For our first fieldwork, we decided to interview Pauline Ross. Pauline Ross was the Attorney State of New York for many years and was a prosecutor at the Department of Justice. With her having experienced many cases, she saw patterns in the judicial system. We asked questions ranging from how she has seen the justice system in her eyes, to cases that she covered.

During the interview with her, we got to learn many things about how prisons are made up of people who are lower class and talked about how she has seen how high prison bail is for prisoners and because of this, they might not be able to pay it. This can lead to people spending a high amount of money to be free or to stay in prison or Rikers which has terrible conditions.

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While interviewing Robert Gangi, we asked if we could court-monitor his organization, PROP. This organization helps count race statistics in court and end bias in court systems. On February 12th, we went to 100 Centre Street, which houses the New York County Criminal Court. We arrived at 10:00, met many people from PROP, and settled into court.

During the cases, we recorded many facts like their race, gender, what they were being accused of, and their sentence. We saw many tragic cases throughout the day. One case was about a man being sentenced and was sent to Rikers Island. One surprising fact we saw inside the court was that 7/10 people having their case that day were African American, and one person was white.

At the end of the day, we met up with Robert Gangi for a closing statement, with him discussing what we saw and the statistics we got. With us learning many things about the court, we gained new insight into the justice system and how its flaws are biased and unfair for many people.

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During this fieldwork, our group met with Nick Lesnansky, a police officer and homicide detective in Aurora, Colorado. Nick has over a decade of experience in public service. This interview gave us insight into what the job entails. He shared his journey from recruit to patrol officer, recruitment, field training officer, and finally to his current role as a detective. “In policing,” Nick said, “you go through a six-month academy before you begin working on the road as a full-fledged officer. Then, you’re paired with a senior officer for three months for further evaluation, and they sign off on you during your probationary period.” Even though we were seeing bias in the NYPD system, police are extensively trained everywhere to ensure “public safety.”

We wondered how he and other police felt about the growing prejudice in the system along with the programs aimed at defunding it. “That means less training for us, right? That means less active shooter training, that means less. That means less, you know, arrest control techniques, right? Less de-escalation training; less — like that’s the first thing that gets cut from training because that’s just too expensive. And then that means fewer cops, less well-trained cops, and less knowledgeable cops who know what they’re doing. And then, you know, the good cops who excel at their jobs don’t want to stay because they aren’t paid enough.” This resonated with us because it makes the solution unclear. Well-trained police lead to less crime, but there is still an enormous amount of bias in police systems, so what can we do? If there are no police, crime skyrockets, leading to another problem.

Overall, he wanted us to realize that these officers are not viewed as people. Like what Robert Gangi said, the public forgets that police officers are citizens like you. ” We’re not robots, we’re real people,” he remarked. “I have, you know, I have a dog and a fiancée and, um, you know, I like watching football and all that stuff, right? Like, um, we people too. um you know, I’m and like I said, we’re always trying to get better. We spend a lot of time doing training every year just to keep our certifications through the state. we’re always practicing and trying to be better. um and if there truly is an issue, um, you know, or people don’t, people have problems, I mean, we have, you know, all these different mechanisms for people to talk to the police department.” Nick does his job. In all of his 13 years of work, he never felt the need to use his gun. It’s more trained police like him that we need. Police are uncertain about what is going on, but are quick to sort out the situation without prejudice or bias. He emphasized the theme “Nobody’s perfect” meaning that he cares for improvement and feedback just as much as his colleagues. More police like Nick can change the way we arrest, try, and sentence individuals everywhere.

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Our group visited the New York Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street. We met Robert Gangi, the founder of the Police Reform Organization Project, along with three college interns. In the courts, we monitored the people being arraigned for that day. We would first write down the defendant’s race and sex, and report, that out of the 12 cases we monitored, only one case involved a white male, while the other 11 cases involved New Yorkers of Color. Meaning that 91% of the cases were for New Yorkers of Color. We recorded the crime that the New Yorker was arraigned for. The violations ranged from Petty Larceny to Parole Violations to even Assult in the Second Degree. Some notable cases we experienced were cases 12, 10, and 7 where the judge and police showed an extreme amount of racial bias.

During case 10, A Black New Yorker was charged with Parole violation and a form of sexual assault. This New Yorker in particular had not attended his Parole meetings since November. In two public places, one in a bathroom and one on an escalator, this New Yorker exposed himself to a female and attempted sexual assault in front of her. He threatened a security guard with a knife saying “If you come any closer you´ll regret it.” The judge set “an unreasonable bail price¨Gangi said, which was 7500 and 5000 dollars. During Case 7, Another Black New Yorker was charged with a Weapon on Transit Authority. This New Yorker was Previously homeless and avoided many court summons due to substance use, but the judge wasn’t empathetic. For possession of a knife, She sentenced him to 5 days on Rikers Island, along with a re-summons to the court.

During our final monitored case, case 12, a Black New Yorker was charged with criminal mischief, a low-level misdemeanor. The man in question had previously been arraigned and had multiple arrest warrants outstanding. However, unlike the white male and the Latino woman, the judge exhibited significant bias. Instead of giving the man an RoR and an Order of Protection, the defendant was sentenced to 10 days on Rikers Island for “Fear of escaping arrest.”

This fieldwork provided us insight into court bias while also explaining how the justice system works. Thank you Robert Gangi for providing us with this hands on experience.

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For our fieldwork, we watched the documentary 13th, which is an eye-opening documentary created by Ava Duvernay that shows the timeline of racism in the justice system and the real world. This shows how long racism has changed forms and found loopholes in the law.

One way that racism has found loopholes is by the war on drugs. In the documentary, we learned many things about the Nixon campaign, and the major thing was how the war on drugs was set up. During Nixon’s election, the war on drugs was fought as a criminal issue, not a health issue. This increased the number of incarceration rates and led people who smoked marijuana to be sent to jail. Because of this, federal spending for local law also increased to almost double the amount because of the mass incarceration. This led to hundreds of thousands of people being sent to jail, and the majority of them were African Americans. Later, the Nixon administration officials admitted that the war on drugs was to get African Americans in jail.

Another way that racism has affected families is with Reagan as president. Reagan’s campaign group made many ads and newsletters that criminalized black families and children of color. During his term, many media depicted black people as evil, which led to more arrests and fear of them. This led to more racism and unjust sentencing.

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Today, we met with Robert Gangi, the founder of the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP). Gangi has been an activist, Public advocate, and community organizer for over 40 years. After working for the Correctional Association for 29 years, he decided to create PROP to end abusive policing techniques that harm many people, including people of color.

While interviewing him, we got to ask many questions about what he does at PROP and how young people care about this issue. One thing that he told us is that since he has been working since the ’60s, he has seen how the political climate has changed and how people fought against Jim Crow laws and the Vietnam War. another thing he noticed during the ’50s is how little activism was happening for young people, which shows how much politicly the United States changed with Nixon being elected and the war on drugs happening, which was a way that Nixon and his party arrested African Americans. The Nixon administration admitted this, which led to a massive prison increase throughout the 70’s and 80’s.

We also got to learn how he got into this career with the District Attorney who worked with the DA office and wanted to change things from the inside. they reached out to Robert and knew about their work, which helped him get into the field.

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For this fieldwork, our group watched “13th,” a documentary regarding the historical context of the criminal justice system in the U.S. The documentary begins just after Emancipation in 1865 and goes through the years to discuss the modern-day criminal justice system. Many people may wonder, why is it so important to start right after slavery? The answer lies in the Black Codes. Following 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment proclaimed Emancipation for everyone except prisoners. It was basically used for whatever person wanted to use, so it was mass exploited. Since the South was filled with ex-Confederate sheriffs and judges, Black Americans would be incarcerated back into a system where they could be used as “slaves.” And nobody seemed to care because it was allowed by the constitution.

It’s also important to recognize the mass incarceration rates during the presidencies of Clinton, Reagan, and Nixon. During Nixon’s presidency, he introduced a rhetoric titled “A War on Drugs,” which intentionally targeted Black Americans and anti-war activists. You could serve time in prison for the simple “misdemeanor” of smoking marijuana. A quote from Nixon’s campaign team stated “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against the war or to be black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and black with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” During Reagan’s presidency, he enforced Nixon’s war on drugs even more. His actions led the public to believe propaganda portraying Black children as “Superpredators.” This resulted in blanket statements about black people that portrayed them as bad people. And because of that, it made it easier to accept that they should go to prison. During Clinton’s term, he was nothing short of ruthless towards criminals. He created Mandatory Minimums, the Three Strikes Your Out law, and the 85% law. These laws ensured people would be put away for life if they committed three crimes, people would have to serve 85% of their sentence, and more.

Note that many of those laws were not created by presidents. A somewhat-known nonprofit has corporations working with a select few republican senators to make laws that directly benefit the corporations focused on. Its name is ALEC: American Legislative Exchange Council. Laws like Mandatory Minimums, SB1070, and Stand Your Ground Laws have all had serious repercussions, including the publicized tragedy of Trayvon Martin, but have also had major money cuts for places like the CCA, Walmart, and other companies. However, not only ALEC corporations benefit from the criminal justice system. Private corporations like Victoria’s Secret and JCPenny run on cheap prison workforces. The fires in California were given prisoners to do the firefighting. It is just crazy to think about how much we rely on prisons and how so many people are biased against because of race.

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Today, my CAP partners and I interviewed Robert Gangi, the director of the Police Reform Organization Project. The interview provided us with insight into the significant impact of the police on the justice system, particularly regarding their brutality. His historical perspective on police brutality and prison conditions helped us understand the conditions of justice for a black person living in New York. To start, Robert Gangi shared with us why he became involved in prison reform after the loss of his father. He told us ” I couldn’t stop it. And so I think that instilled me a desire to do good, a desire to help other people; you know, sort of broadly speaking, the nature of our work essentially is to stop police practices that hurt people.” As Gangi worked as a court monitor for the organization he recorded that “anywhere from 85 to 100% of the cases we see on a given day involved in New Yorkers of color. And we um can’t New Yorkers of color as any non-white person. So it could also include Asians with the recent people.” Proving that our system has surfaced around a biased police force.

In our interview, Gangi referenced the impact of the media on police officers, displaying them as “the heroes.” Because of this, we have created a society where people “don’t care about people being locked up. I’m not so sure that’s totally true, but people know that prisons are bad places. Corruption happens. brutality happens.” He mentioned that the problem with police brutality reform is that there is no clear solution to how we can end this corruption, saying “Researchers show that none of that works. Training doesn’t improve things, and more diversity doesn’t improve things, because when you become a cop, you have to get with the program.” Since the system doesn’t have a clear problem, nobody knows where to start. Resulting in cops choosing to follow the lead of biases.

A story he told us about these biases happens in Yankee Stadium. He had a group of kids watching the game when one kid caused a bit of a disturbance, and the police came. “One of the kids uh, who was in the group is his name is George, and he was the total sweetheart, not like Charlie andolf. So what says, be cool. And one cop Jean of course made to attack George or apparently being like, you know, flip with disrespectful. And another cop jumps into me. And I’m like 22 years old, right? So I never seen anything like this. I thought the second cop was going to grab the first cop who was actually obviously no, but he starts standing on George.” This story was shocking because it shows that cops can act in legalized brutality, and nobody cares.

Robert Gangi taught us about how the placement of police affects communities, how their quotas will make them make outlandish arrests, and so much more. Thank you Robert for the amazing experience. We hope to do court monitoring with you soon.

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