Mayor Bill de Blasio is chalking up a high number of sexual harassment reports in the city's schools system, only a small portion of which were substantiated, to false complaints.
According to data from city agencies, the Department of Education received 471 complaints since 2013—more than a third of those reported across city government. But City Hall says only seven were substantiated.
"It is a known fact, and unfortunately there's been a bit of a hyper-complaint dynamic, sometimes for the wrong reasons. So I think that has inflated their numbers, we need to address that cultural reality within the DOE," de Blasio said at an unrelated press conference Wednesday.
The mayor added that the city takes "any sincere reporting" of problems very seriously. But he said that DOE employees frequently make false complaints more than any other agency, which muddies the waters.
In a statement, United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew defended the city's public school teachers.
“Our teachers have a tough enough job that they don’t have time to make frivolous claims,” said Mulgrew.
When a reporter later in the day asked City Council Speaker Corey Johnson to comment on the mayor's comments, the speaker screwed up his face. "I don't know what that means," he said.
Officials are developing a single policy on sexual harassment that will be applied to all city agencies, and the entire workforce will be retrained.