What The NYPD's Been Up To

Active racism, that's what. From a report by the Center for Constitutional Rights:

The NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk is on the rise. In 2005, the NYPD made less than 400,000 stops in comparison to a projected 543,982 stops by the end of 2008. Over a period of 3.5 years, the NYPD has initiated nearly 1,600,000 stops of New Yorkers.

The NYPD continues to disproportionately stop-and-frisk Black and Latino individuals. From 2005 to 2008, approximately 80 percent of total stops made were of Blacks and Latinos, who comprise 25 percent and 28 percent of New York City's total population, respectively. During this same time period, only approximately 10 percent of stops were of Whites, who comprise 44 percent of the city's population.

Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be frisked after a NYPD-initiated stop than Whites. Between 2005 and June 2008, only 8 percent of Whites stopped were also frisked, while 85 percent of Blacks and Latinos who were stopped were also frisked.

Blacks and Latinos are more likely to have physical force used against them during a NYPD-initiated stop than Whites. In addition to rising rates of NYPD use of physical force, the data reveals that a disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos who are stopped have physical force used against them. In 2005, 19 percent of Whites stopped had physical force used against them , compared to 26 percent of Latinos and Blacks; by the first half of 2008, 18 percent of Whites, compared to 24 percent of Latinos and Blacks, had physical force used against them during NYPD-initiated encounters.

Stops-and-frisks result in a minimal weapons yield and/or contraband yield. The data demonstrates a paucity of stops resulting in weapons and/or contraband yield across racial lines. Of the cumulative number of stops made since 2005, only 2.6 percent resulted in the discovery of a weapon or contraband. Though rates of contraband yielded were minute across racial groups, stops made of Whites were slightly more likely to yield contraband.

The proportion of stops-and-frisks by race does not correspond with rates of arrest. Arrest rates during the period of 2005 through the first half of 2008 were low for all racial groups at between 4 and 6 percent of all NYPD-initiated stops during that period.

Seriously, go there and check out some of the statistics and accompanying graphs. They're staggering. We're a post-racist society in the same way that pigs are taking flight from my butt.

NYC's CCPC

New York City has what's called the Mayor's Commission to Combat Police Corruption (CCPC). It's intent is clear from its name, or at least it should be.

A former lawyer for the CPPC is saying that she was fired for asking questions, something you'd think would be a defining function of someone on an oversight commission. And what did she question? She questioned the NYPD's use of a taser on an already restrained teenage suspect:

A lawyer for the Mayor's Commission to Combat Police Corruption said she was fired when she asked too many questions about the NYPD's use of force.

Willa Bernstein, one of the commission's investigating lawyers, said she thought her job was to critique the NYPD's Internal Affairs cases.

"The real job description should have been: 'Just go along. Don't rock the boat,'" she said.

Bernstein said she was fired from her $75,000-a-year spot in October after the chief of NYPD Internal Affairs complained to her boss that she had an "anti-police" bias.

Bernstein said there was a target on her back after she questioned why police officers Tasered a violent teenage suspect after he was shackled and handcuffed in a police stationhouse. [What incident was this? I can't find it.]

In a September meeting about the incident, Bernstein compared the case to the notorious Abner Louima police brutality case in 1997.

"I said this case needed to be aggressively investigated because no one wanted another Abner Louima case," Bernstein said. "IAB and people in the room were horrified by the comparison."

Internal Affairs Chief Charles Campisi spoke to Bernstein's boss, Commission Executive Director Marnie Blit, according to documents obtained by the Daily News.

"It was after this incident that I started preparing to terminate Willa," Blit wrote in a Nov. 27 memo.

"She insulted IAB and destroyed any credibility she might have when criticizing their cases," Blit wrote. ...

"I was trying to bring a lawyer's perspective to cases, to improve and protect the department," said Bernstein, 41, who left another city job because she believed in the work. She said she even took a civilian course at the NYPD Police Academy to better understand the job.

Formed in 1995, the commission was designed to provide independent oversight of the NYPD. Its $444,914 annual budget covers legal staff, executive director, office manager and expenses. Its commissioners, who review IAB cases, are unpaid.

"The commission is not independent, and doesn't do much," she said. "Rather than pretend, the city should make it real or disband it and save the taxpayers' money."

I'd say Bernstein is right on with her comment at the end of that clip; the commission doesn't even have the power to subpoena NYPD for documents. Commissioner Kelly can deny its requests for information, and he indeed has.

In 2005, the head of the CCPC reported to City Council that disputes with the NYPD and a lack of subpoena power reduced the commission's effectiveness. That same head announced his resignation days after appearing before City Council. By the way, the article in that last link also pins the CCPC's lack of power on Rudy Giuliani:

The commission was formed in 1995 by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani after the Mollen Commission raised questions about the department's ability to police itself and recommended an independent panel with subpoena power. Mr. Giuliani fought the City Council's effort to form such a panel and won a lawsuit barring its creation.

Rudy sued to stop meaningful and independent police oversight!

So is the CCPC there to prevent police corruption, or is it there for appearances? It seems like that later doesn't it?

Tell me again what's going to keep the NYPD from using its 3000+ new tasers excessively (as has happened in so many other large cities where tasers are put in the field).

More on the NYPD's Domestic and International Spying Program

Back in March of 2007, it came out the that the NYPD was spying on people in the US and abroad before the 2004 NYC RNC. They sent officers posing as activists to infiltrate groups conducting, in most cases, perfectly legal, but Republican-unfriendly, activities. One of my favorite quotes from a NYTimes article at the time (ref'd in the link above):

“It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ ” Mr. Ceglie said. “Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid. We applied to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there’s a file, but the answer came back that ‘we cannot confirm or deny.’ ”

The NYPD really didn't want the files detailing the spying, the DD5 reports, made public. Thanks to suits from the New York Civil Liberties Union and the NYTimes, a federal judge yesterday released about 600 pages of documents detailing some of the NYPD's spying activities:

On May 4, the magistrate judge, James C. Francis IV, granted a request by the New York Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times to make the documents public, but also granted a 10-day stay to give the city time to file an appeal.

But in a letter to the judge dated Tuesday, a lawyer for the city, Peter G. Farrell, wrote that the city would not appeal, “in light of the documents’ prior disclosure and corresponding press coverage.”

And that's a big part of why we are supposed to have a free press. City officials never wanted this to see the light of day. A free press is there to expose and deter government abuses. I regularly complain about the Times, but kudos to them on this one.

This isn't over. More documents are out there and the city is still acting the bully, but it's a start:

Civil rights lawyers have said that the records show that the police monitored many law-abiding citizens who were engaged in legally protected activities.

“This is an important first step toward exposing the N.Y.P.D.’s surveillance of political groups planning demonstrations at the convention,” said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“There are many more documents that remain secret, however, and this controversy will continue until the city releases all the documents.”

The judge also suggested that “the city might consider whether or not they want to proceed” with its request for a special inquiry into the sources for a New York Times article about the surveillance program.

City lawyers initially accused the civil liberties union lawyers of leaking the information, then dropped that charge and conceded that they did not know who had provided the
information.

In his letter to the judge, Mr. Farrell wrote that the city will continue to seek “relief due to the disclosure of the intelligence documents in violation of the protective order,” under which the records were once sealed.

Just what kinds of activities were the police spying on? Again, from a post in March:

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

Remember this is the same NYPD, under Bloomberg, who went over the top with arrests and detentions during the 2004 RNC itself:

Moreover, Mr. Smith wrote, the intelligence showed the city was justified in applying intensive scrutiny to the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, including fingerprinting more than a thousand people who faced charges no more serious than traffic tickets. Some were detained as long as two days for minor offenses.

If there is something in those DD5's that warrants that kind of KGB-like abuse of power, we have every right to now.

More Tasers for NYC

Yesterday, the NYPD placed approximately 3000 Taser M-26 devices onto the belts of sergeants throughout the city. These are in addition to the 400-500 taser s already in use by the NYPD. Make no mistake though, commissioner Kelly wants the devices on all of NYC's police:

"While smaller departments have opted to equip all of their patrol officers with them, we have been more cautious before authorizing up to 30,000 officers on patrol to have them," Kelly told reporters Monday.

The decision to arm more NYPD officers was apparently based on a study (The NYCLU's take is here, and the Village Voice notes that the study ignored race!) by the Rand Corporation that found that 25 out of 455 shootings might have been prevented if tasers had been used:

In 25 of the 455 shootings, the RAND group found that officers might have been able to end confrontations more quickly by using a less lethal device — like a Taser, which uses jolts of electricity to disable an assailant — before those encounters escalated to a point where more deadly force was necessary. The police killed someone in 3 of the 25 cases.

Other less-than-lethal methods those cops could having tried? Talking, physical restraint, a baton maybe. But here in NYC, after Sean Bell's tragic death, we know better than to hope for a balanced, metered response from our police. Too harsh? Tell it to Sean's family.

Never mind that tasers aren't as "less-than-lethal" as advertised (or see here and here). Never mind that huge increases in taser use aren't corresponding with decreases in police firearm usage. Never mind that tasers are being used disproportionately on minorities. Never mind that tasers are being used without standardized usage policies and without scrutiny on the devices or the officers using them.

Forget all of that because the NYPD needs some shockers! And you can bet that it won't be affluent white Manhattanites twitching at the ends of the wires.

As a sad prelude to the NYPD's taser arm-up, a Brooklyn man died yesterday in Long Island:

Long Island authorities Wednesday are probing the death of Brooklyn man who collapsed soon after he was zapped by a cop with a Taser.

The death of Tony Curtius Bradway, 26, came just after the NYPD announced it is considering expanding its use of the controversial weapon.

Bradway had swallowed a bag of cocaine Monday just before he was Tasered by Southampton police.

He suffered seizures and died eight hours later, at 7:15 p.m. Monday, at Peconic Bay Medical Center on Long Island.

Authorities said the officer shocked Bradway with the Taser in an attempt to keep him from swallowing the drugs.

After two shocks, Bradway was nonetheless able to walk into police headquarters and later was able to tell hospital staff that he had swallowed between five and six grams of cocaine, authorities said.

Get that? He didn't get tased for coming at the police with a knife, taking a swing at a cop, or even for running. He was tased because he was swallowing! Smell the freedom.

Tasers should never be used to punish or to force the compliance of a nonviolent suspect. Period.

The NYCLU's contact information is here. NYC residents can find their council members here.

The NYPD's Scary Terrorism Report

Substitute "Christian" into this report and give it a read. Were that the report, people would be screaming "persecution" from the rooftops.

The NYPD is sure that terrorist seedlings are being nurtured anywhere you might find young Muslim men hanging out:

An NYPD report released Wednesday warns of a "radicalization" process in which young men — otherwise unremarkable legal immigrants from the Middle East — grow disillusioned with life in America and adopt a philosophy that puts them on the path to jihad. ...

The report found that homegrown terrorists often were indoctrinated in local "radicalization incubators" that are "rife with extremist rhetoric."

Instead of mosques, those places were more likely to be "cafes, cab driver hangouts, flop houses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah bars, butcher shops and bookstores," the report says.

The Internet also provides "the wandering mind of the conflicted young Muslim or potential convert with direct access to unfiltered radical and extremist ideology." ...

They "look, act, talk and walk like everyone around them," the study adds. "In the early stages of their radicalization, these individuals rarely travel, are not participating in any kind of militant activity, yet they are slowly building the mind-set, intention and commitment to conduct jihad."

Police Commissioner Kelly has a disturbing statement implying what he sees as the solution to all of these potential terrorist who look and act like everyone else:"Hopefully, the better we're informed about this process, the more likely we'll be to detect and disrupt it," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said while presenting the findings at a briefing of private security executives at police headquarters.

And just how do you plan on disrupting "it" Commissioner Kelly? Will the NYPD frequent places where young Arab men hangout and disperse them? Yeah, that's sure to work out well.

Sadly, I don't get the impression that Kelly is going approach potential problems (even straw man problems) in the Muslim-American community by embracing and encouraging outreach. He'll push the NYPD toward violating civil rights (per usual) and make things worse.

As Spencer Ackerman points out, people inclined to commit terror are a diverse group and this NYPD report acknowledges that divining those prone to terrorism isn't something a police department can do:

al-Qaeda adherents or al-Qaeda-inspired radicals are a maddeningly diverse bunch, extending in background from former high-tech engineers to Mary Kay cosmetics representatives to former metalheads. They can be second-generation U.S. or European Muslims, or converts. ... And there the report concedes that finding just who is prone to pursue radicalization isn't something law enforcement can really do:

There is no useful profile to assist law enforcement or intelligence to predict who will follow this trajectory of radicalization. Rather, the individuals who take this course will begin as "unremarkable" from various walks of life.

As a result, it's hard to know what kind of action law enforcement can pursue here, short of monitoring every Muslim who hangs out at a hookah bar or has an internet connection. The report stops at calling it a "challenge" to figure out how "to identify, pre-empt and thus prevent homegrown terrorist attacks given the non-criminal element of its indicators." We may learn more next month: Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) said in a statement today that he intends to hold hearings in September of his Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on today's "breakthrough" report.

And that's clearly what this is about, politicians looking for easy political gain (e.g. So they can say, "I'm working hard to fight terrorism and keep your family safe.") by stepping on people that the very serious people at FauxNews have said we all need to be very, very afraid of.

Back in the USSR, er... USA

What kind of country have we become? The police department of the "liberal oasis" known as NYC ran a covert spying operation before the 2004 RNC. This is what happens when a city repeatedly elects wealthy white daddy figures for mayors. The outrages are detailed in the above link. Some of the highlights:

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.

From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.
...
But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports. ...
“The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,” Mr. Dunn said.

“In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department’s political surveillance operation.”

The Police Department said those complaints were overblown.

Yeah, secretly spying on US citizens who have no plans of wrongdoing is nothing to get concerned over!

And from the department of "they can do that?" comes this curious sentence:

In another initiative, detectives were stationed in Europe and the Middle East to quickly funnel information back to New York.

Fascists love their "secret" documents:

From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups’ plans.

People who dared speak publicly against the Bush Crime Family found the face of Big Brother arriving in its usual form:

“It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ ” Mr. Ceglie said. “Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid. We applied to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there’s a file, but the answer came back that ‘we cannot confirm or deny.’ ”

Paul Browne, the chief spokesman for the NYPD is clearly in denial or having memory malfunctions:

Many of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention were held for up to two days on minor offenses normally handled with a summons; the city Law Department said the preconvention intelligence justified detaining them all for fingerprinting.

Mr. Browne said that 18 months of preparation by the police had allowed hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate while also ensuring that the Republican delegates were able to hold their convention with relatively few disruptions.

“We attributed the successful policing of the convention to a host of N.Y.P.D. activities leading up to the R.N.C., including 18 months of intensive planning,” he said. “It was a great success, and despite provocations, such as demonstrators throwing faux feces in the faces of police officers, the N.Y.P.D. showed professionalism and restraint.”

As someone who lived and worked in the NYC area during the 2004 RNC, I can tell you that this place was a police state. I had never witnessed anything like it, but I'm sure I will again. The article I excerpt above is worth reading in its entirety.

No Answers

Two weeks ago, after the NYPD added a few thousand more tasers to our streets, I wrote the NYCLU asking what I can do to help keep NYC from seeing thousands of unwarranted tasings.

I'd just read a statement from the New York chapter of the ACLU recommending against adding the tasers without "careful study and a public dialogue." I had also just read the NY Daily News' frightening projections on how many tasings the new devices will likely lead to, without deterring firearm deployment:

Based on the relative populations of Cincinnati and New York, the NYPD would electrify more than 12,000 people a year, more than than 30 a day, more than 230 a week. ...

Consider Houston's experience. In 2007, the Houston Chronicle found that cops shot the same number of people after they were armed with Tasers and that, most often, they used the stun guns in traffic stops and other common circumstances.

So, I wrote the NYCLU expressing concerning about the devices.

I also asked if they knew whether the NYPD will be carrying tasers at upcoming NYC Pride festivities.

They haven't responded to my inquiry. Similarly, I haven't gotten answers from my elected city officials.

LGBT people should never forget the NYPD actions that led to Stonewall, lest they happen again. Thousands of tasers and the threat of their use for misbehavior - and yes, that's a common reason for deployment against unarmed people - would be a step toward those days of extreme discrimination.

I'll be pressing for more answers this week, this time by making phone calls. Additionally, my camera, video camera, and I will be attending as many events as possible.

The Way Police Operate

A favorite talking point of police-can-do-no-wrong apologists is that 99.99% of cops are really fine and dandy by-the-book officers; there are only a few bad apples and the liberal media loves to focus on them. Statistics on the NYPD from this Village Voice article tell a different story:

The members of the press corps in this city could themselves be of greater use in monitoring our sometimes out-of-control protectors by following up on an acutely relevant story by the Daily News. On June 14, in a five-column story, "Cops flexing their muscle," staff writers Benjamin Lesser and Greg Smith revealed that in 102,000 of the more than 500,000 police stops during 2006, "cops did things such as restrained people, threw them to the ground or against a wall or pointed a gun at them."

Now dig this: "In nine out of 10 police stops involving use of force in 2006, the suspects were not arrested" (emphasis added). And in the 2,700 police stops in which a cop pulled his weapon, only 553—one out of five—"ended with an arrest."

I'm not saying that all cops are bad, but with numbers like that coming out of a supposed bastion of progressivism, something is amiss.

Police departments don't seem to want people trying to figure out what's wrong either. The NYPD's reluctance to release statistics is telling all by itself:

This is the only time that these raw use-of-force documents have been made public. The NYPD gave the internal data (which they usually never let we, the people, see) to University of Michigan researchers who—to the everlasting gratitude of civil libertarians everywhere—put much of that information on the Internet.

I haven't heard a peep about all this from Mayor Bloomberg, who has encouraged Ray Kelly to step into his shoes in 2009. But there has been a reaction from Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has continually done much of the work that the press should have been doing instead to pierce the CIA-like secrecy of Commissioner Kelly's force.

On June 13, Donna Lieberman said to the Daily News: "The data confirms our worst fears. The NYPD is stopping, interrogating and searching hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers every year, and even pointing guns at completely innocent people. New Yorkers deserve a police force that will protect their rights, not violate them."

The Voice article also makes a point that can't be made often enough. Tasers are not being used in the place of deadly force:

A future column will look into Commissioner Kelly's pledge that he would carefully expand the use of non-lethal tasers that stop a person with a 50,000-volt shock. A comprehensive Amnesty International investigation on the use of tasers notes that "80 percent of the time they are used on unarmed suspects. In 30 percent of the cases, they are used for verbal noncompliance, but only 3 percent of the time for cases involving 'deadly assault.' " Without killing you, tasers can do a hell of a lot of damage. And the evidence is mounting that they can also kill you.

That's something for NYC residents to keep in mind as they get ready to elect Kelly as yet another affluent Republican NYC mayor.

Also, it's great to read the Village Voice writing something of consequence. More like this please.

That Would Be Nice

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn wants independent prosecution for police brutality cases. That would be nice.

Right now, NYC has a Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) that has the power to ..., well they don't really have any power. They can send complaints to the police department who handle things internally and experience no external oversight. To no surprise, the NYPD fails to prosecute (or see here) a significant portion of cases substantiated by the CCRB.

The latest move by the NYPD to quiet calls for civilian oversight has been to include lawyers from the CCRB in prosecutions. Sadly, it's a meaningless gesture. The degree of involvement allowed the CCRB lawyer is determined by the head prosecutor for the police department.

What's needed is true civilian oversight. It should be the CCRB deciding which cases are prosecuted and the extent to which police department lawyers are involved. The people shouldn't have to go to the NYPD to meekly ask them to police their own.

Maybe I'm wrong about all of this. Maybe accountability to the taxpayers is an unrealistic ideal. Can someone explain to me how having a police department with zero accountability to the people is good for NYC and its residents? Please?

Other Things NYPD Cops Do

As someone who bikes almost daily in NYC, this one hits home:

A rookie NYPD cop was stripped of his badge and gun Monday after a stunning video caught him slamming a bicyclist to the ground in an apparent unprovoked attack.

Officer Patrick Pogan, 22, of the Midtown South Precinct, was bounced to desk duty soon after the video of Friday's incident in Times Square appeared on YouTube.

The victim was also a veteran. Olbermann tonight said that the cop is a former high school offensive linebacker. Figures.

And then there's this story that has video of a NYC cop wailing on a man's knee with a baton.

Oh, and there's this video of NYPD boys just being boys:


And on and on and on in America's melting pot.

Another Hate Crime And More Missing Media

This is maddening. Right here in NYC, on September 11, 2007, members of a Manhattan Community College basketball team were attacked as they walked by the Patriot Saloon on Chambers Street in lower Manhattan, near City Hall. They were called racial epithets and told, "this is what slavery feels like," but kept walking. Their attackers followed them, beat them, and then beat the team's coaches when they tried to intervene.

Can you guess who ended up getting arrested when the cops arrived? Of course it was the black victims.

Other than the NYDailyNews story linked above, I only see a tiny story at ABC7 Online. I hadn't heard anything about this story until this morning while I was mining through my site's traffic.

How is this not major news? I suspect it's for the same reasons that the unjustified tasering of an African American in Harlem wasn't newsworthy while so many other cops-gone-wild-with-taser stories were. NY is so often billed as a large and wonderful progressive melting pot. That's not what I've seen in my ~3 years living here.

Here's a good chunk of the story from the NYDailyNews:

Two coaches and several players of the Manhattan Community College basketball team say they were the targets of separate racial bias attacks and robberies near City Hall.

They say it happened last week, the attacks were carried out by the same group of white men - and the NYPD has failed to properly investigate. ...

The first incident erupted around 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 11 outside the Patriot, a notoriously rowdy Chambers St. bar, as members of the Manhattan team were walking to the A subway station on Church St. after four hours of basketball practice at the school.

Several players told the Daily News a group of white men standing across Chambers St. outside the bar started yelling "n-----s" and "this is what slavery feels like." One of the men, they said, then threw a bottle at them.

"We kept walking to the station, and when we look back a group of six of the white men had run up behind us and were attacking us," said team member Marquis Scott, 18, the son of an NYPD cop.

Scott says he was knocked down and dragged into the middle of Chambers St., where four of the assailants started to stomp and pummel him.

When police arrived at the scene they immediately handcuffed Scott and charged him with misdemeanor assault while letting his assailants go, he said.

"The first cop who got there, a female, had to tackle two of the guys to get them off me," Scott said. "I'm the victim but then somehow I end up getting arrested."

The official police report said Scott "was observed fighting and punching along with unapprehended others" and "causing a physical injury to the forehead" of a white male named Labinot Rexhaj.

Mapp did not witness the first outbreak. He was still a few blocks away getting ready to leave the school when one of his players called his cell phone for help. He ran to the scene with an assistant coach and found Scott in handcuffs.

"They [the cops] wouldn't give us any information," Mapp said. "They just put him in a police car and drove away."

Once the police left, Mapp headed east on Chambers St. to find the rest of his players and make sure they were okay. He found four of them standing on Broadway near City Hall, where they had run to get away from men at the bar. "I told my kids to go downstairs to the Brooklyn Bridge train station, because there's usually police down there," Mapp said.

As he descended the stairs and started to swipe his MetroCard in the turnstile, Mapp heard rumbling behind him.

"I see four white men jump over the turnstiles and they start to attack my kids," he said. "Then four more of them rush in. They're all yelling 'N---er time,' and 'N---ers, we're gonna get you.'"

Mapp, who recently had hip replacement surgery, yelled to the token booth clerk to call police, then rushed to intercede. He said he was knocked to the ground, surrounded by several of the men and beaten.

By the time transit cops arrived, the assailants had fled, taking Mapp's wallet with $100, and the book bags of two of his players.

Mapp told cops what happened and accompanied two officers in a patrol car around the neighborhood. Within a few minutes, they spotted three of the attackers near Pace University. One of the men was still holding one of the stolen book bags with a paycheck inside belonging to one of Mapp's players.

Cops charged the three men, Visar Halili, 22, and Dardan Rexhaj, 22, both from Manhattan, and Sammy Othman, 21, from Brooklyn, with misdemeanor assault. Halili also was charged with criminal possession of stolen property.

Mapp is furious that not one police report for either incident mentions them as racially biased, and that reports of the train station melee list only one of his players, Travis Johnson, as a victim.

Police say they have no information of any bias connected to these incidents.

"It is outrageous and beyond belief that these young basketball players and their coach were victims of a hate crime, and the NYPD is sweeping it under the rug and refusing to charge this as a felony," said Bonita Zelman, lawyer for Marquis Scott, who filed a victim complaint the same night of the attack.

"My players were traumatized by this, I was knocked down, beaten and have an EMS report to prove it, and somehow the police put me down as a witness," Mapp said. "I don't understand this."

How is this not being pursued as a hate crime?

If I can be a part of it NY, NY.
(h/t Electronic Village)

NYC Doesn't Want NYPD Spying Files Opened

Yesterday I wrote about the NYPD secretly spying on citizens in the US and abroad. The city really wants to keep its DD5 reports secret:

Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize them,” hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.

In papers filed in federal court last week, the city’s lawyers also say that the documents could be “misinterpreted” because they were not intended for the public.

“The documents were not written for consumption by the general public,” wrote Peter Farrell, senior counsel in the city’s Law Department. “The documents contain information filtered and distilled for analysis by intelligence officers accustomed to reading intelligence information.”

So, they're invoking the age old business ruse of putting information on a "need to know basis"? That's sick and not the way government should work.

You can bet that if this information was really useful in stopping serious crimes prior to and during the 2004 RNC, the city would be broadcasting it from the rooftops. The bulk of the information wasn't useful though:

Those records showed that some of the surveillance was conducted on groups that planned to disrupt the convention, but the bulk of it was on groups and people who expressed no apparent intention to break the law.

In at least some cases, the reports were shared with other law enforcement agencies.

If the information really was useful, let it out, let it explain just how it justifies this:

Moreover, Mr. Smith wrote, the intelligence showed the city was justified in applying intensive scrutiny to the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, including fingerprinting more than a thousand people who faced charges no more serious than traffic tickets. Some were detained as long as two days for minor offenses.

Thank You Mr. Downing

In a letter to the NY Times, the ACLU's National Coordinator of their Campaign Against Racial Profiling, King Downing, concisely says just about everything that needs to be said about taser use:

Re “The Police and Tasers” [I wrote about the piece here] (editorial, June 24):

You are correct in calling for caution in the New York Police Department’s plan to arm officers with Tasers. Tasers are unsafe, misused and a vehicle for racial profiling.

Troubled kids, the mentally ill and political protesters have all received their 50,000-volt shock with disastrous results.

Taser proponents rely upon the myth that these are nonlethal. Amnesty International says more than 300 people have died from Taser injuries.

In practice, Tasers are not used as a deadly force alternative but as a compliance tool against nonviolent persons, without the strict limitations, supervision and accountability we require for deadly force. The United Nations Committee Against Torture concluded that Taser use may amount to torture.

Little attention is being paid to the unfair burden Tasers will place on communities of color. The disproportionate number of people of color stopped, searched and interrogated by New York police will likely lead to more abuse by this potentially lethal weapon especially as the N.Y.P.D. moves Tasers from car trunks to the gun belts of thousands of sergeants.

Studies in five major cities have already found racial disparities in Taser deployment. Given the questions surrounding Tasers and the life-or-death risks Tasers carry, we strongly call on the N.Y.P.D. to rethink its use of these lethal weapons.

A Call For Stopping Pre-Trial Electrocutions

Today is the Day of Blogging for Justice: Standing Up Against Pre-Trial Electrocution. It's a day to blog about police abusing African Americans with their tasers. Be sure to check out some of the writings.

The statistics are few and far between, but where they exist they demonstrate clear racial selectivity in whom police are choosing to tase (Yes "choosing." Can reporters please stop writing things like "police were forced to tase...").

Last year I blogged about some statistics out of Syracuse, NY, where examining two years of data revealed that over half of taser draws were directed at black people.

Here in NYC, given the NYPD's documented practice of harassing minorities, it's likely that if anyone gains access to the statistics (and the NYPD is loathe to release them), they'll find a similar racial disparity in taser usage.

The police, and police apologists, can try to rationalize racial biases as much as they like (and yes, that's disgusting all on it's own), but at the end of the day, minorities still suffer at the hands and taser probes of the police.

Even More on NYPD Spying on US Citizens

Expanding on my earlier posts about the NYPD spying on US citizens domestically and abroad, the NYTimes has put up synopses of and pdf versions of documents recently released by judicial order.

Some of the groups spied on, er..., cited in the documents:

• Wetlands Preserve
• High Times
• Planned Parenthood Federation of America
• Veterans for Peace
• Greenpeace
• Sierra Club
• The American Gas Association
• New York Civil Liberties Union
• 9/11 Family Group
• Falun Gong
• Planned Parenthood NYC
• Buddhist Peace Fellowship
• Atheists NYC
• Disabled American Veterans
• New Yorkers Against Gun Violence
• CUNY Students and Faculty
• MSNBC
• Stuyvesant High School Students
• Democratic National Committee
• Westboro Baptist Church
• Vietnam Veterans Against War

What an enormous waste of our taxes.

(h/t Bob Harris)

And They Have Tasers

NYC's finest are behaving badly and costing taxpayers loads:

NEW YORK - The amount New York City is paying to settle claims or cover judgments related to improper police conduct is soaring.

According to a report in the New York Post, the city paid $66.4 million last year to 1,265 claimants who accused the NYPD of bad behavior. That compares with $31.8 million paid to 571 claimants in 1998.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, says those figures reveal an increasing problem of police wrongdoing during Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration. She says the rise in payouts parallels an increase in police-abuse complaints made to the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne says payouts don't always reflect misconduct because the city frequently settles cases in which the police are innocent of wrongdoing.

Breaking Grannies

Even if (and with the NYPD that's a big "if") a swing and a miss happened, how do you justifiably get to a 71-year-old grandmother with a broken hip:

NEW YORK (CBS) ― The family of a 71-year-old grandmother is making a police brutality claim, saying she was hurt when she was knocked down by officers inside a Queens stationhouse.

The woman is now at Jamaica Hospital, undergoing surgery for a broken hip.

Last Wednesday evening at the 107th Precinct in Queens, a group of parents, their teenage daughters, and one grandmother – Elizabeth Gorden – showed up to find out why a man they say slapped one of the girls near a bus stop wasn't arrested.

What happened next inside the precinct depends on which side you believe. Gorden's family says the police are responsible for her being at Jamaica Hospital with injuries that include a fractured hip.

"I did witness a group of police officers come out of nowhere and just pounce my mother to the ground," daughter Sharon Gorden says.

So the parents, the grandmother, and some of the kids go to the 107th precinct to find out about the man who had the encounter with their children. After that, the stories diverge dramatically – either there was a melee and police were pushed and shoved, or it was the police who were doing the pushing and the shoving.

The bottom line, though, is that 71-year-old grandmother Elizabeth Gorden fell and got hurt.

Gorden's family says she's having surgery Monday for the fractured hip.

Police say Elizabeth Gorden took a swing at an officer and missed. Gorden was given a desk appearance ticket and charged with obstructing governmental administration.

That's some more brave, brave police work from the big apple.

Some NYC Taser History

I've been meaning to comment on this NY Times piece, but hadn't gotten to it. For all of its love of Police Commissioner Kelly, it has some interesting history in it. Some relevant paragraphs:

Stun guns were introduced in New York in the early 1980s, when officers were confronting a higher number of disturbed people because of the rapid and widespread deinstitutionalization of mental health patients. The devices were not seen as a success.

The technology had not been perfected and the devices were kept mostly in Emergency Service Unit officers’ trucks. Several high-ranking officers and sergeants were transferred from the 106th Precinct in Queens after officers were charged with using stun guns on drug suspects during interrogations. Mr. Kelly was assigned by Commissioner Benjamin Ward to clean things up.

Perhaps spurred by memories of that scandal, Mr. Kelly added a cautionary line to the new rules of engagement for the Taser. The order, published on June 4, said that putting a Taser directly against someone’s body should not be the primary method of use and that such cases of “touch-stun mode” would be investigated.

How about Mr. Kelly stating that stun mode won't be used, rather than should not be used.

And what about oversight of the NYPD's use of tasers? I've been able to find very little about that and this article offers only a hint of information:

In 2007, 41 people complained of being struck with a Taser by officers and 9 said they had been confronted by officers brandishing one, according to Andrew Case, a spokesman for the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates allegations of wrongdoing by officers. Of those complaints, one was substantiated, he said.

So far this year, the board has received 17 complaints from people who said they were struck with a Taser by officers and 6 from those who said they were confronted by them, Mr. Case said. None of the 2008 cases have been fully investigated yet; eight have been closed because the victim refused to provide a statement, one has been withdrawn, and the others remain open.

Two disturbing paragraphs contain a statement from the NY chapter of the ACLU:

Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the concern now is whether officers will use Tasers in situations where they traditionally had used much less force, and whether civilians will be unnecessarily and more frequently subjected to their use.

“Is it actually an alternative that leads to reduced use of firearms by the police?” Mr. Dunn said. “Or does it lead to increased use of force? The concern is we are going up the ladder of force, as opposed to coming down the ladder.”

Mr. Dunn, those aren't really points of contention anymore. The questions have been answered. Tasers don't reduce firearm usage and they are too high in the continuum of force. See various links to the left and right of this post. They're filled with answers to those questions.

Finally, and this may just be a pet peeve of mine, but NY Times can you please leave your crushes out of your reporting? What is with this bit (emphasis mine):

Tasers came under a new spotlight as the image of a square-jawed Mr. Kelly holding a stun gun was beamed across the media landscape on Monday and Tuesday, and as news spread that the nation’s largest police force was taking a fresh look at the device. At the same time, a sea of controversial Taser headlines seemed to crop up.

Eyes on the City

(Michael Reeve)
New York is planning to use thousands of surveillance cameras and license plate readers to track people in lower Manhattan (below Canal). Privacy issues are raised by the NYTimes article linked above as is the fact that even the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, admits that surveillance cameras haven't been shown to deter crime and terrorism.

The article also states that thousands of surveillance cameras are already in use in lower Manhattan. They are used without oversight. Get that, the government is already monitoring its citizens without oversight. From the article:

...The police and corporate security agents will work together in the center, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police. The plan does not need City Council approval, he said.

The Police Department is still considering whether to use face-recognition technology, an inexact science that matches images against those in an electronic database, or biohazard detectors in its Lower Manhattan network, Mr. Browne said.

The entire operation is forecast to be in place and running by 2010, in time for the projected completion of several new buildings in the financial district, including the new Goldman Sachs world headquarters.

Civil liberties advocates said they were worried about misuse of technology that tracks the movement of thousands of cars and people,

Would this mean that every Wall Street broker, every tourist munching a hot dog near the United States Court House and every sightseer at ground zero would constantly be under surveillance?

“This program marks a whole new level of police monitoring of New Yorkers and is being done without any public input, outside oversight, or privacy protections for the hundreds of thousands of people who will end up in N.Y.P.D. computers," Christopher Dunn, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in an e-mail message.

He said he worried about what would happen to the images once they were archived, how they would be used by the police and who else would have access to them.

Already, according to a report last year by the civil liberties group, there are nearly 4,200 public and private surveillance cameras below 14th Street, a fivefold increase since 1998, with virtually no oversight over what becomes of the recordings.

Mr. Browne said that the Police Department would have control over how the material is used. He said that the cameras would be recording in “areas where there’s no expectation of privacy” and that law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear.

Yes, don't worry that city council, the part of the government elected by the people, doesn't have control over the program or its expansion, instead console yourself from the loss of privacy by repeating the mantra, "I don't need to worry if I've done nothing wrong."

A frightening aspect not directly addressed by the article is that corporate security services are a large part of current and planned surveillance operations. I understand the desire to have private corporations help with the cost of security, but that's what taxes are for. How is giving corporations free reign to collect and analyze data on free citizens a good thing? Seriously, how is trading civil rights and democracy for corporatism a good thing?

Big brother is here with an expensive suite, a bright smile, and a firm handshake.

Grass Roots in Columbia

Demonstrating that it is possible to influence police policy without pressure from national media, Grass Roots Organizing, working in Columbia, MO has been able to influence their police department's tasing policy.

The Columbia Police Department is acknowledging improper use of Tasers in two incidents last year, and interim Chief Tom Dresner said a review of these cases has led the department to change its policy regarding use of the devices. ...

Previous policy prohibited officers from using Tasers when the only crime was fleeing arrest. That was “ambiguous,” Dresner said, because there is always an additional crime that prompts an officer to make an arrest.

Under the new policy, officers cannot use a Taser to subdue a person who is fleeing a misdemeanor offense “unless the person has shown a propensity for violence or is an immediate threat to the officer or a citizen.” ...

Another policy change makes it clear that Tasers should not, in most cases, be used to force a crowd to disperse or on two people fighting.

The police department plans to solicit feedback on its policy from the Police Executive Research Forum, which has set general guidelines for Taser deployment that a coalition led by Grass Roots Organizing has urged Columbia police to adopt.

Several members of the coalition spoke at a city council meeting last night and continued to question the use of Tasers and policy guidelines.

So, the police department has agreed to try avoiding tasing fleeing suspects and not to shoot tasers into crowds. Oh, and check out the comments section at the end of that article. It's men (and yeah, they're men) at their absolute worst.

A cynic might say that these policy changes are a no brainer, that with recent recent suits resulting in damages awarded to taser victims and their families, the police department is simply insulating itself from liability.

I won't say that. However we arrive at limiting taser use is fine by me. It's no small thing to get a concession of any kind from police here in America. For the most post, they operate in secrecy and with no citizen oversight (e.g., the NYPD).

Take note though, the situation is not that different in Columbia. Their police department was free to pick and choose from a list of policy suggestions provided by the grass roots organization. For example, they'll be keeping the options to tase people multiple times, to tase children, and to stick closely to Taser International's training materials.