Council Member Cabán Weighs in on the NYPD Subway Shooting

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as federal investigations and scandals swirl around Mayor Eric Adams and several of his top officials. A small but growing number of local politicians have called on Adams to actually step down. That includes, and in fact has been led by in the city council, New York City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, who'll join me in a minute. Tiffany Cabán, for the record, is not related to former NYPD commissioner Edward Cabán, same spelling, who resigned after being caught up in an apparent corruption probe.

Councilmember Cabán has also weighed in on the chaotic police shooting at a Brooklyn subway station that left four people injured. Many, not just critics, are wondering how an attempt to enforce a relatively minor fare evasion offense spiraled so out of control. There's now police body cam footage of the shooting from the NYPD, finally released on Friday night, which shows Derrell Mickles, the man suspected of fare evasion, wielding a knife, but it leaves many of the questions and concerns unanswered nevertheless.

I think Councilmember Cabán will raise a few of those questions and concerns here, too. Cabán represents District 22 in Queens, which includes Astoria, Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst, Woodside, and Rikers Island. She was previously a public defender. You may remember she ran for Queens DA a few years ago on a progressive prosecutor reform platform, and she's generally been one of the biggest critics of Mayor Adams's policing policies in the council. Councilmember Cabán, welcome back to WNYC.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with that police shooting in the subway in Brownsville. I imagine you've seen the body cam footage released by the NYPD. What was your take?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I think my take was very similar to that of millions of New Yorkers, it was devastating. I'm hoping that the folks that were hurt in that incident make recoveries, but also I'm fully aware that the trauma of that incident is going to take far longer to heal, if ever. I hope that they're going to be able to access the spots they need to navigate those things. I feel really strongly that it should have never happened. I think from jump, this was a situation that was handled poorly, and it makes clear that an armed police response is not what's needed in situations like this.

Brian Lehrer: We'll talk about that longer-term question of whether the NYPD armed police officer should be involved in fare evasion at all on the culpability or not of these police officers. The platform confrontation escalated quickly. We can see in the video, I've seen people interpret it as Mr. Mickles was coming at an officer with a knife. Coming at an officer, and others say he was standing still. Honestly, the edited version I saw was unclear to me in that respect. How do you see it?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I'm going to ask you to bear with me for a second, Brian, because I want to really slow this down and go fact by fact, observation by observation because I think it's really important I provide a little bit of context around each piece. This is what we know. We know that Officer Mays and Officer Wong were at the station, that they observed Mr. Mickles evade the fare by jumping the turnstile and subsequently going through the exit gate.

We also know that at some point in the moments after that, they observed a knife. I want to focus in and talk about this knife for a minute. What they observed was a legal knife. That knife is legal to carry in New York, and there's a really good reason for that. The reason is that there are tens of thousands of New Yorkers who carry exactly this kind of knife every day as work tools. They use them at their jobs. We have to-

Brian Lehrer: Do you have an indication that he was carrying a knife for that reason, or you're saying it shouldn't necessarily be taken as a threat when somebody reveals a knife because a lot of people use them for work?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Again, let me put this into context and relate it to police response. You have the police observe this legal knife, legal to carry, and when they observe it in those beginning moments, it is either in his pocket or by his side. It never comes up above his waistline. In those initial observations, they never see him threatening anybody with it or anything like that, and then they follow him. This is where I think a critical mistake happens between that moment and the interaction on the platform, which, granted, not a lot of time happens, but there is time. De-escalation never happened.

We saw missed opportunities for de-escalation at every step of the way. I want to define de-escalation because that's really important. De-escalation is the use of communication or other techniques during an encounter to stabilize it, to slow it down, to reduce the intensity of a potentially violent situation, by definition, without using physical force or a reduction in force. What we saw actually was the opposite. I was at a hearing yesterday for B-HEARD in the city council, the alternate response.

We had mental health experts and street response experts testify about de-escalation and the difference between de-escalation and what the police do. Police are armed responders who often skip the de-escalation piece, and they go right into orders and control to control a situation.

Brian Lehrer: "Drop the knife. Drop the knife." That's what we see on the video.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Exactly. There's immediate yelling, there's immediate closing space. De-escalation says you got to remain calm, keep the distance. You want to slow things down. You want to be listening. Maybe you ask questions. None of that happened. It was an immediate, like upping the ante of the energy and tenor of the moment. Then there's the use of the taser, a weapon, and then, the use of the gun. I think that that's a really, really big thing to focus on where the situation escalated.

The other thing that I want to take a moment to point out is that we have to keep in mind the role that racial bias is injected into our policing system. I look at this man, Mr. Mickles, and he is a Black man in Brownsville. There are people who, when they observe, when they see a Black man in a place like Brownsville, they view his existence as inherently dangerous or life-threatening. That bias, it affects the police response. It's why we see outcomes like this, and those same people might see a white kid with a semi-automatic and be able to control that situation and subdue and bring that person in without any loss of life. We have to contend with those realities, too.

Brian Lehrer: City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán of Queens, my guest. Mayor Adams has defended the officers involved in the incident. I'm going to play a clip that's a little over a minute of what the mayor said when he was asked about the shooting at his news conference last week. He'll bring up a few different angles here that I'll invite you to follow up on. Here's the mayor.

Mayor Erick Adams: I think those officers took great strides to bring a person with over 20 arrest history that we could talk about. My heart goes out to his parent. No parents want to lose a child, but this was a bad guy. I saw the video. I saw the steps those police officers implemented over and over again trying to reason with the perpetrator. Some people say, "You shouldn't be enforcing fare evasion." No, this is not a city where any and everything goes. There's a reason there's a fare on our subway and bus.

If lawmakers want to make the subways and buses free, then fine, but as long as there are rules, we're going to follow those rules. He was not shot for fare evasion. He was shot because he had a knife, and he went after the police officers after repeatedly asking him to put down the knife. I thought those officers responded accordingly. All shootings, you do an analysis to determine what we can do differently but those officers stopped a very dangerous person who was committing a crime.

Brian Lehrer: There's the mayor last week. There was the police officer behavior aspect, the Derrell Mickles behavior aspect, and the fare evasion and enforcing fare evasion question there. Let's take all three. Councilmember, the mayor obviously saw it differently than you did when he said at the beginning of the clip, "I think those officers took great strides to bring a person with an over 20 arrest history that we could talk about." A, we have officers taking great strides, and B, he's citing Mr. Mickle's arrest history, something that I don't know if the officers would have known at the time. Do you know?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Listen, I think this actually makes the point that I was just talking about with you, is that this is the typical police response and it hammers home the point that they are not always the right responder in certain situations. The government's job is to build a workforce that meets the needs of people, and this wasn't it. The mayor we know was a career police officer, and so the language that we hear him use in that video of the description of how the police officer responded, that's not de-escalation.

There were barked orders. There wasn't a remaining calm. There wasn't a changing of the setting. There wasn't a respecting of personal space. All of these things that are the cornerstones to de-escalation training and techniques. It's inflammatory. It is meant to deflect from what we're looking at in this situation by saying, "Well, this guy's got a criminal record." Criminal record or not, it is not a reason to create that kind of violence, danger, and chaos on our public transit system.

We have to be able to trust workers, city workers, government workers, to be able to make good assessments and good decisions and moments. Now, you and I, we're here Monday morning quarterbacking. I just want to be clear about that. We're sitting here and we're looking at it. I'm not going to deny the fact that making the decisions in these moments is not incredibly, incredibly difficult, but that's why it's so important to have the right worker who is best equipped to make those decisions in that moment. I'm just going keep hammering home that in this case, a police officer probably wasn't it.

Brian Lehrer: A number of people writing in say the police did not know that he had an arrest history, which would make the mayor's statement inappropriate. However, a number of people are writing in and calling in to disagree with your take. One listener writes, "I haven't been agreeing with the mayor as of late, but in this case, the video shows prolonged restraint and delayed action by the cops. The mayor is right in this case for once." Somebody else writes, "Police ask you to drop the knife, you have to drop the knife, period."

We're going to take a phone call that's on that track, I think. Mike in Greenwich Village, you are on WNYC with Councilmember Tiffany Cabán. Hello, Mike.

Mike: Hello, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Tiffany Cabán failed to mention something. Do you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I hear you.

Mike: Okay. Tiffany Cabán failed to mention that the man said, as the police were following him, asking him to stop, he said, "I'll kill you." That's a pretty strong statement. That's what the man said.

Brian Lehrer: Councilmember, do you want to engage Mike?

Mike: Can I say something else?

Brian Lehrer: Sure, go ahead.

Mike: She said that they have to de-escalate. How do you de-escalate when the man's walking away from you getting onto a subway? How do you de-escalate? Just stand there when he gets on the train and just and just takes off? This is nonsense. Police are there to protect the law, to enforce the law. The man violated the law. This is boarding on the ridiculous, what I'm hearing with these people. I used to be a progressive. I voted for Bernie Sanders. That's where I come from. The City seems to be becoming lawless. I get on the bus, I see people getting on like crazy in the back of the bus. They don't pay. It's out of hand.

Brian Lehrer: Mike, thank you. Councilmember, Mike raises several points.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Yes, and I think they're important points to engage with. Mike, I want to thank you for calling in. I think these are hard and serious conversations that, quite frankly, I really invite. I want to tackle this from a couple of different angles saying, what were they to do? I gave that example about how differently we have treated Black men in situations like this with far less of a threat than we treat white men with semi-automatics in different situations. There are other ways to get this done, but I want to talk about police protocol for a minute.

When the police are, and this is going back to my days as seven plus years as a public defender, represented clients in litigated cases, everything from jumping the turnstile to homicides. My job was to know the NYPD patrol guide inside and out and to know police procedure and protocol because I had to cross-examine cops on that. There has to be an effort to make sure that in your pursuit of something or someone, you are not creating an even more dangerous situation.

It's why there's a police guidance, for example, that you don't initiate a car chase when you're trying to make a traffic stop and that person doesn't stop for you because there's an understanding that by initiating that car chase, you are creating a much more dangerous situation for yourself, for the person you're trying to stop, and for the people around you. That's something that has to be taken into account. The other thing is that in these situations, there are workers who handle these things differently, and I'm going to give you an example. Bear with me, Brian.

This goes back to the B-HEARD hearing yesterday. I've traveled around the country just to see what other police departments are doing and to see how they're partnering with alternative responders.

Brian Lehrer: B-HEARD, just so people know, is the program under which mental health professionals respond to people in mental health crisis right, along with, or instead of armed police officers.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Right. Thank you, Brian. A story was told to me by a police chief about how they got onto a scene, or one of their guys got onto the scene, and their equivalent of the B-HEARD team was out there. They were trying to figure out who responds to this, because there's a man that's experiencing an acute mental health episode, and the 911 caller said that he's got rocks on him. He's got rocks in his pockets, he's got rocks in his hands, and they were trying to determine, is that a weapon? Do we let these guys in, or do the police go in?

The mental health expert responders said to the police officers, "No, no, no, hang on. Don't go in there with force. We got this. It's okay." They went over to this person. They used those de-escalation skills that their entire profession is predicated on the training that they had to de-escalate. They slowed things down. They talked to the person, and one by one, the person started taking the rocks out of their pocket, getting rid of the rocks, just putting them on the ground until eventually they no longer had any rocks. They were able to connect this person to some care, get them some help.

You can see how while one worker, the mental health responder, said, "No, this is not a weapon, it's not a dangerous situation, we don't need to go in with brute force and neutralize in that way," and the cop's response was, "Our response is we're going go in and we're going take them down because that's dangerous." You see that there are actually this whole host of different options for how we approach a situation. Whether somebody is experiencing an acute mental health episode or whether they're just having a really, really awful day and are agitated. Sometimes we can't meet that energy where it's at.

Brian Lehrer: Go back to Mike if he's still there.

Mike: Am I still online?

Brian Lehrer: Mike. Yes, you are still there. I wanted to ask you. Hang on. Hearing this, and of course, we have to remember the outcome of this incident, four people injured. Some of the injuries suffered by the bystanders are serious. There was some suggestion initially that one of those bystanders was just grazed in the head. Then The New York Times reported she actually has a bullet lodged in her head and is unable to walk. One could conclude that however you perceive the fare jumper here and the knife holder, this did not go well and the police made a bad choice. What would you say to any of that and to what the council member was saying?

Mike: I agree with that part of it.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Mike: I agree with what you just said, Brian. I agree with what you just said. One of the issues I have so to be on that side, what you just said is that the police don't have to shoot him just because he fledged a knife when he's 10 feet away. If he comes at them close, then if they have to protect themselves, they can shoot and it'll be a lot more accurate. If he's 2 feet away from you, you shoot him. He's very close. You're right. On that score, when he's 10 feet away, you shoot away. Then of course that's a very bad thing because the bullets go all over the place.

The other thing I want to really take exception to which he brought this whole long story about someone having a mental breakdown. This guy wasn't having a mental breakdown. He was waiting outside for the gate to be open, he calmly walked through. The police followed him, he would not stop and even said, "I'll kill you." This is not in any way comparable to the example she's giving of a different person having mental breakdowns.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you for staying on the line and having a second response. We appreciate your call. How do you respond to that, Councilmember?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Listen, I'm just going to fall back on the response that was given. Again, I always welcome the opportunity to be in conversation with our neighbors. I said before, the idea here is that there were multiple opportunities for de-escalation, that we know that there are proven strategies that can cool down a situation rather than heat them up. I said, whether it is an acute mental health episode or somebody is extremely upset or agitated, it's the outcomes that matter. At the end of the day, I want us to be creating policies, procedures, having a workforce ready that is going to give us the best public health and public safety outcomes.

We know that this situation was not it, and we know that there were options to address this a lot differently and have a very, very different outcome where we've seen that there are folks still in the hospital, that their lives are forever changed. For what purpose and at what cost?

Brian Lehrer: If we assume that that's right and that more de-escalation training, more de-escalation skills are required by more NYPD officers, we've been having this conversation for many years.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Can I inject? That's not what I'm saying, by the way.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I just want to be clear that it's not.

Brian Lehrer: Sorry, I don't want to misinterpret.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: No, that's okay. That's something that comes up a lot because the officers that killed Kawaski Trawick, who was a person living in support of housing that they knew had a mental health diagnosis that was just cooking in his home, and was shot by the police, by the way, after other first responders had come, had let him back into his apartment. That officer had completed CIT training, that crisis intervention training, three days before the shooting. This goes back to the idea that no amount of training is going to make the wrong worker the right one in a particular situation.

I've talked to police officers again here and around the country, and there is a really resonant sentiment that police officers feel that they're being asked to do way too much in way too many situations that they don't feel like they are equipped to handle and that they wish that other issues were being addressed properly so they didn't have to handle them. That goes back to where our priorities are.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe it shouldn't be police officers at all in this situation, and I'll let you follow up on that in just a second. Councilmember, it goes to the other part of the clip of the mayor as well, where he says, "There's a reason there's a fare on our subway and bus. If lawmakers want to make the subways and buses free, then fine, but as long as there are rules, we're going to follow those rules."

Without involving the NYPD, how can the MTA and the City enforce fare evasion effectively? It is a big problem that apparently costs the MTA hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and of course, that's hundreds of millions that don't get spent on services for riders.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Brian, don't get too upset with me, but I'm going to reject the question a little bit. I am among the folks that have been part of the chorus that are saying that the subway should be safe and free. Public transit is a public good. This isn't just a crazy novel thing. The free transit experiments have gone well around the world. They're leading to increased mobility and economic growth. They're taking burdens off of low-income people. By the way, when you increase mobility, when you spur economic growth, when you take burdens off of low-income people, safety and health increases. It's being done in other cities in the US, it's being done around the world. I think we have to take a fundamentally different approach.

Brian Lehrer: The premise of the question was the mayor's quote. He said, "If lawmakers want to make the subway and buses free, then fine, but as long as there are rules, we're going to follow those rules." I guess we have two conversations there. One is if we were to go to a zero-fair model, where would all the money come from?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I want to inject one other response and a public defender response in here because the mayor is doing something that prosecutors do a lot that I heard as public defender and I heard on the campaign trail when I ran for district attorney. It's that the law is there and we have to follow the law and we have to enforce it. I got to tell you, Brian, there are so many laws on the books that each and every day, prosecutors, people in power, are not enforcing, and that's a choice.

They are choosing to enforce fare evasion, but they're not enforcing laws that hold bad employers accountable when we know that we have lots of work site debts and construction sites. There are laws that prevent bad landlords from unlawfully-- We're not enforcing those things. We are deciding because of capacity, which laws we want to enforce. There's a track record, there's a routine there of focusing on these lower-level offenses that target Black and brown, lower-income New Yorkers. It's not just as simple as this is against the law, we enforce it. These are choices.

Brian Lehrer: Where would all the money to run the buses and subways without any fare come from?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Tax the rich. A progressive tax scheme where richer are-- When I say rich, it's not the everyday people. It is the multimillionaires, billionaires that are not paying their fare share. We can bring back congestion pricing, and get that revenue that was supposed to be going into our MTA system. I know that a couple of my subway stations in my district were slated to get elevators for accessibility, and those are on the back burner now that congestion pricing has been put on the back burner. Those are just a few of the places where we can be getting that money.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take one more phone call on this, and then I want to get your quick take before we run out of time on some of the investigations into the mayor. Damani in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Damani.

Damani: Hello, Brian. Long-time listener. Many calls in, and I thank you for taking my call. I wanted to express that under no circumstances at all, zero, is it okay and acceptable for any bystander to catch a bullet from a police officer. There should be zero tolerance for that. Anyone who works for the city, state government, who has the ability to take a life, who can carry a firearm, must not make that mistake ever. I thank you for taking this call. I'm going to go ahead and take my answer off the air.

Brian Lehrer: Damani, I'll ask you a follow-up question. The previous caller might turn around and ask you, what if the person has a knife, says, "I'm going to kill you to the police officers," and then runs toward an officer with a knife?

Damani: That is a great question. I'm glad you asked that. There are two things that I would say to that. One, I would say, first of all, if you want to de-escalate, you choose not to suffocate the target. You give the target space, you use your radio, you use all the resources that are allotted to you in the police force, use a radio, you call for backup, you surround the person, and you give everyone enough space so that they're protecting the bystanders and separating the bystanders from the aggressor. Yes, sometimes you have to follow that target in order to get in position.

Now, this is one of the reasons why they do not do high-speed chases in the streets of New York anymore because police officers think they can drive and wind up running someone over or hitting someone else's car.

Brian Lehrer: At least they've cut down on those. Damani, I'm going to leave it there for time. I do want to get with Councilmember Cabán to one other topic, and that is that you are calling for Mayor Adams to resign with these investigations going on. Why go that far?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I think just New Yorkers deserve better at this point. We're seeing the mismanagement, the chaos, the distraction of all of these investigations really affecting his ability to govern and the administration's ability to govern. We've seen him lead with corruption and mismanagement. We know now that at least 15 of his associates are under investigation, and if his track record of cutting critical services and empowering NYPD abuses wasn't enough, to me, it's more clear than ever that he's unfit to govern in this moment. New Yorkers, like I said, deserve a lot better.

That's why I've made the call for him to resign. I know others have joined in that call. We deserve a mayor who's capable of delivering for New Yorkers. It's long, long overdue. It only takes the folks, the constituents walking into my office every day to know that that's true. I'm having issues with a constituent needing to contact the Department of Investigations. I can't get in touch with the chancellor because the FBI has both of his phones, and I've got to figure out who else in the administration I can call to follow up on that.

I have constituents coming in and trying to get SNAP benefits, food stamps. It's taking three months to process those applications. Difference between going hungry and having food. We have folks that get their city FHEPS vouchers for housing, go through it, find an apartment, and the administration isn't processing that quick enough, so they lose the apartment. It's the difference between being homeless and being sheltered. Then you add this level of distraction and chaos. This is a big job that deserves every minute of our attention to deliver for New Yorkers every day. That just can't happen under the current circumstances.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have much support on council in calling for his resignation at this point? You were the first out-of-the-box in terms of city council members to do that. People might look at this coming from you and think, well, you're one of the biggest opponents of the mayor's policies. You did actually just list that as another reason, maybe one of the most different ideologically. Of course, you want the mayor out, and you're basically, one might wonder, using the investigations as an opportunity to weaken him for those other substantive policy reasons. What would you say to anyone thinking that?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: I'm not inventing these criticisms, and it's the conglomeration of all of these things. Yes, we don't agree on a lot of policy things. There are some things that we do agree on and we have worked closely with the administration on, but what is really taking things to the next level is that we are seeing just the mass exodus of high-level officials. We are seeing a breakdown in the administration where everyday services are being interrupted.

Up until this point, I hadn't called on him to resign. I had to use my role as a legislator to hold his feet to the fire, to pass laws that were going to help everyday New Yorkers to fight for a just budget that we're going to deliver the things that New Yorkers want and need every day. Brian, this isn't normal. This is not normal. To have this level of investigation into an administration I think is pretty unprecedented.

You look at the NYPD alone and the commissioner having to resign, but under that commissioner and under this mayor, we have seen the highest levels of unconstitutional stop and frisk in a decade under this administration. We have seen the burying of more substantiated police misconduct cases thrown out and buried than any NYPD commissioner and mayoral administration in the history of NYPD.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you a quick follow-up on that last point, and then we're out of time. There's a good story on the news organization, THE CITY, this morning about the civilian complaint Review Board and the fact that 5 of the 15 seats on that board are sitting empty. That has hampered their ability to review many of the cases that are brought by New Yorkers against police officers and make any determination about them at all either way. Do you blame the mayor? Are you accusing him of trying to defeat the purpose of a civilian complaint review board by not staffing it sufficiently? Is this on him?

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: This is actually a very well-documented strategy of the mayor. When we look at the last few budget cycles under this mayor, he has been calling for devastating cuts to all of the oversight agencies. He has called for and pulled money from the Department of Investigations, the Board of Corrections, the Civilian Complaint Review Board. When you put that together with all of these federal investigations, you should be concerned about the mayor's efforts to make sure that the council and everyday New Yorkers don't have an opportunity to really look under the hood and do these robust investigations to hold the administration accountable and on the straight and narrow.

The CCRB specifically, not only do they not have enough people, and they are woefully underfunded that they're not able to do many of the investigations that they need to do, but the CCRB doesn't have real teeth. I was out in Oakland not too long ago to speak with their equivalent of the CCRB. Over there, the CCRB, their equivalent, has the power to fire officers. We don't have that here. What we do have is the CCRB saying, "Hey, this is substantiated. This is really bad. Our recommendation may be firing," and then the police commissioner or the mayor completely ignoring it and throwing it out. It's a combination of we need to really give teeth to these bodies so that we can get some accountability and also fund them and fill those roles so that they can serve that purpose.

Brian Lehrer: New York City councilmember Tiffany Cabán from District 22 in Queens, which includes Astoria, Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst, Woodside, and also Rikers Island. Thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate the conversation.

Councilmember Tiffany Cabán: Thank you so much.

 

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