NYC Gazette

Deputy Mayor Philip Banks, Public Safety: Good morning. I'm joined here on June 16, 2023 by the New York City Department of Aging Commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, who's here today with a very important announcement on a partnership with the NYPD to keep older adults safe. We are also joined by the Sheriff's Office Bureau of Criminal Investigation Chief Maureen Kokeas, who is here to tell us about the office's efforts to crack down on a crime called deed fraud or deed theft, and to raise awareness for the public to reduce your risk or your family's risk of falling victim to the worst kind of scam. And finally, NYPD Chief of Transportation Kim Royster, and she's here to provide us with an overview of the Police Department's Transportation Bureau and the work they do to keep our roadway safe. For those of you who are joining in the first time, the objective of these regular public safety briefings is to let you, the public, hear directly from the administration, right from the source, what we are doing behind the scenes to keep the city safe.

Each briefing features different speakers, agencies, and topics, such as breaking news like today's announcements by the Department of Aging, information that you yourself can act upon to protect yourself from particular crimes like today's discussion on theft, a deeper look at what a particular agency does and the services they offer, like we will hear from the NYPD's Transportation Bureau. So these are many of the different ways in which we are looking to grow and to be able to provide you with this particular oversight. And today, I think serves as a perfect example. Now, for those of you who are listening, you know how to contact us. It is hearfromeric.com. If you sign up, you'll receive these emails, and you'll be informed of what the upcoming topics are and ability for you to provide questions. And we will answer all of the questions that time allows us to.

And for those questions that we don't get through, we will make sure that we still, you will hear from us. So we can answer that. We encourage you to tell your neighbors, to tell your friends because there's strength in numbers, and we want to make sure that everybody gets this information directly from us. Our first topic today is very important announcement, but particularly for those who are older ourselves, and if you're not today, you know, will be tomorrow, or those who care for a parent or a grandparent or an elderly family member. Mayor Adams always has expressed, upon the members of this administration, the importance of breaking down silos, of having different agencies come together to tackle issues in one unified, comprehensive way. He's of the belief, I'm of the belief, and I think most of us under the belief that there issues that if we tackle them together, we can be much more effective.

And a perfect example is a new initiative announced, it was yesterday, in recognition of World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. And the fact that we even have to have a day like that is unfortunate, but I know that we had met a couple of months back, and you had briefed me on this and we had discussed it, and I think this is just going to be very informational for a lot of people, very useful information. So this is a partnership by the Department of Aging in the NYPD. It's a great new program to help protect older adults in our community by bringing valuable resources and services right to them at their neighborhood precincts. Unfortunately, as we know, older adults are often targeted by scammers. The aging population is also vulnerable to certain types of financial, physical, and emotional abuse. Our message today is that the city is here for you to make sure that that does not happen. So now I'd like to turn over to you, commissioner. What's happening?

Commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, Department for the Aging: Thank you so much. Fortunately, we have a lot to talk about today, more ways which this administration is caring for the public safety of older adults. Last year at this same World Awareness Day, we announced the expansion of elder abuse programs in the community. This year, just yesterday, Mayor Eric Adams, First Deputy Commissioner Edward Caban, and myself announced the older adult liaison program, which is placing one older adult liaison in each preset, someone who will know what the issues are in that community, someone who will know what are the resources in that community, and how to link the older adults, to the resources in the community, and also other officers who may be working with that crime victim. It is an incredible game changer. And it just, as the deputy mayor said, this administration is committed to not working in silos.

And so early on in September, Mayor Adams created a cabinet for older adults, precisely to bring 20 agencies together to look at the issues affecting older New Yorkers, and one of those was NYPD. And we talked about how is it that we can be more responsive at the local precinct level for elder crime victims. And this is exactly the outworth of that program. We had started a program with NYPDs south Manhattan, and we developed a partnership where we were exchanging CompStat. And as a result of that, we have 300 referrals a day from the Manhattan South, identifying older adults who need additional resources. This will just be a elegant solution and an elegant resource for older adults and your family members so that you know exactly where to go to and how to get services. The other thing is, if you want to know what the services are, beyond these officers, I ask everyone to… And you want to find the elder justice providers in your community.

I ask everyone to connect and call Aging Connect at 212-AGING NYC. That is (212) 244-6469. We are committed to not only reducing crime, but we're also admitted to finding the solutions so that we can prevent elder abuse. The beauty of this liaison program, and this is my last comment on it, is that they will also be training the department for NYC Aging, as well as those community resource providers on what are the current trends, what are the crimes, so that then we could adjust our services and make sure that we have adequate provisions for those individuals and their families. So thank you for the opportunity to share this.

Deputy Mayor Banks: That was fantastic. Now, you made the comment in Manhattan South. So to the audience who may not know that terminology, what do you mean by Manhattan South?

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: Because in last spring and during Covid, we saw a rise of crimes against the elderly in the lower part of Manhattan, we wanted to focus on that community. And we started saying, look, how can we know how many older adults are being victimized, and how many of those were hate crimes and others such heinous crimes? And so what we did was we worked with NYPD to exchange data. They would identify people who were reporting crimes. We would identify people who are reporting crimes and work together to find out what were the best resources for those individuals.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Now these liaisons, are these police officers?

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: These are police officers.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Officers. So these police officers are going to get special training on how to deal with this vulnerable population?

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: Yes.

Deputy Mayor Banks: And they'll be the liaisons for these elderly individuals there as well to be… So they'll be trained on how to explain things, how to identify things that they're most accessible to be utilized against them.

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: And they will also be a resource to the precinct—

Deputy Mayor Banks: Correct.

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: …for other officers. We've already trained 6,000 police officers in the academy. We will continue that training with NYPD. But they will be trained, but they will also be a resource for the other members of the preset, but they will also be a resource to the DAs, all who have an elder abuse unit. So this is really a bringing together of all of those forces and making sure that no one falls behind, no wrong door.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Right. That's fantastic, because if you think about it, as we all are going to get older at some point and have aged, we have these perpetrators, and I use that word very kindly, who will prey on our elderly population, right? So they use all types of scams, financially, physically, emotionally, and they need our help, right? They need our help. And part of the help that we can do out there in the public is to pass the information along, make it very simple. One person in your family, one neighbor, let them know about this particular program. If we just did one at a time, we'd be surprised at how much we could cover this ground and how we could potentially eliminate, but certainly, certainly reduce the chances of the worst of the worst trying to scam the best of the best. This is the worst of the worst that's crediting on the best of the best.

And as a city we can and we will do better. And I was just... When we met in your office, I was just kind of blown away at how you articulated what the vision, the plan was, what the cooperation with the NYPD was. So hopefully, let's take on these predators.

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: I have to take this opportunity to thank you and to thank Mark Stewart who pushed it through.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Mark Stewart would be who?

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: Huh?

Deputy Mayor Banks: Mark Stewart would be who?

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: Mark Stewart is the commissioner, the deputy commissioner at the New York City Police Department who is responsible for all community officers. And so relationships with the community are important to him. Relationships with the older community are especially important to him nowadays.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Very good. Excellent. Thank you. Okay. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. So next up, I'm joined by Chief Kokeas from the sheriff's office, and she's from their Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Now, the sheriff office is led by Anthony Miranda, and it is involved in many aspects of law enforcement. We have one of his top deputies here, Warren Glover, former NYPD. They enforce court mandates and processes, they seize property, they enforce cigarette taxes, they conduct investigations of synthetic narcotic sales and investigating property crimes, which is what we will be focusing on today. 

So as I mentioned earlier, one of the goals of these discussions is to raise awareness. We just can never underestimate the amount is that once we are aware of a crime, that is almost half the battle of trying to avoid it. If you are going outside and your family member says, "It's very cold, you need to put on another jacket." Most of us do it. That's information that's useful. That people here who have been through this, we can learn from each other's mistakes. We can learn from the scams that are taking place. So once again, I will say it once again, but I'll probably say it a couple more times during this, pass the information along to your family, to your neighbors, to your loved ones, to your friends. Because if we do that, we can be one step ahead.

So we got to talk about deed fraud or deed theft, right? This is essentially when someone takes the title to someone's house without the owner's knowledge, approval, or full comprehension of the transaction. So the consequences of this can be severe and can put the homeowners in jeopardy. So think about it, there's a person who's owned a house for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. They're getting up there in age. There's scammers out there who go out there and they basically steal, right? Trick the homeowner into signing the house over. I'm not so sure what can be worse crime than that, or certainly that is on the level with the worst of the worst. So we have to, as a city and as an agency, counter against that. And we are going to hear from the expert here. So chief, tell me what's going on.

Chief Maureen Kokeas, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Sheriff’s Office: Good morning. Thank you. So the sheriff's office has a team of investigators that focus on deed fraud crimes, and currently there is no crime of deed fraud, but there's a lot of different variations of schemes that people use to either trick or steal people's homes. Sometimes these cases are just outright forgeries and other times they're more of a con game where you tell somebody that you're going to help them get out of financial distress and they sign papers not fully understanding what the papers mean. So the sheriff's office has been collaborating with city and state prosecutors, with the elder abuse units within all the DA's office and the attorney general's office and many community organizations to raise awareness to people to beware not to sign documents that you don't fully understand. And the predators prey on people that they know are in financial distress.

So very often it's people who are elderly and are on a limited income, and as their property taxes go up and the water bills go up, they kind of fall behind a little. And then when they fall behind, they become a little desperate. And when they're desperate, they kind of want to have hope that somebody's going to help them. So we go out into the community and try to raise awareness to say that be very, very leery of people who are knocking on your door that say that there's a special program and they can help you get out of debt and refinance your mortgage and that type of thing. So these schemes, as I said, range from forgery to just common trickery.

So in 2014, the sheriff's office put together this team because prior to that, people were often told when they were either thrown out of their house or somebody scammed them out of their home, that it was a civil matter. It was because you have a deed to the house and I have a deed to the house. And it's like, well, this is a civil matter, go to civil court. And the victims are our most vulnerable citizens who really don't have the financial sophistication and the financial means to hire a private attorney to go into housing court to litigate these things. And the predators are very familiar with how the court system works and how to navigate the different courts and basically steal people's homes.

So going back to 2008, we have some statistics up. We've been tracking these. As you could see, the numbers were exorbitant in when we started doing these cases in 2014. That was primarily because prior to that people were just told it's a civil matter, go figure it out. And working collectively with the DAs and the sheriff's office, we are kind of like the center of the spokes. So we work with all the DAs in the AG to see who's investigating who, what schemes are being developed, and the schemes change. So maybe 10 years ago they were just doing outright forgeries. Now they're doing a little bit more identity theft and some partition errors cases, which I'll talk about in a few minutes, which are really relevant because it's a method that people are using to take people's homes. However, it's completely legal. So there's not even a potential for us to do a criminal prosecution.

So if I could just show the map here. As you could see, most of the victims of the homes that have been stolen over the last 10 years are in certain communities of color. And we try to map this because we report these statistics to the city council and we use them to fine tune our methods of investigation. But the map is just to kind of highlight that there's really an abundance of fraud in certain communities. We've taken a lot of efforts to stop these. One of the things that we've done working with the city register is anytime a document is filed on anybody's property in the City of New York, we send out a letter to them so that they're aware because very often people's deeds have been transferred without their knowledge. So now anytime a document's recorded on a property, we send a letter to the property owner just so that they're aware. In most instances, there's nothing nefarious about it, but it does bring cases to our attention in a timely matter because we have certain statutes of limitation if we're going to criminally prosecute some cases.

Okay. These predators are very, very organized. They work in groups together, and as you can see here, this was one investigation. Three individuals acquired 189 properties over about 10 years that you were basically swindled from homeowners in New York City. So this is the scheme that I was talking about that is actually quite legal. It's called partition of heirs' property. And this is to bring awareness. We really want people to understand that if you have a home that has not been probated or properly administrated, it was your grandmother's home and you've been living in it for many, many years, if there was not a proper probate or administrative of how that property is supposed to be handled and handed down to somebody, what happens is these predators go out and they do a genealogy chart and they find relatives who have some interest in the property and they buy fractional shares of the property and then they can legally go into court and force the sale of the property because they now own a fractional, more than 25 percent of the shares of interest in the property.

It's a horrific way that people are stealing people's homes from them. Because if you've lived in this house for 50 years and it was bought for $3,500 and it's now worth a million dollars and they've now got 25 percent interest, they knock on your door and say, "You owe me $250,000, or I'm going to take you to court and force you out of the house." So people should be aware and reach out. There's community organizations. You could contact the sheriff's office, the New York City Bar Association has a justice center.

The Homeowners Stability Program is very, very effective in helping people. You can call the sheriff's office at 718-707-2100. And if you have any questions relating to deed transactions or if you need assistance in any way, while we can't give you legal advice, we can guide you in the right direction. Other things that have been happening is we've worked with Department of Finance and City Register in using optical character recognition to identify patterns. So if I have a dirty notary on a transaction or a dirty attorney, I can go back and see other transactions that have been filed with those same people involved so that we can kind of build a stronger case. The DAs have done a fantastic job and the Attorney General in prosecuting some of these cases. And we have a deed fraud task force led by the attorney general's office that all the DAs around the city and others in the state, as well as community based organizations.

We quarterly talk and share information and intel so that we're not doing duplicate investigations and that we're learning from one another's past practices and we're working on some legislative improvements to make it more difficult for people to steal these properties and make it easier for us to prosecute these cases.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Let's spend a minute here thinking about this for a second. The people who are scamming this, their parents aren't being scammed. I mean, they may scam it from their own parents because someone who does this to somebody, they probably treat their own parents and their grandparents that way, but their parents are not being scammed. She says, "Put up the map." We talk about it happens in areas of poor areas. You think about it, poor people when they put money together to be able to afford a house, there's all sorts... They pay a high mortgage rate, there's all types of redlining, and now when they enjoy their homes, people come and steal it. I mean, you just think about that for a second. We can do a dent in this together. And all we're asking you as the public is this one, the first thing you do is just to make sure that your loved ones have as much knowledge as they possibly can to avoid this.

Just start there with chores. Once you solidify that, then pick a family friend to say, "Are you sure? Go to the sheriff's office, go to their website, give a phone call." That did now, so then when the scammer knocks on the door, remember his parents are not being scammed. He probably, or she probably scammed their parents already. They're not being scammed, but they're scamming our parents and this is something that we can do. This is very informative. So you say there's a lot of community based organizations that can assist as well? All right. Can assist some of these people as well with this?

Chief Kokeas: There are, but there's also community based organizations that are part of the scammers, so you need to be very careful and aware. So yes, but there's a lot of very legitimate community based organizations, but a lot of these predators pretend to be out there to help people. So you just really need to be cautious.

Deputy Mayor Banks: I just remember when this really came really to fruition for me, and it was in Bedford Stuyvesant. And I worked many years in Bedford Stuyvesant. And then the community was depressed for many, many years, right? And then when the home values started to rise, the predators came in. And we was the help. We was the support. When people get older and when you get older, our faculty's diminish. It's just a part of aging. They need help. The same help that they gave when they were able to give that help is the help that they're asking to give now. So today, as a society, as administration, we can always do better. These are just two areas. You think about what we're doing here, we got poor and we got the elderly that's being preyed upon, and we can do a good job to repel this.

So chief, that was excellent, very informative. I'm certainly going to ask you, both of you actually, come back to reinforce this because sometimes we have to reinforce the message for us to get it, but this is a fight that we... This is a great fight, and it's a fight that we need to continue the fight over and over and over again. Yes, commissioner, sure you can.

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: When a family buys a home, it is usually the most valuable asset that they have, and it guarantees, for older adults, a livable income when they're older, to know that their most valuable asset is in peril. So we're so looking forward to making sure that the public knows about…

Deputy Mayor Banks: Absolutely. So where to create wealth, absolutely. Great, great presentation. Okay. So now, we're going to be joined by the NYPD Chief of Transportation, Kim Royster. Kim, how you doing?

Chief Kim Royster, Transportation, Police Department: Good morning…

Deputy Mayor Banks: Known Kim for a very, very long time, right? We came on the job pretty much close to the same time many, many years ago.

Chief Royster: Many years ago.

Deputy Mayor Banks: And keeping our streets safe is of the highest importance because it affects all of us. Whether you're a motorist, a cyclist, a pedestrian, you deserve to feel safe on our roadways. And part of that is on us as individuals, knowing the rules of the road for whichever mode of transportation you choose and abiding by those laws. But there's also the responsibility of the Transportation Bureau to enforce the laws, and in the event that there's a collision, ensure that the bad actors are held accountable. So with that, I'd like to turn over to the chief to talk about the Transportation Bureau. Give us a glimpse of what they do and how we keeping our roadways safe.

Chief Royster: Absolutely. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Deputy Mayor, for inviting me and my team here and giving us the opportunity to discuss a very important topic today, which is traffic safety, because traffic safety is public safety. The Transportation Bureau is the department's lead bureau for Vision Zero, and is comprised of over 3,300 police officers, traffic enforcement agents that are assigned to Highway patrol. The traffic agents are assigned to the Traffic Enforcement District. We have Citywide Traffic Task Force and the Traffic Management Center. Our bureau is responsible for the safety of all road users. I would like to begin with an overview about the current traffic safety landscape and what the NYPD is doing to make the streets safer for all road users. After an increase in traffic deaths during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, we saw a downward trend overall in 2022.

While positive progress is important, let me be clear, we are here to eliminate traffic deaths under the Vision Zero mandate. In order to get to Vision Zero, we must improve traffic safety in each borough. Our resources are focused on driving down traffic deaths, especially involving our most vulnerable road users. In 2023, there have been 102 traffic deaths, compared to 99 and 2022, which is on the slide that you see here. This year, we are seeing a reduction in pedestrian deaths and motor vehicle occupant deaths. Unfortunately, we have seen a rise in deaths involving person on two wheel devices, including pedal bicycles, e-bikes, and motorcycles. Now the next slide, we are going to compare 2023 to 2013 pre-Vision Zero. And as you can see in this slide, we are actually having a positive trend when it comes to our most vulnerable road users, which are pedestrians.

However, we still have work to do. People are opting to use micro mobility as a form of transportation. We support the developing industry, however, we want them to be educated on how to use the devices safely. I would like to make a note that we are not in this quest alone for Vision Zero. We are part of an amazing team led by the Mayor's Office of Operations. There are numerous city agencies that are involved and are on the task force, but they're not limited to the Department of Transportation, MTA, TLC, the Department of Health, and of course the sheriff's office, as well as many others. We also hold a weekly traffic safety form where we hold our agency executives accountable for the three pillars that support traffic, safety, science, which is the data that tells us where the collisions are occurring, art, how are we deploying our resources? Are we deploying them in areas where we see fatalities, injuries and collisions?

And culture, this is a very important one. In order to drive down traffic deaths, we focus on equitable enforcement against motorists that commit hazardous violations around the city. Our goal is to change driver behavior. There are times when we can accomplish this behavior change through education, but there are certain drivers that make this selfish and dangerous decision to speed with their vehicles, disobey red lights, block bike lanes, and fail to yield to pedestrians, or get behind the wheel while they're impaired due to drugs or alcohol. Now, let me just stay with the impaired driving. Today, I have with me are Sergeant Donald Snyder, who we call intoxicated driver program manager expert. This year, we have arrested over 1,800 intoxicated drivers, including 90 drivers that were driving while impaired on drugs. Contrary to the beliefs, driving under the influence of cannabis is a crime. We have nearly two dozen drug recognition experts that are trained to test for various types of drugs and controlled substances, including marijuana.

These drug recognition experts are deployed 24/7 around the city, not only to make arrests themselves, but also to assist patrol officers in all five boroughs in combating drunk and drug driving. There is also a quality of life component to traffic safety. This includes enforcement related to ghost cars and large parked vehicles and residential neighborhoods, overnight, large trucks, I'm saying. This administration has been a leader in addressing this issue. So far in 2023, our NYPD officers and traffic enforcement agents have arrested 1700 drivers for operating a vehicle with forged plates, seized and towed over 2,700 ghost cars, and issued 127,000 summonses to drivers that had an obstructed plate that were avoiding enforcement cameras and tows. Thank you for allowing me to introduce NYPD's Traffic Safety Plan, because these numbers are just not statistics. That's data that represents a loved one, a human life. And so we believe that one life loss is too many. Thank you.

Deputy Mayor Banks: So tell us a little bit about, the chief, tell us about when we have a collision. We have a collision and there's a fatality. Who does the investigation? Right? Now, you have almost have your own homicide type unit within the Transportation Bureau, right?

Chief Royster: Absolutely.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Who's in that unit? Where do they come from? And who are they?

Chief Royster: So it's our Collision Investigation Squad. So I'll just like to give you just a little overview of the Collision Investigation Squad. They are investigators that are trained in how to investigate a fatality or a person that has been critically injured in a collision. These officers go out every day when there's a collision and conduct investigation. Within the Collision Investigation Squad is the Collision Technician Group, and they are what you call our crime scene officers. They go out and they look at the scene. They conduct surveys, they do measurements. They also look at any video that they can obtain to determine who's driving the vehicle and what actually occurred and who's at fault. These officers get specific training to do this. There is a course that they have to take. It's a criminal investigations course. They get trained in DNA. They get trained in the homicide investigations course.

They get trained with the medical examiner. So it's very intense, and they have to keep their certification to do so. And so the nine week training that they get is with the partnership with Northwestern University. And so if you look at this particular unit, they are very professional, but they're also driven because going to a fatality where someone has been struck by a car, someone has left the scene, you have to put those pieces all together. And it's very difficult to do so, and they're excellent at their job. So yes, they're like my homicide team.

Deputy Mayor Banks: And I'll tell you, if you don't have the benefit of having almost like a firsthand look at them, and I've had for many, many years, it's phenomenal the work that they do from where they start to the cases that they build to try to keep these people who are keeping us unsafe on the road is really… So that's a really, really big shout out to that team. Now, do they come from the highway unit? Are they born from the highway unit, or do you bring them from outside?

Chief Royster: So we call it a rite of passage of highway.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Born from the Highway unit or do you bring it from outside?

Chief Royster: So we call it a rite of passage in Highway. So you have to be assigned to Highway first, and that's so you can actually get the information and the knowledge of a vehicle, how a vehicle moves, the type of vehicles that are on the road, the speed that a vehicle can and can move through and also the technology in vehicles and the investigation that they do. So they'll go into Highway first, our Highway unit is the unit that you see out there, I call them with the boots on. They have the boots on. And they are responsible for patrolling our highways and making them safe.Speed is a major factor. Last year we saw a lot of our fatalities on the highways that were a result of speed. They also are responsible for people that are driving impaired on our highways. So yeah, you're in Highway first and you get that baseline knowledge of being in Highway and then you move on to the Collision Technician group, and then you also move on to the Collision Investigation Squad, which are our investigators. They all work hand in hand with one another. You heard me mention our drug recognition experts. They are the experts. They are trained and they get their certification by the state and they have to recertify every so often to make sure that they keep up the standards.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Excellent, excellent. So, is he here just to show us the shiny shield or what do we have to offer this-

Chief Royster: He's the expert.

Deputy Mayor Banks: He's the expert. Okay. Expert, give us some information. What does the public need to know or what is something informative they need to know about what you're doing? So just tell us who you are.

Sergeant Donald Schneider, Police Department: So my name is Sergeant Donald Schneider. I run the Intoxicated Driver Testing Unit for the NYPD. So everything involving breath alcohol testing for alcohol as well as drug driving goes through my office under Inspector Ge, my commanding officer of the Highway District, which falls under Chief Royster.

So, we had an amazing chief of department back in 2014 and he allowed us to begin the Drug Recognition, Drug Evaluation and Classification program. For those of you that don't know, Deputy Mayor Banks was the chief of department in 2014.

Deputy Mayor Banks: There's nothing I ever did amazing.

Sergeant Schneider: Yeah. Well you did allow me to begin the program. So with that in mind, we began this program where we identified officers that were well-versed in determining impaired drivers. And initially the Highway Patrol has been responsible for decades for conducting testing of persons arrested for DWI, driving while intoxicated under their alcohol. But we kind of did not get too involved in drug impaired driving. So in 2014, we established a program that falls under the Governor's Office and it's internationally accredited. And we began certifying officers through the Governor's Traffic Safety Committee as drug recognition experts. And from there we certified about two dozen, and their responsibility is to determine impairment when that impairment is not consistent with a blood alcohol content reading. So someone who is a 0.08 in alcohol is deemed intoxicated by alcohol.

For drugs you have to look beyond the numbers. There's no number that shows a correlation. So you can't yell out a number for cannabis or for Xanax or for heroin and say, this person's impaired. So you have to look beyond the numbers. A lot of people are getting caught up in the numbers and saying, well, what is the number that is impaired for cannabis or one of these other drugs? It just does not exist. And I don't believe we're going to see it in our lifetime that there is a number that correlates to it. We studied alcohol for 70 years to come up with that number. With drugs and with particularly cannabis, which is now more prevalent with the passing of the recreational cannabis law, it's now more accessible and out there, as we smell it.

And so the department has these drug recognition experts that once someone is determined to be impaired at roadside, they're brought into one of our facilities and then one of our DREs go out and they conduct a 12 step evaluation to determine whether the person's impaired or not. And if they're not impaired, we deem them not impaired and they're released. If they are impaired, we make sure that they're prosecuted.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Got it. Excellent. Great. So this actually concludes just to this aspect of it, but just for the audience I'd just like to know is that, at least I, and we, as administration, we don't like to say, oh, look at what we're doing. We need help. We need your critique. We need your criticism. We need your suggestions. So the public, when you hit hearfromeric.com, send us, hey, could you try this? Or I heard this, or I read something about this. Or what about trying that? And that information is taken in and we do adapt it into it. So we know we can't do it alone, we need to do it with you as well. That's the purpose of these briefings and we like the two-way conversation. So with that, Derek, I'm going to turn it over to you.

Moderator: Thank you, deputy mayor. We will now open it up for a few questions from the media if there are any. For those who are joining via WebEx, please use the raise hand function. Again, we're only taking on-topic questions.

Earlier this week, the administration reached out to New Yorkers asking them to submit questions for the officials that have joined us here today. We will now get to as many of those with the amount of time that we have left. And we are running short on time, so we'll try to go quick.

First question comes from Vinny in Staten Island for the Department of Aging, who asks, is there a special phone number or contact information for the liaisons? I have older parents and would like to pass this information along.

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: Great. Vinny, the number that you should use share with your neighbor and your parents is 212-AGING-NYC or 212-244-6469. There is a live person who answers the questions that you have either on elder abuse but on all issues related to older adult services in New York City.

Moderator: Thank you. Next question comes from Daryl in Queens for the NYPD who asks, what is the city doing about people putting construction cones out front of their homes to stop people from parking there? Is this legal?

Chief Royster: Well, first of all, a construction cone that's placed on a public street, should be moved unless there is construction there. What I will say is that if you observe something like this occurring, you can call 311, the resident precinct will show up or the unit that's responsible for any type of construction or traffic control, which are some of our agents. So I would recommend moving the cone. It is not illegal to move the cone. If we see that a cone is there, what we would do is conduct an investigation, determine if there is any construction going on at that time. So yes, move the cone and if you don't want to move the cone, call 311 so the police can respond and take the necessary action.

Moderator: Next question comes from Daria in Queens for the Department for the Aging, who asks now that there are older adult liaisons in each precinct who are considered older adults?

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: Great question.

Deputy Mayor Banks: I am.

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez: The older adult for New York City…. I am. The older adults for New York City is age 60 and above. However, there's some services that are limited for those that 65 and above. For employment purposes it's 55 and above. For all of our community services, for all of our elder abuse services, it's 60 and above.

Moderator: Thank you. The next question comes from Clemente in Queens for the NYPD. On my daily commute I see bike lanes being blocked by cars and trucks. Can the police department use more officers on bicycles patrolling the city? This will allow them to see and deal with issues as they come up and hopefully discourage that kind of behavior moving forward.

Chief Royster: Great question. We have officers that do bike patrol, but we also have traffic agents that do foot patrol and they're responsible for conducting enforcement, writing violations to vehicles that are parked in bike lanes and bus lanes. So I would say that when we actually see this happen, we take enforcement action. I just want to provide you with some data with what we've done so far this year because we are laser focused on making sure our bike lanes and bus lanes are clear because that keeps traffic moving and it also is a safety hazard if they are parked in bike lanes. And so we have actually issued over 30,000 summonses to cars that are parked in bike lanes this year.

Moderator: Thank you. That's all the time we have for today. On behalf of the Adams administration, I would like to thank everyone for tuning in to today's briefing. We look forward to seeing you all at our next one. Have a great day.

Original source can be found here.