that are available out there for new parents?
Commissioner Dannhauser: Absolutely. So if you go to the ACS website, which is www.nyc.gov/acs, if you go there, you can find tips on how to protect your child. We also have a robust continuum of preventive services. So if families need a little extra help, maybe they need homemaking in their home, maybe they need support navigating the housing system. They can reach out for ACS prevention services at (212) 676-7667. These are free, voluntary, regardless of immigration status, that are accessible through nonprofits embedded in all communities throughout the city. And if you're just curious and want to know a little bit more about what we provide, that number can also provide that information if you're not sure what you might need.
