A distraught woman who lived in the Liberty Avenue homeless shelter in Brooklyn ran into its management office one afternoon two years ago “crying profusely,” according to a city report.
The woman said her spouse had demanded she give him money for beer and “grabbed her and shook her violently” when she refused.
The May 2016 event was written up by the city Department of Homeless Services as a “critical incident” — a crucial record the city used to monitor and contain criminal and violent behavior inside shelters.
But homeless services staff also specifically noted that “no bruises or other signs of bodily injuries were visible.”
Today, that assault would not be reported — thanks to a significant policy shift in how the city monitors and records safety in its sprawling shelter system.
Under current DHS rules, assaults inside New York shelters are only recorded as a critical incident when visible injury occurs or a weapon is involved, the Daily News has learned.
Those changes, made by Mayor de Blasio’s administration in mid-2016, were never announced to the public.
The about-face only came to light recently when The News requested an updated list of critical incidents.
In response, DHS officials for the first time revealed that they had eliminated or redefined multiple categories of incidents once considered worth counting to track shelter violence.
“We have removed categories from critical that were inaccurately inflating the appearance of violence in shelter,” DHS spokesman Isaac McGinn wrote in response to The News’ questions.
The change was implemented by Department of Social Services Commissioner Steve Banks, who at the time oversaw DHS. De Blasio had tasked Banks in December 2015 with the mission of solving the city’s homelessness crisis.
McGinn said the previous method of detailing incidents was “defined too broadly” and was “over inclusive.” The new system, he said, revised categories “to reflect incidents requiring immediate intervention.”
With assaults, for instance, the city now used “visible injury as the metric for criticality,” McGinn explained.
That means an assault like one recorded in January 2016 — a security guard punched in the face in a Bronx Ave. shelter — would not be reported today, because the victim didn’t end up with an obvious injury.
Likewise, a “physical altercation” between a couple in a family shelter that was also written up in January 2016 now would not count, since there were not “not visible signs of bodily injury to either party.”
Since the overhaul of homeless services reporting rules in mid-2016, there have been dozens of assaults inside shelters that the city once would have recorded, a review by The News has found.
Other categories have been downsized or eliminated besides assaults — including some related to child abuse.
Under the prior system, a report of child abuse inside a shelter would be counted as a “critical incident.” Now, it’s only recorded if there’s an “immediate removal” of the child or children — or an arrest.
Drug possession by residents is no longer counted — only drug possession by staff. Neither are thefts.
Arrests are no longer counted as “critical incidents,” a change DHS’ McGinn explained this way: “In order to most effectively manage safety in shelters, critical incidents, including violent critical incidents, should reflect the incident itself, with severity based on any injury rather than the resulting action, like arrest, which does not itself pose any risk to other clients in the facility.”
The agency continued to collect and analyze arrest data internally, but it no longer reported it publicly because homeless services officials “do not regard it as the most precise and accurate indicator of incidents in shelter,” McGinn said.
“These revised categories provide a more effective window into health and safety of clients,” he added, “and ensure providers and staff prioritize rapid responses to the most urgent events at shelters.”
The decision to impose a more stringent definition of a “critical incident,” which McGinn said was made in consultation with the state Office of Temporary & Disability Assistance, came at a time when violence and criminal activity reports inside shelters were rising dramatically.
In 2015, there were no murders inside city shelters. Between January and July 2016, there were four.
One of those occurred at Boulevard Homeless Shelter in East Harlem. One resident slit the throat of his roommate, Deven Black, a 62, an ex-city schoolteacher and librarian with a troubled history.
Black, plagued by financial woes, arrived at the 101-bed center for homeless adults with mental illness just two days before his death.
His suspected killer stayed in bed after the gruesome attack — and only jumped up and ran out of the shelter when a security guard came into the room for a routine checkup.
Cops identified the alleged attacker as Anthony White, 21. His body was found two months later in the Hudson River, a likely suicide.
Assaults were also on the rise in the first six months of 2016, records show.
By July 1, the city had recorded 165 physical altercations inside shelters that resulted in arrests — more than the 153 assaults that took place over 12 months the year before.
Domestic violence arrests jumped to 115 — up from 97 during the same period in 2015.
By June 30, 2016, shelters reported a total of 866 “critical incidents” — up from the 839 recorded over the same time period in 2015. If the city hadn’t changed its reporting definitions halfway through 2016, the shelter system was on pace to record 1,732 “critical incidents” by year’s end.
By any standard, random violence had become more pervasive in many of the shelters, hotels and “cluster site” apartments where the city places homeless people.
Christopher Castle, 29, who for six months in 2016 stayed in the sprawling Atlantic Armory Shelter in Crown Heights, said it was a dangerous place where workers treated the residents poorly.
“It’s horrible in there,” he said.
Between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2016, critical incident reports show a client in the Atlantic Armory assaulted another with a lock in a sock in front of security. Another attacked a DHS officer, another choked a staff member, and another overdosed in bed. Drug seizures were extremely common, records show.
Now Castle lives in the streets around the armory. He says he was born at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital but has no relatives who will take him in. Going inside the Atlantic Armory, he says, is out of the question.
“I’d rather be out in the streets,” he said.
But after the city enacted its critical incident re-boot, everything seemed to get better.
By the end of 2016, the de Blasio administration was able to report that critical incident reports for the year had decreased to 1,391 from 1,687 in 2015 — a stunning 18% drop.
On Saturday, Banks said the city bolstered shelter security by bringing in the NYPD to work with the DHS police, adding more DHS cops and amping up training.
“With the implementation of the NYPD Management Team at DHS, shelters citywide are seeing increased monitoring, reporting, and enforcement—all a result of new accountability that had been missing from a system that built up in a haphazard way over decades,” Banks said. “Central to turning the tide on homelessness and transforming the shelter system are strong security and improved quality of life that ensure our clients can get back on their feet in safe, secure, and dignified environments.”
Even though “critical” numbers had dropped off, they’ve begun to creep back up again at some shelters, even with the reduced number of categories — raising questions about where the numbers would be if the city hadn’t switched things up.
Banks said from July through December 2017, the rate of violent incidents for single adult families without children rose by 2.5% compared to the same period in 2016. Incidents at shelters with single adults rose only slightly, by .7%, and incidents at shelters with families with children dropped slightly, by .3%.
Homeless services had only started keeping a more detailed accounting of “critical incidents” in 2015 — tracking them within a long list of categories that ranged from arson to homicide to theft.
At the time, Banks said he’d expanded the categories to provide a more detailed way to gauge violence in the system “so we can have a more complete picture of what’s going on.”
But after July 2016, homeless services narrowed its focus.
From the expansion of the list in 2015 to its abrupt contraction in July 2016, the number of overall categories dropped from 36 to 32. The number of categories listed as “violent” was chopped to 10 from 16.
Homeless services also added some new categories, such as “hostage or abduction” situations. None were recorded from July through December 2016.
It also created a “press” category to track visits media made to shelters without permission in that same time frame. Twenty-one were recorded.
In the year before homeless services overhauled its definition of “critical incidents,” dozens of events occurred that the city will no longer count. They include:
* 54 reports of resident drug possession — including heroin and marijuana — from Jan. 1 2015 to June 30, 2016.
* 121 child abuse reports that didn’t result in an arrest of removal of a child.
That tracking had shown some disturbing incidents.
In one example, staff at the Sammon B.U.I.L.D. Center in the Bronx discovered that a 1-year-old boy had crawled out of a fourth-floor window on to the fire escape and managed to work his way all the way to the first floor.
Staff rescued the child and returned him to his mom. The mother, the incident report stated, “appeared agitated that she was being asked questions.”
It was written up at the time — but because no city child welfare agency intervened, it now wouldn’t be recorded as a “critical incident.”
In another example, a couple who were staying at the Flagstone Family Residence in Brownsville, Brooklyn, got into a fight as a child stood between them.
The incident report said the couple “both grab an arm of their 3-year-old son standing next to them” and “began a tug of war with his arms to take their child.”
Staff intervened and the father left. The NYPD was summoned but there were no arrests — meaning it now would not be counted.
Finally arrests the city once felt were worth counting are no longer considered “critical incidents.” Take, for instance, a February 2016 incident reported as “arrest for criminal activity – non-violent.”
Staff at a Bronx shelter looked out the window and saw one of their residents bolting down Broadway in the middle of the afternoon. In hot pursuit were three uniformed cops and an NYPD patrol vehicle.
Cops grabbed the client and cuffed him. His alleged crime: He had just robbed a Citibank two blocks up from the shelter.
Under the protocol in effect at the time, homeless services counted this as a “critical incident.”
But it’s not critical anymore.
