Former CM Robert Holden testifies on crime stat integrity and audit concerns

Hello, do you hear me?

Yes.

Now we'll hear, now we'll welcome former council member Robert Holden, also known as Bob Holden.

He's joining us via the phone because there's some technological difficulties.

You may begin when you're ready.

All right, good afternoon, and thank you, Chair Felice, for waiting, and all the members of the public who are still around for holding this hearing.

My name is Bob Holden.

I represented the 30th Council District for eight years.

My involvement with public safety and the NYPD goes back decades before I even held office.

So I was president of the Junior Park Civic for 25 years, served on Community Board 5 in Queens for 30 years, and I chaired its public safety committees.

And I co-founded COP 104, which brought our local precinct and communities together for monthly meetings for more than 20 years.

So, you know, I know our precincts, and I know how the system used to work, folks, used to work.

And I can tell you that something changed dramatically over the last maybe three or four years, and I've never seen it this bad.

My council office heard the same story over and over again.

Constituents called 911, waited an hour or longer for police, and

they were either discouraged from filing a report or they were told it's not really a crime or nothing is going to happen anyway and detectives aren't going to investigate.

These are some of the...

excuses we got, or even the DA wouldn't prosecute.

That is unacceptable.

A crime victim should never have to argue with the government just to take a report.

I repeatedly told commanding officers, take the report, please, just take it, and they said,

Let the facts determine what happens next.

But after decades of dealing with the NYPD, what concerned me most was this no longer looked like a few isolated incidents.

I began hearing from people inside the department that commands were under tremendous pressure.

To keep complaint numbers down, and in some cases, classify crimes at a lower level.

And so that raised serious questions with me and my staff.

And there were coordinated efforts to, you know, there was apparently a coordinated effort to keep crime numbers artificially low.

I mean, that's what I suspected in many others.

Again, we needed to look at the facts.

So maybe it was intentional.

Maybe nobody ever put it in writing.

But tremendous pressure came down from City Hall or one police plaza to commanders of the precincts.

And that the pressure worked.

It's way down the chain of command.

Either possibility demands an investigation.

So because when the same complaints are coming from victims,

police officers and people inside the department, and then the internal audits that could provide answers are kept from the public view, you cannot just dismiss this as a coincidence.

So I'll say it plainly, I do not trust these crime stats that we're getting today.

And this is not an attack on the rank-and-file cops.

I've been supporting the cops for decades.

I've supported our police.

On every level.

If anything, they may be victims of the system too.

When commanders are pressured to produce lower numbers, that pressure eventually reaches the cop answering the 911 calls.

So before I left office, whistleblowers raised serious concerns with me and to me about the NYPD's Quality Assurance Division audits.

I was told some audits found upwards of 70% of reports reviewed were either classified below what the facts warranted or that a required report was never taken at all.

Think about what that means.

If somebody commits a crime and no report is taken, as far as the stats are concerned, that crime never happened.

So I was told the quality assurance unit was so understaffed it could not conduct broader audits and that findings like these should have been triggered.

So I commend Councilmember Phil Wong.

Oswald Feliz for continuing to pursue this.

The council should demand the audits, staffing members, levels and procedures and command findings and correct this action.

NYPD cannot publish the headline and hide the audit.

So if they refuse to turn over records that the public should see,

I guess we should subpoena them in the council.

After more than four decades of working with our local precincts and the NYPD, I know what I saw.

Something changed in the last three or four years, and New Yorkers deserve at least to know why.

Whether this is an intentional scheme, pressure from above, or a culture that everyone understood that the numbers had better go down, we need to get to the truth.

You cannot let the fox guard the hen house, and you cannot stand at the podium, pat yourself on the back, and tell New Yorkers crime is down while hiding the very audits that could tell us whether those numbers are worth the paper they're printed on.

So, again, thank you for waiting.

I'm sorry for the technical problems, but great hearing.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Robert, and thank you for your testimony.

And thank you for all the work you've done on this issue.

Is there anyone who would like to testify in person?

I don't see anyone here.

I don't see anyone online.

If yes, please use the raise hand function.

I don't see anyone else registered online, so I just want to thank everyone who has joined us today, everyone who watched, everyone who testified.