De Blasio Says Education Employees Make Up Harassment Complaints

NEW YORK, NY — Mayor Bill de Blasio seldom has a bad word to say about the city's teachers — except to suggest that they complain too much. Asked why the Department of Education had substantiated such an infinitesimal fraction of its sexual harassment complaints, the mayor on Wednesday said the agency's employees routinely sling false accusations at each other.

"We have to investigate everything, but it is a known fact that unfortunately there's been a bit of a hyper-complaint dynamic, sometimes for the wrong reasons," de Blasio said at a City Hall press conference. "So I think that has inflated their numbers."

City Hall figures released Friday show the DOE received 471 complaints of sexual harassment from 2014 through 2017 but substantiated only seven — less than 1.5 percent, according to news reports. City Hall did not provide the figures to Patch.

That's far lower than the rate for all city agencies, which substantiated 221 — or 16.8 percent — of the 1,312 complaints they received over a roughly four-year period, news reports say.

De Blasio attributed the low rate to a "cultural reality" within the department. He said its employees often make sham claims about all sorts of things, not just sexual harassment.

The city takes any "sincere" report of sexual harassment or other bad behavior "very, very seriously," he said, but it's a "known fact" that DOE employees are more likely to file bad complaints than their counterparts in other agencies.

"Some people inappropriately make complaints for other reasons," he said. "Not just — I'm not even sure it's ever about sexual harassment, but it is, unfortunately, a part of the culture and it has to be addressed separately."

The city plans to bring every agency under a single standard for employee training and annual reporting on sexual harassment, de Blasio said, citing the #MeToo movement against harassment as a motivator.

The mayor's apparent skepticism toward some sexual harassment complaints came the same day that first lady Chirlane McCray was scheduled to host a panel discussion at Gracie Mansion titled "No More Silence: What's Next in the #MeToo and #TimesUp Movements."

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson grimaced when asked about the mayor's claim of a "hyper-complaint dynamic" within the DOE. "I don't know what that means," he said.

Johnson called the low number of substantiated DOE complaints "shocking."

"There's a level of incongruity there that's hard to understand," he said.

De Blasio later walked back his comments on Twitter, hours after fielding questions from reporters.

"Let me be clear, every single person who has the courage to come forward with a sexual harassment complaint deserves to be believed," he tweeted.

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks at the National Action Network Convention on April 18, 2018. Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)