Governor Cuomo taps billionaire Bloomberg to implement a COVID-19 tech surveillance apparatus

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and Mike Bloomberg today announced a new nation-leading COVID-19 contact tracing program to control the infection rate of the disease. Mike Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies have committed organizational support and technical assistance to help build and execute this new program. The contact tracing program will be done in coordination with the downstate region as well as New Jersey and Connecticut and will serve as an important resource to gather best practices and as a model that can be replicated across the nation. There has never been a contact tracing program implemented at this scale either in New York or anywhere in the United States. The program will launch immediately.

As part of this effort, The Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University will build an online curriculum and training program for contact tracers. The New York State Department of Health will work with Bloomberg Philanthropies to help identify and recruit contact tracer candidates for the training program, including staff from the State Department of Health, investigators from various state agencies, hundreds of tracers from downstate counties and SUNY and CUNY students in medical fields. Bloomberg Philanthropies will also work with New York State to establish an expert panel to review the work of the program, and create a best in class model that other states can use for contact tracing.

 We're all eager to begin loosening restrictions on our daily lives and our economy. But in order to do that as safely as possible, we first have to put in place systems to identify people who may have been exposed to the virus and support them as they isolate," said Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and Bloomberg LP, three-term mayor of New York City. "I'm honored to partner with Governor Cuomo and New York State to help do that, by creating a new contact tracing program on a widespread scale. Coupled with far more testing, it will help us drive the virus into a corner -- saving lives and allowing more people to begin getting back to work."

City paid consulting firm to manipulate the violence statistics at Rikers Island with shady and unethical tech methods

 

Propublica

In April 2017, partners from McKinsey & Company sent a confidential final report to the New York City corrections commissioner. They had spent almost three years leading an unusual project for a white-shoe corporate consulting firm like McKinsey: Attempting to stem the tide of inmate brawls, gang slashings and assaults by guards that threatened to overwhelm the jail complex on Rikers Island.

The report recounted that McKinsey had tested its new anti-violence strategy in what the firm called “Restart” housing units at Rikers. The results were striking. Violence had dropped more than 50% in the Restart facilities, the McKinsey partners wrote.

The number was bogus. Jail officials and McKinsey consultants had jointly rigged the Restart program in its earliest phase to all but guarantee there would be few violent episodes, according to documents and interviews. They stacked the units with inmates they believed to be compliant and unlikely to get into fights or to attack staff.

Publicly, McKinsey and top corrections officials touted the drop in violence in these units as an early sign of their project’s success — without disclosing that they had tilted the scale in favor of that result. After McKinsey handed off the inmate selection process, about a year into the firm’s work at Rikers, jail officials continued to manipulate the population of the Restart units to keep their violence numbers low.

In October of this year, the New York City Council voted to approve Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to close Rikers. The vote occurred during the same month that a federal monitor, appointed by a court to oversee reform at Rikers, revealed that violence by jail guards there continues to worsen. Overall, using the metrics employed by McKinsey, jailhouse violence has risen nearly 50% since the firm began its assignment.

The full story of how New York City came to pay McKinsey $27.5 million only to abandon many of the firm’s recommendations and decide to shut Rikers has never been told. A ProPublica investigation, based on interviews with 36 people, half of whom worked directly on the project, as well as more than 10,000 pages of project documents, internal emails and other records, reveals that problems dogged the project at every stage.

Among the issues that plagued the project: McKinsey, which had never before advised a jail or prison system, made data errors that further undercut the results it reported from Restart units. The firm also persuaded the Department of Correction to spend millions on the sorts of advanced data analytics favored by McKinsey’s corporate clients. The department never ended up using many of the those data products, some of which simply did not work very well.

What happened at Rikers is a cautionary tale of a public-sector consulting boom that has emerged over the past decade. In recent years, government agencies across the United States have entrusted management consultants with more and more facets of public administration, from designing school systems to shaping Medicaid policy. Public-sector consulting in North America is a more than $9 billion industry, with an average yearly growth rate of about half a billion dollars, according to ALM Intelligence, which monitors the consulting business. McKinsey was anxious to expand into a potentially lucrative branch of public-sector work, corrections consulting, according to a former McKinsey consultant who worked on the project.

As I am sure you all are aware, and this is mostly directed to the residents of Kew Gardens, Mott Haven, Boerum Hill and Chinatown, this report was used to justify closing Rikers. 

In the future, who will they contract to study and manipulate the data after the four borough tower jails get built?

Jimmy Van Bramer calls for more surveillance cameras to stop parking in bike lanes

Sunnyside Post
 
Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer joined forces with members of Transportation Alternatives in Long Island City this morning to condemn motorists who block sidewalks, bike lanes and crosswalks—and to call on the NYPD to ticket these drivers.

Van Bramer also announced his support for a pilot program that would bring 20 cameras to the streets of New York tasked with catching drivers who block bicycle lanes and pedestrian pathways. The program, which is likely to be introduced as a bill before the council, is part of Transportation Alternatives’ new #TechforSafety campaign.

 When cars turn our sidewalks into parking lots and block our bike lanes and crosswalks, they put pedestrians and cyclists in danger,” Van Bramer said. “The NYPD must step up its enforcement against illegal parking and ticket and tow cars that are blatantly breaking the law. We need a comprehensive, zero-tolerance policy and legislation to increase penalties.”

Sure we need more enforcement of habitual pig parking offenders, but more cameras on the streets is not the answer and any ideas from TransAlt are always bad.

It's a short post but the comment thread is long and interesting. Notably the one dink who describes drivers as "car people"

Senate Majority Leader gives Gianaris ability to quash Amazon corporate welfare deal as de Blasio starts job training program designed for it

 

QNS


Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins recommended state Senator Michael Gianaris as a member of the state Public Authorities Control Board, which could potentially veto the Amazon project.

 
Gianaris, the deputy majority leader of the Senate, has been a leading opponent of the Amazon deal due to the incentive package worth nearly $3 billion in taxpayer funds.
 
“New York needs responsible fiscal stewardship now more than ever and ensuring our economic development dollars are well spent is a responsibility I take very seriously,” Gianaris said Monday. 

“I appreciate Leader Stewart-Cousin’s faith in me and am honored she submitted my name to serve on the PACB.”

We shall see.

Meanwhile...

QNS

As it gears up for the full arrival of Amazon’s HQ2 campus in Long Island City is the coming years, the de Blasio administration announced Jan. 28 it is offering up to $300,000 in micro-grants to qualified organizations that specialize in workforce development.

The grants will support research and planning into innovative approaches the city could take to promote training and hiring of underrepresented New Yorkers in tech and other in-demand sectors.

“Preparing New Yorkers for the jobs of tomorrow and making sure those jobs are accessible to residents from all backgrounds with different skill sets is critical to leveling the economic playing field,” the New York City Economic Development Corporation President and CEO James Patchett said. “We are excited to partner with the Office of Workforce Development to catalyze innovative workforce training programs that will help ensure New Yorkers are ahead of the game as the city’s tech sector booms.”

 Through a request for expressions of interest, known as an RFEI, the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development and the NYCEDC will work with community-based organizations with funds to develop effective, innovative programmatic concepts the city and its partners can use to help ensure local talent is prepared to access new hiring tech opportunities.