'Bushwick 32' and the Rubberization Process

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/opinion/16herbert.html
Bob Herbert (picture) tells us that a group of young people were framed by the New York City police and by Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes on and after May 21 2007. He says this is "Cruel and Gratuitous" treatment.

Mr. Herbert, what about teachers and education professionals who are confined to "rubber rooms" and also have done nothing? This is the same process, with different victims.

February 16, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
NY Times
Cruel and Gratuitous
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/opinion/16herbert.html

It happened last spring.

The police commissioner’s office and a New York City police captain tried to convince the public that a marauding band of kids had gotten out of control and terrified residents, motorists and pedestrians on a street in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

The cops were wrong. And they must have known that they were wrong, that the picture they were creating of youngsters climbing on top of cars and blocking vehicular and pedestrian traffic was completely false.

The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, carried the canard further. That had to have been deliberate, too. He went on the Brian Lehrer radio program on WNYC and said that his office had investigated the matter — had conducted what he described as an “independent inquiry.”

“We had many, many interviews with local store owners and people who live in the neighborhood who are, frankly, scared to death of these kids,” he said. “And they were not just walking on one car; they were trampling on all sorts of cars. It was almost as if they were inviting their arrest.”

Thirty-two people were arrested on that Bushwick street last May 21, including young women and children. They had been walking along a quiet, tree-lined block of Putnam Avenue on their way to a subway station where they had hoped to catch a train to attend a wake for a friend who had been murdered. The police, who have said that the friend was a gang leader, surrounded the group and closed in.

The youngest person arrested was 13. All of the kids were handcuffed, cursed at and humiliated, and several spent 30 hours or more in jail.

To date, there has been no evidence produced — no witnesses, no photographs or videotapes, no dented vehicles or broken mirrors, nothing whatsoever — to indicate that any of the youngsters had done anything at all that was wrong.

How is it that you can have a rampage in broad daylight on a street in New York City and not be able to show in any way that the rampage occurred?

At least 22 of the 32 people arrested have had their charges dismissed or were never formally charged at all. No one has been convicted of anything.

The case against 18-year-old Zezza Anderson was dropped last month after his lawyer, Ron Kuby, filed a motion demanding that Mr. Hynes’s office produce documentary evidence of the youngsters misbehaving. No evidence was produced. Instead, an assistant district attorney moved to have the charges against Mr. Anderson dismissed, acknowledging that the case against the defendant could not be proved.

I’d like to know why, after the better part of a year, the authorities are still tormenting some of these kids. Why are charges still hanging over 10 of them? Why should it take more than nine months to resolve charges of unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct?

A number of the kids have missed days at school to show up for court dates at which nothing of consequence happens. Asher Callender, a senior at Bushwick Community High School, had to go to court on Friday, only to have his case postponed again until March 3.

These are not gangsters. These are not drug dealers. These are kids who were trying to go to a wake for a friend. It was not the kids who were out of control, it was the criminal justice system, which can’t seem to tell the difference between right and wrong, between the truth and deliberate lies, or between justice on the one hand and gratuitously cruel behavior by public officials on the other.

All the charges in this case should be dropped and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who apparently wants to be mayor of this city, and District Attorney Hynes should offer the kids a public apology.

The authorities have become accustomed to treating disadvantaged young people in New York City like dirt and getting away with it. In this case, local school officials, community residents and the civic group Make the Road New York rallied to the youngsters’ cause.

Neither the police nor the district attorney expected to be confronted in any kind of sustained way over their treatment of these kids. Mr. Hynes said on the radio program: “None of these kids are going to be prosecuted. They’re not going to go to jail ... We are going to offer every one of them community service.”

What he meant was that he expected the kids to go quietly, to plead guilty and passively accept the blot on their records and what he thought of as mild punishment.

But the kids had a surprise for him. They refused to plead guilty to something they hadn’t done. Ten of them are still paying the price for standing up for themselves.

Bushwick 32’ supporters arrested on phony charges
By Tyneisha Bowens
Brooklyn, N.Y.Published Dec 9, 2007 11:34 PM
LINK

On Nov. 30 than 20 Black students were in the Criminal Court of Brooklyn, N.Y., facing charges from their arrest in May while walking peacefully to the wake of a fellow student and friend. The charges they face include “unlawful assembly,” although the students had permission to attend the wake from both their parents and the administration of their high school. Originally these students were the “Bushwick 32” but some of the students had their charges dropped or had been to court before Nov. 30.

The Bushwick youths have had support from fellow students, community members, organizations like Student Coalition Against Racial Profiling and Make the Road since the May arrest, and had planned a news conference for Nov. 30. Unfortunately, no bourgeois news outlet found this incident important enough to dispatch even one news crew, camera person, or reporter.

During the court proceedings four supporters of the Bushwick students—John Mekins, Brian Favors, Mario Cox, and Jesus Gonzalez—were forced out of the courtroom for attempting to have counsel with one of the students’ lawyers and calling out injustice when they saw the court’s treatment of fellow supporters.

Once in the hall a fight between the supporters and the court officers broke out. “We could hear what was going on in the hallway but when we wanted to go out and stop it we were told to sit down before the same thing happened to us,” said one of the Bushwick youths on trial at the time.

The four men were arrested in the hall and held in the courthouse. During the initial time of their holding, Brian Favors’ spouse and Mario Cox’s mother were not allowed to see their loved ones and were unaware of the charges and details of the incident. Due to the circumstances of the case and the arrest of the students’ supporters, the Bushwick youths’ case was moved to Dec. 7.

On Dec. 1, the four supporters were arraigned in the same courthouse where they had been the previous day standing up against racial profiling and the racism of the entire judicial system. More than 60 supporters of the four men packed the courtroom. Most of the crowd in the courtroom consisted of Latin@ and Black community members, while the judge, prosecution and the bulk of the officers present were white.

Mekins, Favors, Cox, and Gonzalez were accused of starting the altercation with court officers and resisting arrest during the prosecution’s statement. The defense teams for the four men used character statements about them to prove that they had no intention of or interest in causing an altercation with the officers and that doing so would have stood in contrast to their community work and past behavior.

Cox, a high school student, was scheduled to take the SAT at the very time he was in court. Favors is a teacher and a trusted advisor to the Buschwick students and their parents. Gonzalez is a dedicated community organizer and college student. And Mekins’ removal from the courtroom was a case of mistaken identity which was cleared up by Favors before the arrest.

The four defendants had visible bruises during the arraignment. They had been taken to the hospital for their injuries after the fight. All four men were released without bail, but the charges were not dropped. Cox and Gonzalez will be in court on Jan.7, and Mekins and Favors on Dec. 12.

After their release the four pillars of the community greeted and thanked each of their supporters outside of the courtroom. The defense team and defendants spoke to supporters outside the courthouse.

Ray Boudreaux of the San Francisco 8, members of the Black Panther Party and political prisoners, came out in support of these men and had this to say: “They attacked these brothers because they are organizers for our community. ... This is the whole U.S. government that we are up against and what we need is a revolution.”

The defendants let tears run down their faces as more supporters joined the crowd outside.

For all those who are against these racist acts of injustice, come out to Criminal Court at 120 Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn on Dec. 7, Dec. 12 (room AP1) and Jan. 7 (room AP6) and show your support.

The writer is a Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST) youth organizer. Email: fist@workers.org.

Sam Freedman, by Judy Cohen

Sam Freedman came into the Seventh Avenue Reassignment Center in the beginning of October, 2007 and sat with the inmates for over three hours to understand the difficult condition professionals tolerate everyday while awaiting due process. At that time there were approximately 82 people sitting on hard chairs, practically on top of each other, in an 1,100 square foot windowless room made to hold 25-30 people. Shortly after Mr Freedman's article appeared in the Times on October 10, 2007, another reassignment center was opened on 174th Street and Broadway in an old Catholic school where 30 professionals were assigned from Seventh Avenue, as well as some teachers from the reassignment center in the Bronx, thereby clearing out the overcrowded Seventh Avenue Room. When the 174th Street room began in October, there were 45 inmates. In the 3-4 months since then, the new professionals forced out awaiting due process continue coming to 174th Street, which now houses 76 people in such a short time. It is so overcrowded, the DOE began sending more people back to the Seventh Avenue room at 333 7th avenue.

Here is Mr. Freedman's article published in the NY TIMES:

October 10, 2007
On Education, NY TIMES
Where Teachers Sit, Awaiting Their Fates
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Back in 1968, when he was a graduate student of 24, Ivan Valtchev boarded a ferry from the Polish coast to Stockholm. It was the final leg in a complex and risky process of escaping to the West from his native Bulgaria. Newly free, he believed that he had left totalitarianism forever behind.

Mr. Valtchev made his way eventually to the United States, becoming an artist whose etchings were exhibited at the National Gallery. He taught at the college and secondary levels, most recently at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts in Manhattan.

But on Aug. 30, when Mr. Valtchev reported to a security guard on the eighth floor of an office building near Midtown, he experienced a certain sense of gulag déjà vu. He had been ordered by his principal to a reassignment center, more commonly known among New York teachers as a “rubber room.”

The room in question was about 1,100 square feet and on blueprints submitted to the Fire Department was designed to hold 26 people. On this day, it contained upward of 75. It had no windows, no land phone, no Internet access, no wall decorations, not even a clock. Any personal belongings left overnight were removed by custodians.

Some of the occupants faced criminal charges like assault, while others had been brought up by city education officials for termination due to incompetence or other causes. Still more, including Mr. Valtchev, had not yet received a formal letter specifying any allegation. Until their cases are resolved, which can take years, all are required to spend the 181 days of the school year in the rubber room.

And although the teachers there receive their full salaries, the stale, spartan conditions and the absence of any physical or intellectual stimulation provide a ceaseless reminder that in some respects they are guilty until proved innocent.

“There is a spirit of the K.G.B. about it,” Mr. Valtchev said in an interview on Monday. “Their main strategy is to destabilize the person, reduce his self-respect.

“It’s extremely oppressive. It’s regimented. It’s unhappy. There’s friendship and camaraderie among us in the room, but there’s a constant atmosphere of fear. And deep depression.”

Throughout New York City, the Department of Education operates 12 reassignment centers, populated at any one time by about 760 teachers from a total work force of 80,000. And, let’s face it, they can be a hard bunch to defend.

During my own 20 years of observing and writing about public education in New York, I’ve seen firsthand how exasperatingly difficult it has been for principals to oust abusive, incapable or negligent teachers who are protected by a powerful union. Instead, some principals would privately agree to swap problem teachers in a process known as “trading turkeys.” Others would offer such teachers a positive rating if they used their seniority to transfer to a different school.

The transfer rules were ended in 2005, under an agreement between the city and the teachers’ union. That same accord also slightly streamlined the process of bringing termination cases before an arbitrator. But I’ve also reported on examples of quality teachers persecuted by insecure or dictatorial administrators for being active in the union, speaking to the press or merely having independent views on curriculum. Not every teacher in the rubber room deserves the fate, even if some surely do.

Arbitrators and courts will weigh the evidence in each case. So why are those who have been charged, but not convicted, consigned to places like the eighth-floor room at 333 Seventh Avenue, which seem intended to mete out punishment long before any verdict has been issued?

“From our perspective, it’s not punitive,” said Andrew Gordon, the director of employee relations at the department. “It’s all about respect for the other employees” both in the rubber room itself and in other department offices on the floor, he said. Of the ban on keeping personal items, he said: “We don’t want to play policeman. It turns into an administrative nightmare.”

Still, the stultifying atmosphere of that rubber room is not simply the opinion of its unwilling, disgruntled residents. I spent several hours there last week observing the listless routine, and what I saw confirmed the complaints I had heard privately from teachers before my unannounced visit.

Until this year, teachers could at least keep some personal items: a seat cushion, a tin of tea. A teacher with a damaged leg who needs a support dog was permitted to sit at a table just outside the rubber room. A physical education teacher even held fitness classes in the hallway.

All that has ended. The department supplied new chairs and tables at the outset of this academic year, but also stopped allowing any of the personal touches.

The teacher with the dog, Joy Hochstadt — facing termination because of repeated ratings of unsatisfactory — now sits in the rubber room; several teachers who are allergic to dogs then had to be moved elsewhere. Teachers cannot use the hall for exercise or borrow books from two department libraries in the building. Instead of arriving on staggered shifts, as in the past, all 75-plus teachers stay from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m., meaning that the process of signing in or out can take half an hour.

“When a new teacher comes in, it’s not unusual for us to get very territorial,” conceded Judith Katz Cohen, who had taught art at the Talented and Gifted School in Manhattan and is accused of making a profane comment to a student. “People would be going from table to table, looking for a place to sit, and others would get loud, angry.”

Gilda Teel, who taught social studies at Independence High School in Manhattan, said she tried to meditate before coming into the rubber room. “I’ve been here just a month and it’s made me more nervous, more aggressive,” said Ms. Teel, accused of not accounting for $245 in school money. “It’s changed my whole temperament.”

Until things improve, which may be never, the teachers in the rubber room pass their days with crossword puzzles, knitting, iPods, sketch pads, whatever can be brought home at night and doesn’t need electricity. For a roomful of people with advanced degrees, whether truly or falsely accused, that mental diet is thin gruel.

“Even in the penal system,” said Ms. Cohen, a veteran of more than 240 days in the rubber room, “they permit rehabilitation.”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. His e-mail is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.