When Poor People Are Beaten for Seeking Help

An investigation reveals a troubling pattern of abuse
against one of New York’s most vulnerable populations.

The New York Times
October 27, 2019
By Mara Gay and Emma Goldberg
Ms. Gay is a member of the editorial board, for which Ms. Goldberg is a researcher.

Ronald Purnell at home in Far Rockaway, N.Y.
Credit: Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Ronald Purnell struggled for breath in the doorway of a city welfare office on West 14th Street, begging for help as officers kicked him and beat him with batons. His oxygen tank lay just out of reach.

“I can’t breathe!” Mr. Purnell heaved. “I need my oxygen!”

Mr. Purnell, 58, hadn’t been accused of any crime. The guards who he said attacked him that day weren’t police officers. They were employees and contractors of the Human Resources Administration, the city agency that serves more than three million impoverished New Yorkers every year.

The H.R.A. is the largest social service system run by an American city. It operates roughly 50 offices where New Yorkers can apply for a sprawling array of safety net programs, from Medicaid to food and rental assistance. Most New Yorkers know little of this bureaucratic archipelago tucked away in nondescript buildings from the West Village to the Bronx. But for the millions who are forced to navigate it, H.R.A. is the public face of the city they call home.

Like social workers everywhere, H.R.A. employees deal with stressful conditions and low pay. But the treatment endured by those who seek help at New York’s welfare offices cries out for a new approach. It demands urgent, focused attention by the mayor to stop an alarming pattern of abuse against people living in poverty.

New Yorkers wait for hours to see overwhelmed case workers who are often rude or unhelpful. Frustrated clients sometimes become unruly or even violent toward staff members. Security officers are undertrained and poorly supervised. In the most troubling cases, people who come to the centers looking for help have been subjected to violence at the hands of H.R.A. security officers and by private guards hired by the agency.

Mr. Purnell’s account is one of dozens of such incidents in recent years, according to court documents and interviews with victims and civil rights attorneys. Since 2013, more than 50 people filed legal complaints of serious abuse. Of those, 11 complaints resulted in settlements, and 14 are under review by the Law Department or the Comptroller’s Office. The others were closed because the complainant failed to file a lawsuit within the 21-month deadline.

The number of formal complaints is small, given the millions of people served by the agency, but the behavior they describe is shocking. Victims and attorneys say abuse often goes unreported, since poor people are less likely to have legal representation.

Complaints against the agency’s employees — which totaled 13,575 between 2013 and July of this year — hint at a larger problem. More than half arose from “rudeness,” according to city data. Nearly 700 were related to the behavior of the security staff, a category that includes allegations of excessive force by the agency’s officers and contracted security guards.

Together, the allegations suggest a pattern of unprovoked physical abuse against some of New York’s most vulnerable. Where compassion is demanded, the welfare offices all too often dispense callousness.

Taina Clarke is an Army veteran working toward a paralegal degree. In 2015, she visited an H.R.A. office to fix a clerical error. After more than a two-hour wait, Ms. Clarke, concerned about picking up her sons from a babysitter, asked to see a supervisor. An officer approached her instead, and slammed her facedown onto a counter in front of a roomful of people still waiting to be seen.

“Get off her, she’s so little!” Ms. Clarke remembers hearing someone shout. The officer dragged her like a rag doll to a closet and threw her inside, she said. As he tried to slam the door shut, a female bystander stuck out her foot to stop the door from closing. “If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know what he would have done to me,” Ms. Clarke said.

H.R.A. officers arrested Ms. Clarke and charged her with trespassing, a charge that was later dismissed. She filed a claim and eventually received a $45,000 settlement from the city. The H.R.A. took no action against the two officers named in the case, but both were later fired over unrelated issues, city officials said.

The stories share a pattern: A person waits for hours to see a caseworker, then is ordered by a peace officer to leave the office for a capricious reason, like asking to see a supervisor or using a cellphone. As the person leaves the building, he or she is jumped by a group of officers, often in an elevator, staircase or doorway.

In most of the cases reviewed by The Times, the officers are accused in court documents of making false arrests for charges like trespassing or disorderly conduct, after physically attacking someone. The charges are regularly dropped.

In December 2018, a viral video of Jazmine Headley, a young mother arrested at a Brooklyn H.R.A. center, offered a glimpse at the broken system. H.R.A. and police officers loomed over the unarmed black woman as her 1-year-old son was ripped from her arms. The dispute began when an officer told Ms. Headley she wasn’t allowed to sit on the floor, though no seats were available.

In some cases, the abuse continues for hours, out of view. In interviews and court documents, people described being held by officers in back offices, handcuffed. Several said they were forced to urinate on themselves after officers held them for long periods and refused to allow them to use the restroom.

On May 17, 2017, Laura Zilioli walked into the H.R.A. job center on West 14th Street looking for financial assistance. When she got no help after a long wait, she began to cry. Officers told her to leave. Before she could do so, they handcuffed her and forced her into a back office. John Lugo, a supervising officer, told the other officers to leave. When they did, he sexually assaulted her.

“What can your mouth do?” Ms. Zilioli recalls Mr. Lugo saying, as he forced her to perform oral sex on him.

Mr. Lugo was sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 after pleading guilty to a criminal sex act.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made addressing income inequality the central mission of his public life. In 2014, he appointed Steven Banks, a former Legal Aid Society chief, as H.R.A. commissioner. Early on, Mr. Banks said he became aware of a handful of cases that “raised alarm bells.”

In 2014, he revamped the agency’s special investigations unit, adding investigators to review instances of excessive use of force. Since then, three officers have been fired, and 13 have resigned amid investigations. Six others were put on desk duty. Roughly 20 percent of the agency’s officers have left or been reassigned under his tenure.

Mr. Banks said it is difficult to substantiate allegations of abuse without body cameras. Of 57 excessive-force complaints received through the agency’s inquiry line from 2017 through 2019, 44 couldn’t be substantiated. “I worry about the extent of the problem based on the egregious cases I’ve seen,” Mr. Banks said. “I’m always concerned whether or not clients speak up when they have suffered an injustice.”

Yet, settlements that indemnify the city from wrongdoing can make it difficult to discipline the officers involved. And not all reports of abuse make their way to senior agency officials, who often aren’t notified when people take legal action.

Ms. Headley’s story inspired changes. Mr. Banks said H.R.A. officers would be wearing body cameras by the end of 2019. He added 73 hours of new training for officers, including training in de-escalation, and he directed security contractors to retrain guards.

The City Council passed bills requiring H.R.A. to audit its operations. A spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Investigation, which examines misconduct in city agencies, said the agency is “very aware” about concerns over interactions the public has with both H.R.A. officers and Department of Homeless Services officers. The spokeswoman declined to comment further.

The Headley story, like the others, hints at the casual cruelty and humiliations to which people living in poverty are constantly subjected, simply for seeking government help.

Moments before he was attacked and separated from his oxygen tank, Mr. Purnell said he saw an officer throw water on a sleeping client during a long wait. He said he visited the office to help an acquaintance who didn’t speak fluent English seek benefits. An officer wouldn’t let him re-enter the building after he briefly stepped outside.

Those who enter welfare offices are already in daily battle with the stresses of poverty in one of the country’s most expensive cities. Mr. Purnell, who lost his wife and his job in recent years, has been struggling to save money for his children’s education.

A single hostile encounter at a welfare office can have life-altering consequences.

On Jan. 23, 2018, Lucretia McDaniel and her mother were arrested by H.R.A. officers at a Bronx office and charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Ms. McDaniel, 30, said a group of five or six officers jumped on her when she took out her phone to record them roughing up her mother. “They’re twisting my arms, they’re pushing me against the wall,” she recalled. “I was confused. Do they have the right to do this to us?”

The charges against Ms. McDaniel were dropped. But it took months for her employer to clear her for duty as a home health aide, leaving her unable to work. With no income, she tried to enter a homeless shelter with her young son but was turned away because she was staying at a friend’s apartment.

“I never felt so low in my life,” she said. “You already feel bad you have to ask for help.”

Ms. McDaniel received $40,000 in a settlement from the city.

Maria Rosario Angeles, 28, is uninsured but hasn’t applied for Medicaid because she fears returning to an H.R.A. office after being attacked by officers there in 2017. “They told me I should take my boat back to the Dominican Republic and not live off the government,” she said, crying.

In phone interviews, former and current H.R.A. officers described an agency in which the majority of officers try to serve with professionalism and treat people with respect, but aren’t given the training and support to do so.

The officers said they were unequipped to handle the daily chaos of hundreds of frustrated and often irate people who sometimes taunt, curse out or even assault staff members. One H.R.A. officer said that he was bitten in his first week and that he consistently feels unsafe on the job.

A former H.R.A. sergeant told of an incident in the Bronx in which an H.I.V.-positive man punched an officer in the face, then tried to spit his blood at officers. “Eventually, it starts to wear on you,” he said.

Officers said the city’s inability to hold officers accountable for misconduct made them wary of making whistle-blower complaints. Some said they had witnessed repeated instances of unprovoked abuse. “This went on; I worked with officers who operated that way,” said Kevin Milner, who worked as both an officer and supervisor at H.R.A. and was dismissed in 2015 after being out on disability for roughly a year.

Mr. Milner sued the agency in 2015, saying he had been unfairly demoted and retaliated against by supervisors. He couldn’t afford an attorney, and his case was dismissed.

He said he was escorting a troubled young woman out of an H.R.A. center in Queens without issue in 2010 when another officer came out of nowhere and handcuffed her. “I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Mr. Milner recalled. “It was for no reason. The girl was using profanity, but I had the situation well under control.”

Gregory Floyd, president of Teamsters Local 237, which represents the officers, said he had asked the city for more training. “There’s room for improvement,” he said. “They were left to fend for themselves.”

Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Banks should consider a top-to-bottom review of security at H.R.A. centers, examining staffing, training, recruitment and disciplinary procedures.

But H.R.A.’s ability to stop the abuse on its own is limited. New York’s robust government can be marshaled to do great things, like build parks, offer free prekindergarten and clear cigarette smoke from bars. But without strong leadership, its large bureaucracy can get in the way.

To stop the abuse, Mr. de Blasio will have to make changes far beyond this agency, slashing through that web of bureaucracy and labor agreements that limit whom H.R.A. hires, what it pays, and how it disciplines workers.

At H.R.A., reform should begin with more training. Officers receive roughly eight weeks of training, compared with over six months for police officers.

Pay raises could help the agency recruit stronger candidates. The starting salary for an H.R.A. officer is $33,819, and the salary after seven years on the job is $48,745. Pay is set to increase 3 percent in June 2020. But the city might consider more substantial raises and improvements to the work environment.

Officers now carry only batons and handcuffs. Adding nonlethal equipment like pepper spray could help officers avoid more aggressive tactics. Most important is holding problem officers accountable. That’s the surest way to send the message that abuse is unacceptable.

Mr. Purnell thought his trip to the welfare office would take an hour or so of his day and be a favor to a friend. But he stepped into a world in which the simple act of asking for help put his body and life on the line.

“It felt like I was a criminal,” he said. “Like I had done something criminally wrong.”

He was beaten for being poor.