City’s Cash Strapped NYCHA is Been Paying NYPD $70 Mil to Patrol the City Projects

 After riding the elevator to the top floor of a building in the Louis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn and scanning the rooftop, the police officers made their way back down, floor by floor, searching the stairwells and hallways. On the sixth floor, slumped against the stairs, was a man who said he was waiting for his ex-girlfriend. The officers ran a warrant check on the 49-year-old man and arrested him after learning he was wanted for a parole violation.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Housing Bureau officers run a background check on a man during the patrol, then arrest him for a parole violation.

“You never know what you’re going to find,” said one of the officers, Sgt. Marshall Winston, who has policed public housing for 23 years. “Sometimes we catch somebody with a gun. Other times we catch somebody with drugs. And sometimes you just catch somebody down on their luck.”

The patrols, known as verticals, are painstaking police work, and for the New York City Housing Authority, they do not come cheap. About 2,000 officers are assigned to the projects, and Nycha, as the authority is known, pays the Police Department about $70 million a year. The payment is a legacy of the mergers that brought the transit and housing authority police forces into the New York Police Department almost 20 years ago.

But the housing authority’s increasingly strained finances have focused attention on the payments, and Mayor-electBill de Blasio, who will be sworn in on Wednesday, has promised to end them. At a forum during the mayoral campaign, Mr. de Blasio said the money “was taken on the assumption that Nycha was just awash in federal money, all these wonderful resources coming into Nycha. And that hasn’t been true for decades.”

Indeed, the housing authority has been adapting to a new reality that has left it with far less in subsidies, even as the demand for low- and moderate-income housing has grown. In a bid to raise money for repairs and maintenance, the city has been soliciting ideas for building market-rate apartments on open space in a handful of public housing developments.

For the housing authority, holding onto the money it pays each year to the Police Department would be helpful, though a modest gain. One proposal calls for using the payments to leverage financing for $1 billion in much needed capital improvements in the city’s 344 housing projects.

Ending the payment would require the two agencies to recast their relationship for the first time since the merger in 1995. The police commissioner at the time was none other than William J. Bratton, who has been chosen by Mr. de Blasio to lead the Police Department once again.

A change could become entangled in the continuing debate over the Police Department’sstop-and-frisk practices. Those tactics were especially common at some projects and fueled tensions between tenants and officers. The police and others have pointed to the relatively high level of crime in public housing. According to the Police Department, about 20 percent of the city’s violent crimes take place in projects, home to about 5 percent of city residents.

About two-thirds of crimes in public housing are violent, compared with about one-third citywide. So far this year, 55 of the city’s 328 homicides and 144 of the 1,365 rapes have occurred in public housing. (The number of robberies so far this year in public housing — 1,140 out of 18,634 citywide — is roughly proportional to the population.)

The locations of public housing, often in higher-crime neighborhoods, and the layout of the complexes heighten the need for more policing, said Fritz Umbach of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who wrote a history of the housing police, “The Last Neighborhood Cops.”

“Public housing is a unique policing context, not because the residents are more criminally prone, but because the architecture is distinctive and where it is in the city is distinctive,” he said. “This presents unique police challenges that can only be met with these over-and-above services.”

Landlords of thousands of private residential buildings across the city have authorized the Police Department to patrol their hallways and stairwells, and the police do so — at their discretion — without charging.

The opposition to funneling federal housing subsidies to the Police Department has been building as the authority’s budget has come up shorter each year. In a report last year, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer, now the comptroller-elect, said public housing “residents are essentially charged twice for policing services — once through local taxes like all other New Yorkers and once through the reimbursement required of their landlord.” Public housing developments are exempt from property taxes, but the authority pays the city about $28 million a year in lieu of property taxes.

The housing authority chairman, John B. Rhea, said that discontinuing the police payments “should be on the table,” but not at the expense of policing.

By MIREYA NAVARRO and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

nytimes.com