State and local agencies across New York train law enforcement officers on a condition that much of the medical establishment has disavowed as unscientific and a catalyst for police violence, newly unearthed documents show.

The condition, known as excited delirium syndrome, is said to turn people into erratic, super-strong aggressors and can supposedly lead to cardiac arrest. It dates to largely debunked research from the 1980s, which cited it as an alternate explanation for deaths at the hands of cops.

New York authorities, however, have continued to train officers on the discredited syndrome. In 2023, New York Focus revealed that the New York City Police Department was training its recruits to tase and pepper spray suspected excited delirium sufferers. 

Now, documents obtained by the police reform group Campaign Zero and shared with New York Focus show that half a dozen county sheriffs’ offices, as well as state-level agencies, have also recently included excited delirium in their training.

For decades, people being sued in New York City civil courts over unpaid debt never learned about the lawsuits against them.

The reason? ‘Sewer service,’ a phrase that refers to an old practice of process servers, or the people hired to hand court documents to defendants, throwing those papers in the sewer rather than delivering them.

While servers may not be literally trashing papers anymore, a New York Focus investigation has found that even after New York City and the state court system implemented reforms to fix the issue, servers are still failing to inform defendants about consumer debt lawsuits against them.

To understand the issue, we reviewed court records, analyzed complaints to regulators, and spoke with consumer attorneys across the city.

Here are five key takeaways from our investigation.

As New York Focus’s criminal justice reporter, Chris Gelardi has spent years investigating New York state’s sprawling prison system. That system exploded into chaos this year after authorities released a video of guards beating an incarcerated man to death and corrections officers staged a three-week-long wildcat strike. Gelardi released a series of features and news stories helping readers make sense of the tumult. He also published an investigation into the family dynasty at the agency’s helm, uncovering its decades-long ascent to power and the many scandals it has weathered along the way.

For this work, the Legislative Correspondents Alumni Association awarded Gelardi the annual Walter T. Brown Award for excellence in coverage of New York state government. (Last year, the award went to Focus’s other Chris — our Albany bureau chief, Chris Bragg — for his reporting on the Assembly Speaker’s romantic relationship with a legislative lobbyist.) Gelardi sat down with New York Focus’s editor-in-chief, Akash Mehta, to talk about the stories.

Last April, Sam Gordon, a Harlem resident who works with people experiencing drug addiction, got a notice in the mail: Thousands of dollars were about to be garnished from his wages.

“I’m living pretty much paycheck to paycheck,” said Gordon, a 61-year old immigrant from the former Czechoslovakia who asked not to use his real name. “So that kind of amount would have put me in a situation that would have been not sustainable.”

About five years prior, a mental health crisis followed by a serious bike accident had put Gordon out of work for a few months, leaving him unable to pay his bills. In 2021, Capital One sued him for $3,620 in credit card debt — but he says he didn’t know that until last year.

Capital One was legally obligated to inform Gordon of the lawsuit. The law firm working for the credit card company, called Selip & Stylianou, had hired a process server to give him the court papers. The server claimed in a court filing that in October 2021, he went to Gordon’s apartment and hand-delivered the documents to a relative of his named Damien.

“I live alone,” Gordon told New York Focus. “I don’t know any Damien.”

Because Gordon didn’t show up to court, Capital One automatically won the case, allowing the company to garnish his wages. (Neither Capital One nor Selip & Stylianou responded to requests for comment.)

Lawyers have a term for when process servers lie about delivering papers to defendants: sewer service. As a result, creditors can win court orders, called default judgements, that allow them to garnish the wages of defendants who don’t know they’ve been sued.

These default judgments “can throw a person, can throw a family into financial turmoil, all because the process server didn’t properly notify the consumer that there was a lawsuit against them,” said Ted Mermin, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice.

Sewer service has plagued New York City for decades, and though the city implemented nation-leading reforms in the 2010s to combat it, a New York Focus investigation has found that fraudulent practices persist, limited regulatory enforcement doesn’t always deter bad actors, and some repeat offenders continue operating. To understand the issue, reporters reviewed court records, analyzed complaints to regulators, and spoke with consumer attorneys across the city.

When Governor Kathy Hochul abruptly hit the brakes in January on a sweeping program to price pollution, she said the state needed more time to “get it right.”

Holding off on the cap and invest program would allow “more space and time for public transparency,” her 2025 agenda briefing book promised.

Later that month, the then–head of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation told lawmakers that the agency would “continue the robust stakeholder engagement we have had over the past few months” on New York’s plan to ratchet down pollution while raising billions for the transition to clean energy.

Four months on, there’s little sign that Hochul’s administration has continued those efforts.

As chair of the New York City Council’s Land Use Committee, Rafael Salamanca has the power to determine whether development projects live or die — and it’s made him a magnet for campaign donations from the real estate industry.

Salamanca, who is now running for Bronx borough president, has long maintained a campaign committee for his city races — one that is bound by strict contribution limits for individuals doing business with the city, including developers.

But that’s not his only fundraising vehicle. A New York Focus investigation has found that Salamanca opened a second campaign committee in recent years — one which funds his campaigns for an unpaid position in the Bronx Democratic Party — that is subject to much looser rules.

Developers have donated the maximum allowed to his city campaign, then made much larger donations to the second committee — sometimes on the same day.

Over less than three years, Salamanca raised $244,000 through the second account, even though he’s never faced a challenge at the ballot box for the comparatively lowly post of district leader.

"That's an extraordinarily high amount to have in a district leader campaign chest,” said Sarah Steiner, an attorney and former chair of the election law committee for the New York City Bar Association. “It's an unpaid position.”

Salamanca then spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from the account to pay for restaurant bills, bar tabs, liquor store purchases, his wife’s salary for her role as his campaign treasurer, and other expenses.