Stringer: Partnership with NYPD Will Cut Claims Costs

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New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer announced a partnership designed to reduce claims against the New York Police Department.

Since November, Stringer's office has shared in real time all claims filed against the police. Attorneys at both offices have also met weekly to address trouble spots, improve public safety and limit the city's liability from lawsuits, Stringer said Monday to the business group Association for a Better New York.

According to Stringer, legal judgments against the city total $732 million a year, triple the 1995 total. His initiative, ClaimStat, is essentially a comptroller's version of CompStat, a metric that city police have used since the 1990s to reduce crime.

"Where once there were reams of buried data, there is now a cutting-edge tool for reform," said Stringer. "Let me tell you - commissioners are taking note, because they know that claims are often a leading indicator of challenges within their agency. [Police] Commissioner Bill Bratton gets this."

Stringer laid out other initiatives, including an audit of $700 million the city has invested in recent years to upgrade Internet speeds at city schools and libraries; the launch of a "comptroller's audit assessment team," which will monitor agencies for implementation of recommendations from previous audits; and a red-tape commission of small business owners and regulatory experts that will identify bureaucratic roadblocks.

Co-chairing the latter are Jessica Lappin, president of the Downtown Alliance, and Michael Lambert, executive director of the Bed-Stuy Gateway Business Improvement District and co-chair of the New York City BID Association, which represents all 68 business improvement districts in the city.

Stringer also said Big Lots Stores Inc., one of the nation's largest discount retailers, has agreed to the New York City Pension Funds' Boardroom Accountability Project proposal. Stringer has demanded that 75 major companies give long-term shareholders the right to nominate independent candidates.

"For too long, the election of corporate directors has been a stacked deck," said Stringer. "They're not elections, they're coronations. Boss Tweed never had it so good."

According to Stringer, highlights of his first year in office included a six-point ethics overhaul of the operations of the Bureau of Asset Management, which his office oversees. They include banning placement agents and hiring BAM's inaugural chief risk and compliance officers.

Stringer called placement agents "those middlemen who got paid big bucks for doing little work."

In addition, said Stringer, his office helped the city save $1.2 billion through bond refinancings; detailed how the New York City Housing Authority missed out on nearly $700 million in federal funds that could have been used to purchase new boilers and other necessities; and assigned a D grade to city agencies on their investments with minority- and women-owned businesses.

It also mandated technology vendors to document work before payment, and worked with Mayor Bill de Blasio, Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito and the City Council and Chancellor Carmen Fariña to secure $23 million in funding for arts teachers after publishing a report that found 28% of city schools had no full-time arts instructor.

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New York
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