Part 9 — Public Safety, Emergency Response, Arrest Data, and Community Financial Impact printable pdf

Part 9 — Public Safety, Emergency Response, Arrest Data, and Community Financial Impact

Introduction

Part 8 examined safety as one component of Borden Avenue Veterans’ Residence operations. This Part addresses the subject more specifically through independent emergency-response and arrest records associated with 21-10 Borden Avenue and considers what those records indicate about the residential environment, demands on public systems, and the potential secondary financial impact of repeated emergency activity.

The distinction is important because later Parts separately examine ICL management, DHS contract oversight, governmental accountability, and findings and recommendations. Part 9 does not attempt to assign responsibility for individual incidents or determine whether particular events resulted from provider practices. Its purpose is to establish the scale and character of documented emergency and law-enforcement activity and identify the questions that those records reasonably raise.

The available records document sustained emergency activity over the period examined. At the same time, they require careful interpretation. A 911 call does not prove misconduct, an arrest does not establish guilt or conviction, and neither dataset independently establishes negligence or a violation of GPD requirements. These records are most useful as objective indicators that can be compared with internal incident reports, VA records, DHS monitoring, and corrective-action documentation.

Emergency-Service Activity

NYPD emergency-response records reviewed for this report identify approximately 1,365 emergency-service calls associated with 21-10 Borden Avenue between August 2024 and December 2025, approximately sixteen months. This represents roughly 85 calls per month and nearly three emergency responses per day during the period examined.

The calls encompass medical emergencies, behavioral-health crises, violence, suspected overdoses, disputes, injuries, unconscious persons, and other circumstances requiring emergency intervention. Major categories identified in the analysis include:

• Approximately 705 ambulance or medical incidents.
• Approximately 218 emotionally disturbed person (EDP) incidents.
• Approximately 85 violent EDP incidents.
• Approximately 58 assault-related incidents.
• Approximately 58 suspected overdose incidents.
• Additional unconscious-person, injury, dispute, disturbance, harassment, and other emergency calls.

Categories may overlap, and these figures should not be added together as though each represents a separate incident. Nevertheless, the approximately 1,365 total calls establish that emergency intervention was a recurring feature of activity associated with the facility during the period reviewed.

The appropriate interpretation is not that every emergency represents program failure. Staff and residents should call 911 when police, ambulance, or other emergency assistance is necessary. A facility serving a large population that includes Veterans with medical, behavioral-health, disability, and substance-use needs can reasonably be expected to experience emergencies.

The more important question is whether repeated events reveal patterns that can be identified and reduced. Public-safety analysis should therefore distinguish unavoidable emergencies from potentially preventable recurring conditions.

Behavioral-Health and Medical Emergencies

Approximately 218 calls involved emotionally disturbed persons, including approximately 85 classified as violent EDP incidents. These records do not establish the diagnosis, treatment history, or circumstances of the individuals involved, and they should not be interpreted to suggest that Veterans with behavioral-health conditions are inherently dangerous.

They do, however, establish repeated reliance upon emergency intervention for behavioral-health crises. That pattern makes crisis prevention and response appropriate subjects for program review. Oversight can examine whether escalating behavior was recognized, whether appropriate clinical resources were available, whether staff had effective crisis procedures, and whether recurring incidents involving particular circumstances produced changes in practice.

Medical and ambulance activity raises similar questions. Some responses may reflect unavoidable illness or disability rather than residential conditions. Others may involve overdose, injury, assault, or behavioral-health crises. The dataset alone cannot reliably distinguish every cause or establish how many ambulance calls resulted in transportation or hospitalization.

For that reason, the value of the emergency data lies primarily in identifying frequency and patterns, not assigning causation.

Emergency Dispositions and Limits of the Records

Approximately 60 percent of the emergency calls reviewed did not contain a publicly available disposition. The absence of a disposition should not be interpreted as evidence that nothing happened, that the incident was concealed, or that required follow-up did not occur. Dispatch and FOIL records may omit information, and incidents can be resolved without arrest or hospital transportation.

This limitation makes comparison with other records particularly important. A comprehensive safety review should reconcile, where available:

• NYPD emergency-response records.
• ICL incident reports and security logs.
• DHS incident and inspection records.
• Applicable VA GPD incident notifications.
• EMS, overdose, injury, and death information.
• Resident grievances and safety complaints.
• Performance-improvement and corrective-action records.

This comparison would provide information that the 911 dataset alone cannot supply, including what occurred after emergency personnel arrived, whether an incident qualified for additional reporting, whether similar incidents had occurred previously, and whether preventive action followed.

Part 17 addresses the broader governmental oversight process. The narrower Part 9 question is whether the available external records correspond with what the responsible organizations recorded internally.

Arrest Activity

Separate NYPD records identify 82 arrest entries associated with 21-10 Borden Avenue from September 2022 through December 2025. Arrests occurred throughout the reviewed period: 13 in 2022, 33 in 2023, 17 in 2024, and 19 in 2025.

The data show that arrest activity was not confined to a single year. Approximately 45 of the 82 arrest records, or 55 percent, were assault-related, while 28 arrests, approximately 34 percent, were classified as felonies. The records include allegations involving assault, weapons possession, menacing, reckless endangerment, narcotics offenses, terroristic threats, criminal mischief, larceny, and other offenses. One September 2025 record identifies a top charge involving possession of a loaded firearm.

Location information is also significant. At least 70 of the 82 arrest records appear to involve alleged conduct occurring inside 21-10 Borden Avenue, rather than merely elsewhere in the surrounding neighborhood. This makes the records directly relevant to evaluation of the residential safety environment.

Important limitations remain. An arrest represents law-enforcement action based upon an allegation; it is not proof of guilt or conviction. Multiple people may also be arrested in connection with one event. The dataset therefore establishes 82 arrest entries, not necessarily 82 separate incidents or 82 different individuals.

What the Records Mean for Veterans

Part 4 discusses vulnerable Veterans, while Part 11 separately evaluates behavioral-health program models. Part 9 should therefore avoid assuming that emergency activity results from the characteristics of the Veteran population. The relevant issue is the environment in which Veterans are expected to stabilize.

A transitional residence necessarily houses people during a period of significant change. Residents may be attending healthcare appointments, pursuing employment or education, restoring benefits, obtaining documentation, meeting housing specialists, and preparing for permanent placement. Frequent serious disturbances can interfere with those activities even when the resident is not personally involved in the underlying incident.

Repeated police responses, ambulance activity, assaults, overdoses, behavioral-health crises, and weapons allegations may affect residents' perceptions of safety and their ability to maintain ordinary routines. The appropriate performance question is therefore not whether a facility can eliminate every incident, but whether it can demonstrate that serious and recurring risks are being identified and reduced.

Safety data should consequently be evaluated over time. Declining rates of assaults, violent crises, overdoses, injuries, ambulance responses, and arrests would provide objective evidence that prevention and stabilization efforts are having an effect.

Public-Safety Resources and the Surrounding Community

The effects of emergency activity do not stop at the facility entrance. Borden Avenue is within the jurisdiction of the NYPD's 108th Precinct, while ambulance and medical responses draw upon FDNY/EMS and hospital resources. Arrests can additionally involve processing, prosecutors, defense counsel, courts, and detention or correctional systems.

Repeated responses to one location therefore represent a secondary public-resource demand beyond the direct cost of operating the residence. Officers or ambulances assigned to Borden Avenue are temporarily unavailable for other calls, although the records reviewed do not establish that any particular community emergency went unanswered because resources were responding there.

This distinction should be preserved. The evidence supports identifying substantial emergency-service utilization; it does not support attributing a specific service failure elsewhere in Queens to a Borden Avenue response.

The policy objective should also never be fewer legitimate 911 calls merely to improve statistics. Emergency assistance must remain readily available. The appropriate objective is fewer emergencies requiring 911 intervention because preventable crises are occurring less often.

Estimated Secondary Financial Impact

The project's cost analysis attempts to illustrate the broader financial consequences associated with repeated emergency activity. Based on modeled costs for police responses, ambulance activity, emergency-department care, psychiatric evaluation, arrest processing, court activity, and short-term detention, the analysis estimates approximately $4 million to $8 million in potential secondary public expenditures during the sixteen-month emergency-call period, with a midpoint of approximately $6 million.

Annualizing the midpoint produces an estimate of approximately $4.5 million per year. The source analysis further estimated an annualized amount exceeding $20,000 per resident using an assumed average resident population of approximately 220.

These figures require substantial caution. They are modeled estimates, not audited government expenditures. The underlying emergency records do not provide invoices showing what NYPD, FDNY, hospitals, prosecutors, courts, insurers, Medicaid, Medicare, VA, or other entities actually spent.

Several limitations prevent the estimate from being treated as an accounting figure:

• Not every ambulance call resulted in transportation.
• Not every transport resulted in emergency-department or inpatient care.
• Not every arrest resulted in prosecution, detention, or conviction.
• Individual incidents may involve several agencies simultaneously.
• Actual personnel time and treatment costs vary considerably.
• Some healthcare costs may reflect ordinary medical needs rather than preventable residential emergencies.

The $4 million to $8 million range is therefore most appropriately presented as an illustrative cost model demonstrating the possible scale of secondary public expenditures, not as a finding that government actually spent that amount because of Borden Avenue.

Relationship to the Direct Operating Budget

The source Part compares the modeled emergency costs with Borden Avenue's annual operating budget of more than $9 million and ICL's organizational revenue of approximately $214 million. Those financial matters are examined more appropriately in Part 10 and the DHS discussion and should not dominate the public-safety analysis here.

One distinction is nevertheless important. Direct program expenditures and secondary emergency expenditures represent different categories of public cost. The first supports housing, staffing, security, food, case management, and other contracted services. The second may arise when police, EMS, hospitals, courts, or other public systems respond to crises associated with the facility.

ICL's organizational revenue should not be treated as unrestricted money available to Borden Avenue, and the comparison does not establish that additional program spending would automatically prevent emergencies. The relevant fiscal question is whether existing public investment is producing measurable improvements in safety and transition.

Prevention as Financial Stewardship

The purpose of analyzing secondary costs is not to suggest that emergency services should be withheld from Veterans. When someone experiences an overdose, medical emergency, assault, behavioral-health crisis, or immediate threat, appropriate emergency intervention is essential.

Financial stewardship instead involves determining whether some emergencies can be prevented before police, ambulance, hospital, or criminal-justice intervention becomes necessary. Potential areas for review include staffing, clinical intervention, substance-use services, security practices, resident assessment, conflict management, and crisis-response procedures.

Prevention can therefore produce two benefits simultaneously. A prevented assault, overdose, serious injury, or behavioral-health crisis protects Veterans while also avoiding some of the public costs associated with emergency response.

Integrated Safety Review

Emergency calls and arrests should ultimately be treated as two components of a larger safety record. Neither captures all incidents, and neither explains what the provider or responsible agencies did in response.

A useful integrated review would compare:

• 1,365 emergency-service calls during the principal sixteen-month review period.
• 82 arrest records between September 2022 and December 2025.
• Internal ICL and security incident documentation.
• DHS incident and inspection records.
• Applicable VA GPD incident reports.
• Resident complaints and grievances.
• Corrective-action and performance-improvement records.

Such reconciliation would permit reviewers to determine whether the same events appear across systems, whether qualifying incidents were appropriately reported, whether recurring patterns were identified, and whether corrective measures were followed by measurable improvement.

This approach avoids duplicating the governmental-accountability analysis in Parts 12 through 17. Part 9 supplies the measurable safety evidence; later Parts determine how the responsible organizations responded to it.

Conclusion

The NYPD records provide substantial objective evidence of recurring emergency and law-enforcement activity associated with Borden Avenue. Approximately 1,365 emergency calls were identified between August 2024 and December 2025, including hundreds of medical and behavioral-health incidents and dozens of suspected overdoses and assault-related calls. Separate records identify 82 arrest entries between September 2022 and December 2025, approximately 55 percent assault-related and 34 percent classified as felonies, with at least 70 apparently involving alleged conduct occurring inside the facility.

Those figures should neither be minimized nor overstated. They do not independently establish negligence, regulatory violations, or criminal guilt. Emergency calls can demonstrate appropriate requests for assistance, arrest records document allegations rather than convictions, and incomplete dispositions prevent the public records from establishing the outcome of many incidents.

What the records establish is a level of recurring emergency activity sufficient to justify systematic measurement and review. The most useful question is therefore not simply how many times police or ambulances responded, but whether the responsible organizations identified recurring causes, implemented appropriate preventive measures, and achieved measurable reductions in serious incidents over time.

The financial analysis reinforces that approach. The estimated $4 million to $8 million secondary cost is a modeled range rather than an audited expenditure, but it illustrates why emergency activity should be considered alongside the direct public investment in transitional housing. Prevention can protect Veterans while reducing avoidable demands upon police, EMS, hospitals, courts, and other public systems.

For purposes of this report, public safety should therefore be treated as a measurable component of transitional-program performance. Emergency intervention will sometimes be unavoidable, and access to it must never be discouraged. The stronger measure of success is whether assaults, overdoses, violent crises, injuries, arrests, and other preventable emergencies decline as the residential environment becomes safer and more stable for Veterans preparing to return to permanent housing and community life.