Looking at the Hyper-Local

One of the most amazing aspects of reentry in Upper Manhattan is how locally specific it is. There are extremely high concentrations of people returning to very small local areas in Harlem -- and this is generally the nature of criminal justice problems in urban areas.

Looking at the broader global context, Swedish public health professor and doctor Hans Rosling has put together a fascinating dataset displaying this same pattern in development. Arguing against the traditional perspective that there are "developed" and then "developing" nations, Rosling uses his data to describe extreme variations among so-called "developing nations." [See also his website to see more displays of world development data compellingly presented.]

The video below -- humorous and dynamic -- shows a presentation he gave through TED at the US Department of State this summer. His visual displays of development over time speak very clearly to the idea that all global phenomena have very specific local manifestations. An interesting idea to ponder in Upper Manhattan as well.

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Report Details Severe Abuse at NYS Juvenile Detention Facilities

In spite of many efforts at reform, New York State appears to have a long way to go in cleaning up its juvenile detention system. As an article in the NY Times describes, the United States Department of Justice publicized a report today detailing such severe abuse of juveniles by detention facility workers that they merit a violation of constitutional rights.

The report follows a two-year investigation by the DOJ that found that workers at four detention facilities, run by the state's Office of Children and Family Services, regularly used physical force to restrain the young people, even though they were only allowed to so as a last resort. In multiple instances, this use of force resulted in serious injuries, such as concussions, broken teeth, and fractured bones. From the article, some examples of the byzantine treatment these young people received:

In one case described in the report, a youth was forcibly restrained and handcuffed after refusing to stop laughing when ordered to; the youth sustained a cut lip and injuries to the wrists and elbows. One boy, after glaring at a staff member, was forced into a sitting position and his arms were secured behind his back with such force that his collarbone was broken.

Another youth was restrained eight times in three months despite signs that she might have been contemplating suicide. “In nearly every one of the eight incidents,” the report found, “the youth was engaged in behaviors such as head banging, putting paper clips in her mouth, tying a string around her neck, etc.”

Not only were there multiple instances of abuse, but when the abuse did occur, staff members at the facilities indicated did not follow the correct review procedures for disciplining employees. The Office of Children and Family Services could face federal takeover of the state juvenile detention system if it does not respond within 49 days with a plan of action.

Notably, Gladys Carrion, Commissioner of OCFS, has made some great strides in improving her agency in the past few years. She has closed detention facilities that were built to house large juvenile populations but were detaining only a few young people, she has helped to build out the alternative to detention programs in New York City that divert young people from placement at upstate facilities, and she has given new life to an ombudsman's office tasked with addressing abuse of force cases. As Ms. Carrion herself says in the article, while the agency has made a lot of progress, it is clear that there is much more work to be done.

UPDATE: The NY Times published a scathing editorial about the results of this report here as well. See also four letters to the editor from Jeremy Travis, of President of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Janice L. Cooper of the National Center for Children and Poverty and Susan Wile Schwarz of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Angela Olivia Burton Associate Professor at CUNY Law School, and David Brandt Professor Emertius of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

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The Prophet: Crime and Punishment

It must be Poetry Friday here at Rethinking Reentry -- here's a poem we came across on crime and punishment. It was written in 1923 by the Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran, in his famous work The Prophet. In this collection of poems, a community of people encounters a prophet and asks him for wisdom on a number of issues: love, freedom, self-knowledge, beauty, religion, death, etc. Here are his thoughts on crime and punishment.

Crime and Punishment

Then one of the judges of the city stood forth and said, "Speak to us of Crime and Punishment."

And he answered saying:

It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind,

That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.

And for that wrong committed must you knock and wait a while unheeded at the gate of the blessed.

Like the ocean is your god-self;

It remains for ever undefiled.

And like the ether it lifts but the winged.

Even like the sun is your god-self;

It knows not the ways of the mole nor seeks it the holes of the serpent.

But your god-self does not dwell alone in your being.

Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man,

But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.

And of the man in you would I now speak.

For it is he and not your god-self nor the pigmy in the mist, that knows crime and the punishment of crime.

Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,

So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.

And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,

So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.

Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.

You are the way and the wayfarers.

And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.

Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.

And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:

The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,

And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.

The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,

And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.

Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,

And still more often the condemned is the burden-bearer for the guiltless and unblamed.

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;

For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.

And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also.

If any of you would bring judgment the unfaithful wife,

Let him also weight the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul with measurements.

And let him who would lash the offender look unto the spirit of the offended.

And if any of you would punish in the name of righteousness and lay the ax unto the evil tree, let him see to its roots;

And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth.

And you judges who would be just,

What judgment pronounce you upon him who though honest in the flesh yet is a thief in spirit?

What penalty lay you upon him who slays in the flesh yet is himself slain in the spirit?

And how prosecute you him who in action is a deceiver and an oppressor,

Yet who also is aggrieved and outraged?

And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?

Is not remorse the justice which is administered by that very law which you would fain serve?

Yet you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty.

Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may wake and gaze upon themselves.

And you who would understand justice, how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light?

Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pigmy-self and the day of his god-self,

And that the corner-stone of the temple is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation.

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Books: A Question of Freedom

When he was sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts carjacked a man with a friend. He was a good student from a lower-middle-class family and had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. He served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state.

When he left prison, Mr. Betts went from community college to a full scholarship at the University of Maryland. He now runs a school poetry program for middle and high school students and has just released a new book called A Question of Freedom. We at Rethinking Reentry haven't had a chance to read it yet, but we were able to check out some press coverage of him.

Here's an interview he did with Tavis Smiley. Note how he owns up for his crime but is critical of the environment in which it was within his realm of experience to commit a carjacking. In this interview, he recites some of his poetry as well.

And here's an interview he did with Fox News.

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Jobs, But Not Just for Vick

As you may know, Michael Vick, the pro football player who was just released from a 2-year prison term for animal cruelty abuses, was recently signed to the Philadelphia Eagles.

The Philadelphia Enquirer published this article today asking whether the Eagles would now be hiring people with criminal records for various positions at the stadium. The answer seems to be .... no. But there are some amusing observations in the article.

Here's a link to the Philadelphia Mayor's Office for the Reentry of Ex-Offenders.

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Video: Buzz Cuts and Basketball

For those of you who have never been to Harlem, here's a taste of what its good citizens are like. Warning: this video has nothing to do with reentry. Enjoy!

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Interview with Carl Wicklund, Executive Director of APPA

Carl Wicklund is the Executive Director of the American Probation and Parole Association (APPA). We sat down for this interview on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, at the National Forum on Criminal Justice & Public Safety. Mr. Wicklund was part of an earlier panel I attended at the Forum on Corrections Information Sharing. I wanted to probe the issue of law enforcement collaboration with probation/parole.

What is the best way to encourage local police-parole/probation collaboration?

I think that one of the premises that [must] be understood and appreciated for any of these partnerships between law enforcement and probation/parole to work is the fact that both groups have as their primary goal public safety. Now, law enforcement tends to be focused more on short-term public safety, where probation/parole has a dual purpose of both short-term public safety and long-term public safety, which ultimately means changing the behavior of that person on probation or parole. Where I’ve seen it really work, they come together and develop a joint mission that doesn’t degrade the strength of their own individual missions. There is some acceptance and understanding of the roles that both groups have and they look for commonalities, and obviously the main commonality is public safety. How they go about that can be very different -- there can be some meshing of that, but they have to be careful not to mesh it to a degree where you start getting mission-bleed. One of my concerns is that, in a lot of places where partnerships between law enforcement and probation and parole have occurred, probation and parole start seeing that balance of monitoring and behavior change getting out of balance, and they start seeing themselves [more] as law enforcement. It’s an easy trap to fall into because the compliance aspect for probation and parole is much more concrete than behavior change, which is a more difficult challenge. People tend to go towards that which is easier to define. A good partnership keeps people focused on what their primary roles are in order to meet that partnership’s overall goal.

Are there examples of strategies that encourage a balance between monitoring and behavior change?

I’m fond to saying that there is not best practice, there are really best people who are committed, dedicated, and skilled at what they do and they don’t lose sight of their long-term goals. It is very personality-driven, but I think that [a] strategy that is so important to any effective partnership between different units of government or different units of the justice system is what I call "horizontal diffusion," as opposed to vertical diffusion. I think that a lot of partnerships occur from a top-down push, where you have top leadership saying, "we are going to do this" and they push it down. The people that are mid-management or line staff ask “what do we give up to do this? You are just giving us more to do [, but] you are not relieving us of anything.” Instead, we should be looking at who are the leaders at all levels of an organization and working with them at the same time, coming at it horizontally, embedding it in the practices. When things are pushed from the top down you get a passive-aggressive resistance from people at other levels of an organization because they haven’t been part of it.

Don’t you always have to start at the top to get buy-in and approval?

No, I don’t think you have to start at the top. I think you have to have the top involved. Again, I’m talking horizontal diffusion; I’m not talking vertical where it’s from the top to the bottom. If you look at what happened with Boston Nightlight, how did that start? That started with a probation officer and a police officer talking, and saying “we have to work together,” and they pushed it in their respective agencies. They were not CEO’s, but they were leaders [in] what they were doing. My point is that there are leaders at all levels of an organization, and I don’t think that we always do a very good job looking at who are the champions within those mid-management positions, who are the champions in the line staff, and getting them involved. Find out who are the people that can make this actually work at different levels of the organization. Engage them, empower them to take this and run with it. Maybe you only have a pilot attempt originally or a certain neighborhood [to start], but let them go with it and let it diffuse through the system that way, rather having someone push it down like a food press.

Are there models for this?

So much is dependent on the individual or individuals involved. I think there are models in a sense that there are some principles that you need to keep in mind: you have to have a joint respect for each other missions, you have to look for the commonality in those missions, you have to have the blessing of the cops, you have to look at the workload and take that workload and devise it in a way that allows the people that are actually on the streets doing this stuff to focus on it. Doesn’t mean that you eliminate all of the other stuff, but you have to give some relief that way. There are models in good management, you can look at innovation. Look at 3M. They have crazy meetings where they sit around and throw out these ridiculous ideas and some of the best things that ever occurred come out of it. There are models that way, but I think ultimately what it looks like becomes very personal. If you and I develop a partnership ultimately for that partnership to work we have to get along. If there is any distrust between you and I that partnership is not going to work. So maybe you and I start a partnership, but people in your organization and people in my organization have some distrust. Then it is incumbent on me to deal and diffuse some of that distrust in my organization and you to diffuse some of that distrust in your organization. We help people in our respected organizations understand and appreciate the role that the other organization plays and the strengths and shortcomings that they may have. We have this joint mission that is not a threat to our turf or your turf.

How should information-sharing between probation/parole and law enforcement work in the reentry context?

I think that especially in this day and age people want to get all the information they can and then they will determine what is useful to them and what is not. The reality of that is that they will get overwhelmed. Just think of your email: do you want all the emails you are getting? But are you willing to put stops in place deterring some? Ultimately, when you talk about sharing information between different agencies within the justice system you really have to sit down and develop a business case for what is needed. Qhat does law enforcement and corrections really need? Not what do they want, what is going to help you do your job better. What is the interesting information that they have? I think that you have to build that business case. The kind of information that law enforcement needs is going to be different than the kind of information that probation and parole needs.

I gave some examples where law enforcements certainly would need or should have conditions of supervision because there are some nuisances to conditions of supervisions that tell you a lot about that person under supervision. For example, if you have a sex offender driving in a car with two little girls in the back and you [police officer] pulls him over for speeding. You [have] whatever the statute is in that state. [However,] there is nothing in there that says he has a condition of supervision not to have any contact [with minors] -- you don’t have that information. That’s an important thing for law enforcement to have. Or, if someone is a gang member and one of their [probation/parole] conditions is that they will not be displaying gang symbols [or] wear gang colors, etc. A law enforcement officer sees them standing on a corner doing just that. That’s not only important for law enforcements to know, it’s also important for probation or parole officer to know that the person is violating their conditions. I also gave the example of catching people doing things right because probation and parole have that dual role of ensuring that people are following their conditions of supervision, but also changing behavior. So if you are on my caseload as a probationer and you have a condition that you will not be out at certain hours or that you will be employed during certain times and a cop sees you working your job, I’d like you know that too. Then I do not have to do all these collateral contacts, and a cop can come up to you and say, “Hey I see that you are supposed to be working here and you are doing it. That’s cool. Way to go!” You get that kind of reinforcement of behavior and that informal social control that is so important for people to have in order to change. The formal social controls are important, but they are not the ones that typically change behavior, it’s the informal ones. In some smaller jurisdictions, you have people on a GPS tracking system and probation gets an alert that a person is in a exclusion zone [in other words, an area where they are not supposed to be]. You have a partnership with law enforcement, law enforcement is already over there patrolling, they can go look. There are so many false alerts with GPS that it is driving probation officers crazy because they have to respond to everything. If a probation officer goes inside someone’s house and is having a meeting with them and happens to see a letter from somebody that is an acquaintance and checks with law enforcement only to find out that that person is being investigated for some sort of drug trafficking, its very helpful for a law enforcement to know that person has been in contact [with your client].

Are joint police-probation/parole patrols a good approach to community supervision?

I think they can be great. I used to ask our officers to do ride-a-longs at least once a month with law enforcement. It was as much for them to have an appreciation for what law enforcement’s challenges where, what they were up to, what they were seeing, etc., as it was for law enforcements to [understand] the probation officers [perspective]. I know that a lot of places are doing that much more regularly than once a month, they are actually going out and doing home visits. I think that is great if people can stay true to their individual agency missions and at the same time have that joint mission too.

Posted by: Christopher Watler, Task Force Coordinator

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More About the Human Side of a Recent Harlem Shooting

As you've probably heard by now, a recent robbery at a hardware store on 125th Street turned fatal earlier in the week when the store owner shot two of the four robbers with a registered gun.

The NY Times has a piece today about the men involved in the shooting, focusing mostly on Charles Augusto Jr., the store owner who has been working at the hardware store for 49 years. Community members hold Augusto in high esteem for having stayed through some dangerous and rough years in Harlem to provide hardware services and goods to local residents. As the article notes, Augusto has not had an easy life -- his only son committed suicide some years ago -- and it's clear that he feels no pride in having to defend himself last week. From the article:

Despite all the congratulations, Mr. Augusto said he wished that the men had left when he urged them to and that he would not have had to use the shotgun.

“I know the pain these people must feel,” he said, referring to the families of the two who were killed. “I don’t know what feels worse, now or when my only son died.”

From many angles, this is a tragic story: the families of two young people who made bad decisions have lost their children, a neighborhood institution is vandalized during a time of economic depression, the ready supply of guns has led to yet more fatalities, etc.

What do you think of this incident? Is it a rare event or does it represent some growing trend?

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National Forum on Criminal Justice & Public Safety

This week I am blogging from the National Forum on Criminal Justice & Public Safety in Bellevue, Washington. The Forum brings together a broad range of attendees from law enforcement, probation and parole, counterterrorism, private information management firms and non-profits. Forum partners include the National Criminal Justice Association (NCJA), the IJIS Institute, and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).


Regional Priorities

On Monday, a morning session I attended focused on regional criminal justice priorities. Tom O’Reilly, Senior Policy Advisor for Information Sharing Initiatives at BJA, facilitated the northeast regional priorities session. There were a range of concerns raised in the session that NCJA will report, along with feedback from the other regions, to BJA leadership that will be used to shape policy priorities.

While many important concerns were raised, the northeast regional top priorities identified included: the need for enhanced data sharing/technology, increased resources for law enforcement/ problem-solving manpower, offender reentry, inner-city violent gangs, and illegal prescription drug markets.

Mortgage Fraud

In the afternoon I facilitated a panel on mortgage fraud. My panel included Ann Fulmer, former prosecutor and current Vice President of Business Relations at Interthinx a risk management firm specializing in loan risk mitigation for the financial services industry; Chief Brad Ramos of the Indio California Police Department; Glenn Theobald, Chief Legal Counsel for the Miami-Dade Police Dept. Glenn chairs the Mayor’s Mortgage Fraud Task Force, an innovative strategy begun in Miami-Dade that is now a national model; and, Abed Hammoud, Lead Prosecutor in Wayne County, MI. Abed is a national expert on the prosecution of mortgage fraud.

BJA, under the leadership of Jim Birch III and Attorney General Eric Holder, is working to help jurisdictions address mortgage fraud. In January 2009, BJA brought together several jurisdictions for a two-day focus group to explore the impacts and collaborative responses to mortgage fraud and vacant and abandoned properties. To learn more click here.

Christopher Watler, Task Force Coordinator

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Using Technology for Reentry

We were excited to see that the Oregon Department of Corrections has launched the "Oregon Reentry Wiki."

For those of you who are not familiar with Wiki pages, it's a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change most content very easily. At Wikipedia, people make these pages on all kinds of subjects, from the "apparent retrograde motion of Mars" to the history of fashion design. As Wikipedia says, it's a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

In Oregon, the idea is that this website will be a one-stop for resource information both for reentrants and for justice system partners. Additionally, community members will be able to learn about reentry and post information about events.

We created a login to test out how it works -- turns out that only certain people have privileges to edit information and create pages (not the general public), but it still a good idea for centralizing information.

What other technologies have you seen criminal justice entities use for successful interaction with the public? We're curious to hear how other jurisdictions are taking advantage of all the tech tools out there.

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Red Beans and Rice

No, it's not what we're having for lunch at Rethinking Reentry.

It's a new newsletter for nonprofit organizations and it is one of the most helpful resources we've seen in a long time. Thanks to our friends at Cuidiu Consulting for putting together such a great source of information!

In addition to food-for-thought pieces, the newsletter has fundraising tips, links to current grants, job and professional development opportunities, resources and templates "from the field," and more.

Check out archives of the newsletter here.
Sign up to receive it in your inbox weekly here.

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Why We Need a Systems Approach

Today's NY Times has a truly sad article about mentally ill juvenile offenders. Tracking the state budget cuts to community mental health resources, the article discusses the increased burden to prison systems as they deal with rising numbers of mentally ill young people. Since young people are mandated to receive necessary mental and physical health services when they are wards of the state, court systems often sentence them to detention, where they are assured to receive required treatment, instead of releasing them to the community, where there is no guarantee of treatment. Often, these seriously mentally ill young people are on multiple strong medications and without access to regular therapy, causing disruptions in the continuation of care.

One of the most poignant quotes from the article is the following:

"Joseph Parks, medical director for the Missouri Department of Mental Health and a national expert on pharmaceutical drug use in corrections facilities, said many juvenile offenders are prescribed multiple psychiatric drugs as they move from mental health clinics to detention halls to juvenile prisons. A decade ago, it was rare to find juvenile offenders on two psychotropic drugs at once, Dr. Parks said. Now, many take three or four at a time, often for nonprescribed uses like helping the youths sleep.

'If you just give a kid a pill, the prison administration doesn’t have to do anything differently,' he said. 'The staff doesn’t have to do anything differently. The guards don’t have to get more training.'"

What jumps out from this comment is the need for a systems approach to problem-solving. From Wikipedia:

"Systems thinking is any process of estimating or inferring how local policies, actions, or changes influence the state of the neighboring universe. It also can be defined, as an approach to problem solving, as viewing "problems" as parts of an overall system, rather than reacting to present outcomes or events and potentially contributing to further development of the undesired issue or problem. Systems thinking is a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. The only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the part in relation to the whole." [Click here for a more detailed discussion of this idea.]

The need for this kind of thinking can be seen in the mental health demands of juvenile detention facilities. While a psychotropic medication will soothe an episode of mental illness for a certain period of time, it does not address the set of actions and consequences that led the young person to a detention facility. What is needed is a broader set of assessments about how systems of care are (or are not) responding to the needs of mentally ill youth and their families. It is tragic that the current budget cuts are affecting already limited community mental health resources -- but wasn't this a problem before our economy hit rock bottom? We'd love to hear your thoughts on this issue.

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Unpacking the Law: Disorderly Conduct

Disorderly conduct has been in the news recently. Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was recently arrested for it at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and today's Washington Post features a piece from a Washington, D.C. lawyer charged with disorderly conduct after saying "I hate the police."

But this charge is old news to folks in criminal justice circles. Spend a few hours observing criminal court in New York City and you'll see "240.20's" (the penal code for disorderly conduct) come in, one after the other.

So what is it? Why does it exist?

The New York State Penal Code says the following:

"A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof:

1. He engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior; or

2. He makes unreasonable noise; or

3. In a public place, he uses abusive or obscene language, or makes an obscene gesture; or

4. Without lawful authority, he disturbs any lawful assembly or meeting of persons; or

5. He obstructs vehicular or pedestrian traffic; or

6. He congregates with other persons in a public place and refuses to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse; or

7. He creates a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose.

Disorderly conduct is a violation. "

This last sentence is important: in saying that disorderly conduct is a violation and not a crime, the Penal Code is describing an offense where the potential sentence cannot be greater than fifteen days jail. What distinguishes a violation from a crime is that, if you plead guilty to a violation, you will not have a criminal record as a result of that particular plea.

According to a Time article about this offense, disorderly conduct "has its roots in the mid-19th century, when police officers needed a way to quell street brawls that erupted frequently between recent immigrants and already established residents, often regarding labor issues. Crowds would gather and cops needed to restore order in public places."

These days, the law leaves a little more room for interpretation, and disorderly conduct is a charge that depends largely on an officer's discretion. The tension most recently highlighted concerns the distinction between free speech (for example, saying insulting things about the police or a police officer's mother) and inciting a crowd with your words. The former, while rude and perhaps unwise, is not a crime; the latter can land you with a disorderly conduct charge, if substantiated by a grouping of people listening to you express yourself.

These issues are hard -- the policing perspective would likely note that disorderly conduct is often used in situations where people are making loud noise on the street or behaving in a threatening way to others around them. In fact, these quality of life issues are what can lead to an overall sense of disorder and lawlessness in a neighborhood. If you ascribe to the broken windows theory, you would believe that the police should make use of the disorderly conduct statute as a tool for maintaining order, to prevent the occurrence of worse crimes.

We would be curious to hear your stories of disorderly conduct.

Have you been arrested for it?
Are you a police officer who has made an arrest for disorderly conduct?
What are your opinions about the use of the disorderly conduct law?

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Who is Samual J. Battle?

We noticed this article in today's Daily News about Sam Battle, the first African-American Police Officer appointed in New York City. He was appointed to the force in 1911, according to the article, and served in Harlem. It has been 43 years since his death and thanks to the work of a local Harlem historian the City has renamed Lenox Avenue and West 135th Street Samuel J. Battle Plaza.

[Picture: NYC Police Museum]

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