When NYPD Officer Peter Liang shot and killed 28-year-old Akai Gurley in the stairwell of East New York’s Pink Houses in November of 2014, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton called Gurley’s death an “unfortunate accident.” Yet Liang and his partner were two rookie cops patrolling an area designated by police to be among the most dangerous in the city. The lights in the stairwell they descended were broken, and the building’s elevator was unreliable. More than a year after Gurley’s death, Officer Liang is on trial, but residents of the Pink Houses say that little has changed.
“There’s more NYPD patrols around the buildings, but they sit in their vans, not really going inside the buildings,” said Sean Rogers, 48, who has been living in the Pink Houses with his girlfriend for two years. Rogers told Gothamist that even though the hallways and stairwells are now better lit, many of the apartments still have major problems with plumbing and vermin.
“There’s been roaches in the apartment and everything’s falling apart,” Rogers said. "We keep giving them tickets to do the repairs, but nothing happens. The exterminator, he sprayed, but then more roaches come."
Brown Turner, who has lived at the Pink Houses for 22 of his 26 years, also complained of deteriorating pipes in the houses, with bathrooms flooding and sinks backing up. He’s seen more of a police presence at the Pink Houses, but has found that the police are focusing more on quality-of-life violations than serious crimes.
“They’re more into antagonizing people then stepping up and stopping violence,” Turner said. “They go after people that are not doing nothing, smoking weed or whatever. I’m not naïve about the law, but if you’re not shooting nobody, you really shouldn’t be the priority. They’re not cracking down on the big stuff.”
NYCHA is currently being sued for $50 million by Kimberly Ballinger, Gurley's domestic partner. Her suit alleges that the housing authority created hazardous and "trap-like" conditions, that contributed to Gurley's death.
The housing authority has set aside $34 million in repairs for the Pink Houses, with construction scheduled to be completed sometime in 2017. The residences are now surrounded by scaffolding as part of the repairs, and every single walkway between the buildings is surrounded by bars.
“Look at this scaffolding, it’s not safe. It looks like we’re in the penitentiary,” said Lisa Stansfield, 42, who has been living in the Pink Houses since 1989.
“There’s been no proper preparation for the construction and no difference in conditions. But ever since they shot the boy in the staircase they make sure the lights work in the hallways.”
Stansfield hasn’t been following Liang’s trial closely, but has noticed that ever since Gurley’s death, the NYPD has been less active doing patrols inside of buildings, with more cops gathering outside of them.
As we spoke on Autumn Avenue, a van full of officers idled under a block away, on the corner of Linden Boulevard.
Operation Impact was an NYPD initiative created under Bratton’s predecessor, Ray Kelly, and sent inexperienced police officers into what they considered “high-crime areas.” Kelly credited the program as one of the key reasons crime had declined.
“Operation Impact is not going away,” Bratton told reporters in January 2014, though he added that he wanted rookies to spend more time with seasoned officers while they were patrolling dangerous neighborhoods.
But in the months following Gurley’s shooting, the NYPD took definitive steps to phase out Operation Impact. This new approach was also brought about by a 2015 settlement from a lawsuit that was brought in 2010 by NYCHA residents that focused on NYPD policing methods inside NYCHA buildings, including the use of stop-and-frisk and “vertical patrols,” like the one that resulted in Gurley’s death.
The new approach includes officers interacting with more community members, as well as a larger change in NYPD organization where officers will be assigned to precincts again, as opposed to being assigned to larger “targeted” areas, which Kelly favored. Often, by having officers assigned to a larger area that encompassed several precincts, rookies were left without much in the way of supervision by officers who were familiar with the neighborhoods they had been patrolling for years.
“We still have areas in which we will deploy extra resources based on crime assessments; however, the police staffing of these areas will be changed from the original Operation Impact model,” Stephen Davis, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, said in a statement. “Newly assigned officer will be teamed-up with senior Field Training Officers during their initial precinct assignments.”
City Hall spokeswoman Monica Klein said the de Blasio administration was focused not only on changing policing in public housing, but also on repairing buildings that have suffered from decades of neglect.
“Since day one, we have made safety in public housing and the surrounding neighborhoods a top priority,” said Klein. “From investing millions to improve safety in NYCHA developments to deploying Neighborhood Community Officers to adding security cameras and lighting, Mayor de Blasio is taking aggressive steps to make public housing safer while strengthening the relationship between our officers and the communities they protect.”
The stairwell where Akai Gurley was shot and killed by Officer Peter Liang as it looks today. (Christian Hansen / Gothamist)
But the perception that the Pink Houses is “one of the most dangerous housing projects” in the city, in the words of Liang’s defense attorney, might be tough to change.
Throughout the first week of the trial of Officer Liang, the defense has repeatedly brought up the idea of the hazardous nature of Liang’s assignment, including having a police academy instructor read a section of the patrol guide that tells officers to be on the lookout for a “possible ambush.”
“What has changed since last November? Nothing’s changed. They’re still out here trying to catch you do something wrong,” said Jose Guzman, 25, who has lived in the Pink Houses for his entire life and runs a podcast that focuses on the Brooklyn community where he grew up.
“If you looked like you’re the guy who would be a criminal, they’d just treat you as a criminal. I remember being sixteen and they would just stop me on the street and make me take off my shoes. They would make you sit on the curb, go through all your stuff, and all I was just doing was crossing the street to my friend’s house.”
Guzman added, “And now they have body cameras, so they’re not really into letting anything go.”
East New York was one of the first neighborhoods to pilot the NYPD’s new body camera program, an initiative that was ordered by the same judge who presided over the NYCHA stop and frisk settlement. The body cameras can help hold officers accountable, but also make officers wary of using discretion on smaller violations of the law. Neither officer Liang nor officer Landau were wearing a body camera on the night Akai Gurley died.
Less discretion by the NYPD has placed additional pressures on public housing residents, as entire families can be evicted for a misdemeanor. Police commissioner Bratton’s focus on Broken Windows policing has only worked to further complicate the relationship between cops and public housing residents, who found the controversial stop-and-frisk policy replaced by an equally invasive strategy.
“It is easy to imagine that only ‘criminals’ are affected by these policing decisions, but the repercussions of being arrested for an open container of alcohol or for selling umbrellas on the street in an attempt to earn a living for one's family are borne by the larger community," CUNY Law Professor Babe Howell wrote in a 2009 report on Broken Windows policing.
Sitting in his room in the Pink Houses, Guzman reflected on what life was life growing up in an area constantly under watch by the NYPD.
“When you’re dealing with a cop, when they would stop you, it’s just like that nonchalant, ‘Hey man, I’m just doing my job,’ type of thing,” Guzman said. “Cops would then end up doing extra stuff, violating your rights, just to exert their authority or maybe because they’re just bored.”
Standing next to the scaffolding outside of the building in the Pink Houses where he lives, Sean Rogers believes that officer Liang should be convicted.
“That guy got killed and they say it was because of bad lighting,” Rogers said. “But why would he shoot his gun, though? Who did he think he was going to run into? There’s no need to have your gun out.”
Standing outside of the courtroom last week, Akai Gurley’s aunt, Hertencia Peterson, reflected on the idea of how NYPD officers have been trained in the past, and what it means to actually protect a community.
“To dehumanize another human being like that, to step around them as they die, that means there’s a huge problem in how that officer’s been trained,” Ms. Peterson said. “Who are these people protecting and who are they serving? Too often they’re just protecting themselves, and that’s what they’re taught. Where is the empathy? Where’s the humanity?”
For her part, longtime Pink Houses resident Lisa Stansfield is skeptical about the possibility of improved relations between the NYPD and the community.
“I have a very biased opinion regarding the NYPD, and the 75th Precinct specifically,” Stansfield said, as she walked away. “I’m going to leave you at this: I have a 25-year-old son.”
