Photo: Queens DA Richard Brown (second from l.) testified last week before the City Council Public Safety and Finance committees. Courtesy of the Queens DA’s Office.
The Queens district attorney last week urged the city to make available for conversion to office space the 10-story Queens House of Detention which , for the most part, has been empty since 2002 and for which the Corrections Department has long said it has no need.
In testimony before the City Council Finance and Public Safety committees, Queens DA Richard Brown pointed out that it “doesn’t make fiscal sense—especially when sitting adjacent to my office, literally just a wall away, is the shuttered 10-storied Queens House of Detention, which has been vacant for a dozen years. By renovating the House of Detention into usable office space for my staff, the cost-benefit of such a consolidation would mean an elimination of our lease payments and the reduction of duplicate overhead costs, as well as an increase in staff productivity and the added savings of the City not having to pay to maintain an empty building.”
Brown said that the goal “of establishing a state of the art Cyber Crime forensic laboratory on site has been a long-standing and critical problem due to the lack of available space in our existing office facilities. In a nutshell, we currently are blocked from moving forward because we do not have the office space needed to establish these new initiatives, alleviate our overcrowding, or house additional hires.”
Brown also noted that his office has made “significant strides in addressing many of our county’s new and emerging crime trends and needs and were able to add some critically needed new initiatives to our operations. Along those lines we began a new and active Immigrant Affairs initiative with an experienced, multi-lingual staff of attorneys, investigators and paralegals dedicated to addressing the needs of our county’s large immigrant population and assisting those communities in better accessing a wide array of services available to them. We were able to increase staffing assigned to vehicular crimes and gang violence matters, while also addressing some of our long-term staffing needs in the economic crimes area as well—where we continue to see steady increases in many areas, including identity theft, skimmer-based ATM thefts, credit card fraud, revenue crimes, financial exploitation crimes targeting the elderly and many others. And we were able to enhance staffing devoted to community-based youth violence prevention and youth empowerment initiatives—with still more to come.”
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