When Sheila Berman traveled to a Brooklyn police precinct last month to file a report, she encountered stairs just inside the front entrance — a dead end for a 62-year-old woman who walks with the help of a cane.
So she stood outside the 68th Precinct in Bay Ridge and hollered for help.
“I had to yell because I couldn’t get up the stairs,” Berman, who suffers from back problems, told THE CITY. “An officer had to come out and accompany me down the driveway and across the parking lot to let me in through the back door.
“I shouldn’t have to stand on the sidewalk yelling for a cop.”
Sunday marked eight years since several New Yorkers with disabilities filed a class-action lawsuit against the city and the NYPD in federal court
over decades of alleged civil-rights violations — including architectural barriers at more than half of the city’s 77 police stationhouses. The suit is still winding through the courts.
“This is a case that illustrates that they maybe aren’t taking it very seriously,” said Scott Gordon, senior staff attorney for Disability Rights Advocates, the nonprofit legal rights center that represents the plaintiffs.
In response to questions from THE CITY, a spokesperson for the NYPD said that settlement talks are ongoing but would not comment on the status of accessibility upgrades for people who use wheelchairs, walkers and other mobility devices.
In its 2024-2028 “AccessibleNYPD” plan, updated early this year, the Police Department conceded that efforts to make public areas in just 16 so-called hub stationhouses fully accessible by the end of 2021 were pushed back by the pandemic to the end of 2027.
“A small number of stationhouses will not be able to be remediated and will not be accessible to those with mobility impairments,” the NYPD wrote in the five-year accessibility plan, which is required of all city agencies under a 2023 law. “However, the NYPD is committed to providing access to programs and services through alternative methods.”
The department’s plan also estimates that those select hubs in each borough need close to $60 million in renovations through 2028 to bring them into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Since the suit was filed on Oct. 27, 2016, two of the four individual plaintiffs have died and the NYPD has had five police commissioners (including the current interim one).
The judge presiding over the case ruled in February 2020 that the NYPD had discriminated against people with mobility disabilities by offering some services — including community meetings, cash-for-guns trade-ins and in-person permit applications — at stationhouses with “pervasive” barriers to access.
U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Caproni also noted that she has “reservations” about the NYPD’s proposal to make accessibility upgrades only at the 16 “hubs,” rather than at all 77 stationhouses.
“This plan disregards the undisputed benefits of delivering NYPD services and programs at a local level — for an individual is most likely to seek services at his or her local station,” Caproni wrote at the time.
Time Warp
Gordon, the Disability Rights Advocates lawyer, compared entering police facilities in the city to “stepping back in time,” noting that many were built before the passage of the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
Signed into law by President Richard Nixon, it bars discrimination on the basis of disability for entities that receive federal funding, like the NYPD.
“They’ve had something like 50 years to comply,” Gordon said.
“These police stations are central for so many activities and services, whether you’re talking about emergency things or filling out a police report,” he added. “Those emergency services are absolutely crucial to everyone in the city, but people with disabilities cannot access those services in the same way.”
While there have been modest gains via accessibility-related lawsuits filed against the MTA and the Taxi & Limousine Commission, progress has been harder to come by in the NYPD case.
“Delay, delay, delay is a standard tactic that the city uses,” said Joseph Rappaport, executive director of Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, one of the two organizations that sued the city and the NYPD. “What that means in that case is that almost five years after disabled people won in court, really nothing has happened to improve the accessibility of police precincts.”
At some police buildings, people with disabilities must enter through hard-to-find side or rear entrances. In other instances, the NYPD has procedures to provide accommodations that include shifting to an alternate accessible location within or outside of a stationhouse or bringing a program or service directly to a person with a disability, according to its five-year-plan.
“Those sorts of accommodations rely on everything working perfectly and everyone knowing what to do or else they go sideways fast,” Gordon said.
Plaintiff Jean Ryan, a motorized wheelchair user who lives in Brooklyn, said she has encountered obstacles at stationhouses while trying to dispose of unused medications in drop boxes, attend meetings and obtain a blue plastic parking permit for people with disabilities.
“Precincts are used for things other than taking people who got arrested,” said Ryan, president of Disabled in Action of New York, which is also party to the lawsuit.
The NYPD is also facing pressure on another legal front from the Justice Department.
Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, this spring flagged the department over police officers parking on sidewalks and in crosswalks near police precincts, a long-running practice that prosecutors said leads to “inaccessibility of the pedestrian grid.”
“It’s not just that they’re fortresses,” Ryan said. “They’re inaccessible fortresses.”
Berman, who had to yell for someone to let her into the 68 Precinct, said it’s unreasonable that so many stationhouses remain largely off-limits to people with mobility issues.
“In 2024, this is ridiculous,” she said.
