It’s perennial, abiding, immutable, everlasting: Roosevelt Island’s Public Safety Department (PSD) occupies a special place in the heart and gut of resident leadership as a focus for complaints and demands for better service – perhaps even more embedded in the community’s political culture than charges of haphazard development and worries about creeping deterioration.

Try to count the efforts to do something, just do something about Public Safety or public safety (the department, capitalized, or the goal, generic) over the years, and it’s hard to distinguish where one ends and the next begins, and mankind has no system of enumeration that will suffice.

For about a year, give or take, another effort called RISK has been the vehicle of resident efforts to do something, just do something.  That’s the Roosevelt Island (RI) Safety Kommittee (SK), headed by Eastwood residents Byron Gaspard and Nellie Velez.  As Gaspard put it in a meeting this week, “an organization that was put together to unify all the task forces of this community in one effort, and that is to deal with the safety issues – the public safety of Roosevelt Island.”

There is no figurative nutshell that will contain all the gripes, but they range from lack of contracted interior vertical patrols through alleged blindness at drug dealing, from failure to keep reliable statistics to ineffective leadership, from crony-driven recruitment through sleeping on the job.

This week’s meeting brought in representatives of Carolyn Maloney, Member of Congress; Alan Hevesi, State Controller; William Thompson, City Controller; Pete Grannis, Assemblymember; C. Virginia Fields, Borough President; and Gifford Miller, Speaker of the City Council; along with Dan Quart, representing Community Board 8.  Many had been present before, or their colleagues had been, to listen to a plea for more policing by NYPD, radical surgery on PSD, and the calls to do something.

The Island voices ranged from plaintive to strident:

Ron Schuppert, a member of the Rivercross Board: “I’m appalled at the nepotism, the way people are recruited, the way people are not trained, and the fact that if anything goes wrong on the street, nothing is ever done about it.  The supervision is not there; the head of Public Safety, Mr. Fry, only comes out of his office to play the lottery, or brown-nose at the RIOC offices.  There is no supervision.  Some of the people they have are actually trying to do their job, [but] they’re getting no back-up.  In fact, if they give a summons to the wrong person, they’re either fired or reprimanded.  This thing has gone far beyond us trying to correct it.  It needs to be torn out at the roots and started over.“

Matthew Katz, president of the Residents Association: “I’ve seen a Public Safety force, for which the residents of this Island pay a considerable amount of money, which has particular responsibilities within each building that have not been defined on paper, and have not been actually produced, and I think these need to be dealt with and dealt with now.”

Damon LaScot, representing the Westview Task Force: “We have a dysfunctional system in place.  By system I mean PSD, for which we pay over $2.4 million a year – and the other part of the system is the NYPD, and it seems that the system is not working.  We’re not seeing our tax dollars or our rent dollars well represented in terms of the safety and security and quality of life in our neighborhood.  I’ve seen it deteriorate at an alarming rate and to an appalling degree over the past 25 years.”

Nellie Velez, from the Eastwood Building Committee: “This is our seventh meeting...  We didn’t invite RIOC because we have met with them.  From all those meetings we have had with them, we have had no accomplishment.  Nothing’s been done.  A new president, [Herb] Berman, came in.  He sat with us, met with us, he said, ‘OK, we’ll get a coalition,’ which was PSAC [RIOC’s Public Safety Advisory Committee].  The only thing we got from this committee is a pat on our shoulder and one CPOP [Community Policing] officer, kept here for one month, and then pulled away.”

There were similar articulations from Dorothy Donald, representing 4 River Road; Kitty Berman of Island House; and Margaret Gaspard of Eastwood.  LaScot produced copies of the Public Safety Blotter, reprinted from www.nyc10044.com, and his own personal crimewatch log, to support a charge that PSD doesn’t record everything.  He described hearing a PSD vehicle pull up outside his apartment window and cut its engine in the middle of the night, then hearing it restart some two hours later when a Public Safety Officer had finished a long nap.

Thursday evening, at the RIOC Board of Directors meeting, Historical Society President Judy Berdy joined in the general condemnation of PSD.  She brought photos of the office, which she characterized as a “dump,” “pathetic,” and “deplorable,” reflective of the administration of the department.  “I don’t know why RIOC tolerates this,” she said.

Resident Board member David Kraut agreed, using a four-letter word for excrement to describe the office.

At the RISK meeting earlier in the week, RIRA President Matthew Katz laid out the numbers in a “follow the money” recitation that described what Roosevelt Islanders pay for PSD’s Island policing.  RIOC’s projected 2004-05 budget lists $2.5 million for Public Safety, including $700,000 in administrative cost.  RIOC pays half from funds it collects for ground rents, commercial rents, and other Island-based income; the rest is billed to housing companies.  It works out, he said, to $49.48 per month for every Island House apartment, $49.05 per month for every Westview apartment, $46.73 at Eastwood, $44.33 at Rivercross. Per month, per apartment.

(Manhattan Park has a different deal with RIOC, paying high ground rent but only $19.42 per month per apartment for Public Safety; Southtown has construction-site security involved. Their contributions go into the mix, as well.)

Tony Morenzi, representing Assemblymember Pete Grannis, pointed out that some of these numbers have been reduced, or will be, because the State Department of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) ordered a rollback.  That agency controls what can be charged for Mitchell-Lama housing, and on what owners can spend for certain services.  The rollback is based on 1995 letters of agreement, in which RIOC and the housing companies agreed on payments for PSD costs.  The effort pushed forward by the political leaders represented at the meeting.  Katz pointed out that, nonetheless, whatever the specific charges work out to be, the payments “are in addition to the City taxes we all pay to sustain the NYPD, which at present has no patrol presence on Roosevelt Island whatsoever.”  Katz went on to complain that, “The CPOP officer promised to us by the 114th Precinct and listed as such on their duty roster has, in fact, not been a presence here almost from the day his Island patrol tour was announced
over a year ago.”

On the Island, RIOC President Herb Berman’s response to the rumble of dissatisfaction has ranged from a quiet admission at a RIOC President’s Open House for residents (“I know we have a problem there”) to creation of PSAC, the Public Safety Advisory Committee, chaired by resident RIOC Board member and former Residents Association President Patrick Stewart. As it turns out, Stewart’s handling of that task has also displeased the Islanders representing their buildings on RISK, most of whom also serve on PSAC.

“We were given a bunch of runaround assignments having nothing to do with recommendations,” said Byron Gaspard.  Stewart, he said, “has completely bamboozled the community and disrespected the people on the committee...by not doing any work at all, dishing out orders, treating us as if we had done no homework...  Our function was to make recommendations, based on our findings, on the constructive changes PSD has to make.  We produced a mission statement written by a former Director of Public Safety, Peter Norwood. Stewart asked us to rewrite what was already an acceptable document.”

“It took Stewart over two months to schedule the first PSAC meeting,” complains LaScot. “That was November 13, 2003.  Nearly six months later, he was asking PSAC members to do even more prerequisite work before we would be allowed to meet with the increasingly Wizard-of-Oz-like Herb Berman.  And, by the way, Stewart never volunteered to participate in any of the busy work he handed out to PSAC members.”

LaScot says Stewart’s role, assigned or assumed, is to stall things, shield Berman, and do no work.  The WIRE asked Stewart for a response to the charges, but by press time nothing had been received.  But Thursday night at the RIOC meeting, Stewart announced he had completed his own mission statement for Public Safety.

And when Byron Gaspard started complaining about Stewart’s work as chair of PSAC, RIOC Board Chair Mary Beth Labate interrupted him: “I’ve been kept abreast of what’s going on with the Public Safety Advisory Committee and, frankly, it looks like a complete mess...  If the committee cannot come together and work productively, there’s very llittle that we here on the Board can do...  The Board is not in a position to make sure everyone holds hands and plays nice, and from what I understand, the biggest issue is [that] people are just not jelling at these meetings.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, held around three long, narrow banquet tables in the Island House community room, the representatives of government promised help – to support a request for an NYPD substation, for example, or to continue economic pressure on RIOC through DHCR – but offered advice, as well: Document, document, document.  Don’t inundate officials with paper; instead write short letters.  Ask Islanders to call 911 for emergencies or 311 for quality-of-life matters instead of Public Safety.  NYPD is “complaint-driven” – make sure they get the Island’s complaints.

But even on the committee, there are uncertainties about just what solutions might be possible. There is the concern that personnel at an NYPD substation would be pulled away for duty in other parts of the 114th Precinct, among other things.

But it’s perennial, abiding, immutable, everlasting – Sisyphean in its persistence – dissatisfaction with the Island’s public safety and RIOC’s Public Safety Department – and even dissatisfaction with RIOC’s efforts to deal with it.  Tuesday’s meeting was only the latest manifestation of resident leaders’ exhortations to do something, just do something.