On Tuesday, April 21, Senior Policy Associate Caitlyn Passaretti submitted testimony to the NYC Council Committee on Children and Youth, the Committee on Mental Health and Substance Use and the Committee on Oversight & Investigations. On behalf of CCC, the testimony focuses on Intro 660, a bill that, though well-intentioned, has the potential to expand surveillance and criminalization of young people as well as erode trust they have in programs provided by DYCD. 

Read the testimony below.

Testimony of Caitlyn Passaretti, Senior Policy Associate
Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York
Submitted to New York City Council Committee on Children and Youth, the Committee on Mental Health and Substance Use and the Committee on Oversight & Investigations 
April 21, 2026

Since 1944, Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York has served as an independent, multi-issue child advocacy organization. CCC does not accept or receive public resources, provide direct services, or represent a sector or workforce; our priority is improving outcomes for children and families through civic engagement, research, and advocacy. We document the facts, engage, and mobilize New Yorkers, and advocate for solutions to ensure that every New York child is healthy, housed, educated, and safe.  

We would like to thank Chair Stevens, Chair Cabán, and Chair Williams and all the members of the City Council Children and Youth Committee, Mental Health and Substance Use Committee and the Oversight & Investigations Committee for holding this hearing today and hearing public testimony.  

We greatly appreciate the City Council’s attention to the impacts of social media and screen time on youth mental health, and support efforts to better understand, educate about, and regulate social media intake. For the purposes of this testimony, we will focus on Int. 660, which would require DYCD providers to monitor altercations between youth in their programs. Though well-intentioned, this bill has the potential to expand surveillance and criminalization of young people. 

Oppose Int. 660 

Every child and youth deserves access to enriching programs and quality services, including programming offered through the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) such as COMPASS and SONYC afterschool programs, the Runaway and Homeless Youth System, the Crisis Management System, summer programming, employment opportunities and more. Young people seek these programs because they are curious to learn, in need of housing supports, looking for meaningful community engagement, or looking for work. The common denominator is that these spaces are meant to provide care, support, and enriching activities.  

We are concerned that Intro 660 would erode the trust that youth have in the providers and spaces offered by DYCD, impacting the lives of the over 120,000 young people engaged in programming. Intro 660 would expand surveillance of young people under the age of 24 by requiring all programs funded by DYCD to report on in-person verbal or physical altercations involving youth under 24, detail the reasons for those altercations, examine related online activity, and report whether an agency responded. 

Those requirements raise several concerns: 

• The bill requires online surveillance of young people in DYCD-funded programs, which will transition youth-serving spaces from trusted places for mediation, support, and conflict resolution, to a monitoring role that can damage relationships between youth and staff.  

• The broad scope of the bill, including both “verbal or physical altercations” and “relevant” online activity would result in overreach and subjective interpretation. This would result in ordinary youth conflict, or reactive behavior receiving scrutiny instead of support. In many ways, this bill would create a new surveillance database of our youth that in effect could become a new iteration of the gang database.  

• There are also serious data and privacy concerns with this legislation. It does not call for a general review of trends alone; it requires incident-level reporting on specific altercations, related online activity, and agency response, all in machine-readable form. Although the bill states the report should not violate existing privacy laws, it does not take any proactive steps to protect young people from having personally identifiable information released.  

• DYCD providers deal with late contracts, low rates, and budgets not coupled with inflation. This is an additional task that providers do not have the capacity to do.  

This raises equity issues as well. It is likely that youth who are already subject to heavier surveillance and system contact will face more scrutiny. We again urge that city leaders meet young people with investments in supportive services, rather than criminalizing approaches.   

For these reasons, we urge the Council to reject Int. 660 and instead support approaches to youth safety that strengthen youth programs as places for prevention, conflict resolution, healing, and care.