Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday questioned whether 471 sexual harassment complaints filed by Department of Education workers were legitimate — and blamed the staggering statistic on a “hyper-complaint dynamic” at the city agency.
De Blasio’s explanation came in response to a question from The Post about the low number — 1.5 percent — of substantiated claims at the DOE, which topped the list of city agencies in number of complaints.
“Any sincere reporting, whether it’s about sexual harassment or, you know, cheating on tests or anything, we take very, very seriously … and we have to investigate everything,” he said at a press conference. “But it is a known fact that unfortunately there’s been a bit of a hyper-complaint dynamic sometimes for the wrong reasons. So I think that has inflated their numbers. We need to address that cultural reality within the DOE.”
Just seven complaints within the DOE were substantiated out of 471 complaints filed from July 2013 through 2017, according to data released last Friday by City Hall.
The mayor tried walking back his comments, saying he wasn’t specifically referring to trumped-up complaints of sexual harassment at the DOE.
“Some are absolutely sincere — many I’m sure are absolutely sincere. We take them very seriously, we have to investigate everything. We treat everything with equality when it comes to investigating,” he explained. “But I’m also trying to be honest about something that’s different at DOE than at a lot of other places. And it’s a pretty well-known thing in the education world. Some people inappropriately make complaints for other reasons, not just — I’m not even sure it’s ever about sexual harassment. But it is unfortunately part of the culture.”
Records showed municipal workers have filed 1,312 complaints of sexual harassment against their colleagues from July 2013 through 2017 — and that 221 had been substantiated.
De Blasio said it was a “generalized culture we have to address where people use the complaint process for reasons other than a legitimate complaint.”