ABOUT
NYC Community Cleanup is a new citywide initiative designed to address neighborhood hot spots and eyesores. NYC Community Cleanup puts low-level offenders (arrested for minor offenses such as vandalism, shoplifting, and public drunkenness) to work repairing conditions of disorder throughout New York City. The goal is to create meaningful community service work projects that emphasize the values of immediacy (tying a crime to its consequences); visibility (showing New Yorkers that the justice system is responding to neighborhood problems); and accountability (ensuring high compliance rates). NYC Community Cleanup has three principal components:
Targeting Local Needs: Using data from a variety of sources—the city's 311 system, foreclosure reports, crime maps—NYC Community Cleanup identifies neighborhoods across New York City that are struggling with visible signs of disorder. This data is augmented by focused outreach to community boards and precinct councils to determine local priorities. In addition, New Yorkers can e-mail NYC Community Cleanup at notify@nycleanup.org to suggest ideas for possible projects. NYC Community Cleanup projects are efforts to take care of chronic and emerging neighborhood problems. This includes sorting recyclables, sweeping streets, cleaning up local parks, and improving blighted waterfront areas. Cleaning Up NYC: After identifying local problems, NYC Community Cleanup sends out supervised work crews to address them. The crews are comprised of individuals referred by criminal court judges to pay their debt to New York through community service. Work crews are highly visible: participants wear special vests and jump suits (depending upon the weather and the activity) and have saw horses and special signage advertising that they are part of NYC Community Cleanup. All NYC Community Cleanup participants are offered links to social services—drug treatment, job training, and counseling. Any individual who does not complete their community service as ordered is immediately referred back to court for re-sentencing. Communicating the Results: One of NYC Community Cleanup’s goals is to demonstrate to New Yorkers that justice is at work in their communities. This includes not just an emphasis on visible restitution projects but also a public communications campaign including presentations by NYC Community Cleanup staff at local churches, schools and community groups, as well as a website that enables users to see before and after photos of the work that has been done in their neighborhoods. |
NYC Community Cleanup is an effort to go to scale with the model of targeted community restitution originally pioneered by the City of New York and the New York State Unified Court System in three award-winning community courts—Midtown Community Court, Red Hook Community Justice Center, and Bronx Community Solutions. Researchers have documented that these projects have helped to reduce local crime and levels of neighborhood fear while improving public trust in justice. NYC Community Cleanup is operated as a project of the Center for Court Innovation in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator.
The Project Director of NYC Community Cleanup is James Brodick, who also continues to serve as project director of the Red Hook Community Justice Center, the multi-jurisdictional community court in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Mr. Brodick joined the Center for Court Innovation in 1998 and has held numerous positions at the Red Hook Community Justice Center, including project coordinator of the Red Hook Public Safety Corps (an AmeriCorps program), director of Community Programs (which includes mediation, housing resource, youth court, AmeriCorps and Operation Tool Kit), and deputy director. He received his B.S. in business management from Saint John’s University in 1995.
The Deputy Project Director of NYC Community Cleanup is Benjamin Smith. He joined the Center in 2003 as a development associate. Since 2005, he worked at Bronx Community Solutions, a project of the Center for Court Innovation which seeks to take community court principles to scale in a traditional centralized court, as a coordinator of operations and planning. He received his B.A. in history from Haverford College and is currently pursuing an M.P.A. at Baruch College.