Quality of Life, Advocacy, & Social Justice
East Harlem (in red, below) hosts a disproportionate number of OASAS-licensed Opioid Treatment Programs, that wealthier zip codes have rejected. This graph clearly illustrates that the NYS Office of Addiction Services and Supports applies discriminatory medical redlining, forcing low-income communities of color to bear more than their fair share of programs.
In 2018 Staten Island had 50% more premature drug-related deaths than Harlem, yet Harlem has 6 times the Opioid Treatment Program capacity. As a result, many Staten Islanders have to travel to other boroughs (and to Harlem, for example) for help in their struggle with addiction.
Staten Island has 35% more people than Harlem, yet according to the New York Department of Health, in 2018 it had over 50% more premature drug-related deaths.
The Greater Harlem Coalition partnered with Silicon Harlem to present an NYC Open Data workshop on Visualizing Social Justice on March 4th.
Thursday, February 27th – 7:00 PM, Ascension Presbyterian Church, 15 Mount Morris Park West @ 122nd St.
When will other, wealthier communities accept their Fair Share?
Thursday, February 27th – 7:00 PM
Ascension Presbyterian Church
15 Mount Morris Park West @ 122nd St
Presenters:
Mount Sinai Beth Israel
Dr. Lily Awad, Assistant Professor Psychiatry and Director of Addiction services, Mount Sinai Beth Israel.
Teri Friedman, MS, CRC Director Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Opioid Treatment Program.
Will discuss Methadone and other modalities used to treat addiction, including dispensing protocol, outcome, and the use of the life saving drug Narcan.
Bridget G. Brennan, the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for the City of New York
Will speak to the impact the 2020 New York State Bail Reform is having (and will have) on the quality of life in Harlem and East Harlem.
mmpcia.org greaterharlem.nyc
Illegal Drug Use, Treatment, and Bail Reform MMPCIA and The Greater Harlem Coalition are working to locate opioid treatment programs in all New York communities and to end the practice of oversaturating Harlem and East Harlem.
At a recent meeting with police officers who patrol 124th Street, a question was asked about what tool they needed the most in their fight against drug dealing and quality of life issues. The unequivocal response from the police officers in the room was security cameras.
A camera system for your building or home is a series of compromises and a complex one at that. First of all, We would stress that you have to focus on the quality of the camera, as expressed in megapixels. There is no point in buying and installing a system that doesn’t have the resolution to tell the police, and then convince a jury, who the perpetrator is. While I currently have a system with 6, 3 MP (3 megapixels or 3,000 pixels) cameras, if I was buying today, We would aim for a 5 MP camera system or above.
Once you set a camera standard (5MP+ cameras…), then the issue is really how to wire the setup. Although a wireless setup sounds good, stay clear from this kind of system. Wireless cameras still need wires (for power) or batteries (which you’ll go through at an alarming rate and need to get up on a ladder to change…). All a wireless camera will give you is a wireless data transfer to the DVR that records your footage for review or preservation. But, being wireless, you’ll run into problems as the signal tries to get through thick Harlem brownstone/apartment walls. And, in the end, the data transfer is often so weak compared to a wired connection that you’ll be stuck with low-resolution cameras and poor quality recordings.
We would recommend looking for a ‘Power over Ethernet’ camera system (PoE). This means that both the power sent to the camera and the data from the camera to the DVR, are sent by the same cable (typically called an ethernet cable). That means that you (or the installer) just has to get one wire to each camera from the DVR, and not worry about the proximity of the closest electrical power source (note that the cameras use LED’s to light up the scene at night time, and while you will only get black/white images at night, at least you’ll get images).
We would recommend a ‘package’ like the ones you see here that mostly come with 2 TB DVRs. (The DVRs are the hard drives that store the footage for you. You’ll usually need to buy your own monitor to view the footage. A DVR with 2 TB (2 terabytes) will roughly give you 1 or 2 weeks of footage that you can review (newer footage overwrites the oldest, so you have to export/save anything of value you want to preserve to a USB drive).
Note that anyone who can do electrical work, can easily put up a camera system, and no permits are required. Also, if you want to get super ‘Mission Impossible’ a movable/zoomable camera setup, this will require a separate power source to run the motors that drive these cameras and thus cost significantly more.
Lastly, we want to emphasize that there is no point mounting your cameras up high and getting great footage of criminals’ headgear. You need to think about ways to get footage from as close to eye-level as you can. There is, of course, the issue of this then being vandalized, but a high camera will only tell you that ‘someone’ came to your building, but not give the authorities enough information to find that person, let alone convict someone in a court of law.
If we were starting today, we might go with something like this:
or, if we wanted a more budget-friendly system:
GHC Protest At Mt. Sinai Meeting With Political Leaders, Mentioned In “The City “ – 092719
By Rachel Holliday Smith
On West 124th Street, Mount Sinai Hospital has been planning for more than a year to open a new health facility.
In its current form, the Mt. Sinai outpatient clinic, set for a late-2021 opening, would include primary and specialty care as well as mental health treatment for children, teens and adults.
On the block Mt. Sinai is eyeing, there are multiple methadone clinics, a sliding-scale health center and at least two homeless shelters.
The Greater Harlem Coalition was founded last year to fight the Mount Sinai facility and bring attention to the concentration of social and health services in East and Central Harlem as a problem.
The protesters’ message was clear: the neighborhood is already doing more than its fair share, and they shouldn’t have to shoulder more services.
On a map of the density of mental health programs the group compiled from state and city health data, Harlem is shaded dark gray. Their analysis found Harlem has just 5% of New York City’s population but 15% of its mental health programs.
Data from the state’s Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services (OASAS) obtained by the coalition through a Freedom of Information Law request shows that while 6.9% of people in New York City OASAS-certified treatment programs for opioid addiction are Harlem residents, nearly a fifth (19.1%) of opioid treatment programs are located there as well.
Shawn Hill, a co-founder of the Coalition told the crowd, “Every time you feel overburdened, every time you feel that it’s too much — you are absolutely correct. And we have the data to back that up,”
For full article clink here:
https://thecity.nyc/2019/09/harlem-overburdened-with-clinics-neighbors-complain.html
Come out and protest the over saturation of addiction services in greater Harlem!
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
10:30am – 11:00am
Gale Brewer’s Office
Manhattan Borough President
431 West 125th Street
A reminder that we need you to join us at The Greater Harlem Coalition’s protest from 10:30-11:00 in front of Gale Brewer’s office at 431 West 125th Street, on Tuesday, September 24th, 2019.
At 11:00 the Borough President will host a meeting with local politicians, their staff, representatives from our Coalition, representatives from MMPCIA, and representatives from Mount Sinai. We need you to join the 10:30 protest in front of the meeting location so all attendees have to pass by the community who will be most affected by Mount Sinai’s decision.
Please make every effort to attend. Spread the word. Our community is already oversaturated, and bringing in an additional 2,400 more mental health and substance abuse clients into the heart of Harlem will be devastating to the community.
Tuesday, May 28th at 5:30 PM, at 1470 Madison Avenue, Room 5-101
Next Tuesday, Mount Sinai will host a Community Advisory Board Meeting where they will discuss the proposed move of 2,500 mental health and substance abuse clients from Morningside Heights to West 124th Street.
This meeting is about your block, your subway station, your streets, and your community.
The meeting will take place on Tuesday, May 28th at 5:30 PM, at 1470 Madison Avenue, Room 5-101. We need you to encourage your neighbors to join, to bring your children, and to spread the word on your block by posting the attached flyer and emailing your friends living and working in Harlem. Our goal to have 1,000 members of the community there to show Mount Sinai exactly how Harlem feels about their proposal.
Please wear a GREEN shirt if you can, which will identify you as part of the Greater Harlem Coalition. Bring/Draw/Print/Create a poster, a sign, a banner or have your kids do it!
SCHEDULE:
5:00 – 5:25 PM – Meet at 1470 Madison Avenue (between 101st and 102nd Streets) to march in front of the entrance of the hospital
5:30 PM – Attend and speak out at the Community Advisory Board Meeting in Room 5-101, 1470 Madison Avenue
We need your voice to demand that Mount Sinai commit to reducing their contribution to the over saturation of Harlem.
Since Robert Rodriguez’s election to New York State Assembly, the number of substance abuse programs in his district #68 has exploded to become larger than any other district in New York City.
Based on our 2019 data request via FOIL (Freedom of Information Law), we are able to display a map of substance abuse programs by NY State Assembly districts. The data shows that since Robert Rodriguez’s election, the number of substance abuse programs in his district has exploded to become larger than any other district in New York City. [note the darkest district on this map]
As you know, New York State Assembly Districts have equal population counts, and thus Robert Rodriguez’s District 68 is shockingly oversaturated with 44 such programs. By comparison, 46 other districts have less than 10 substance abuse programs, and 5 districts have none.
Compounding this oversaturation of Robert Rodriguez’s district is the fact that the second highest count of substance abuse programs is located in NY State Assembly District 70 – immediately adjacent.
Consistent with this data, in our earlier post, you can see that 76% of the patients getting drug treatment in Harlem’s substance abuse clinics do not reside in Harlem.
Hover over map to reveal Assembly Districts and number of substance abuse programs found in each.
How can you help Harlem?
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