Yesterday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton announced that the NYPD will stop using condoms as evidence for prostitution arrests, a change advocates have been pushing for years. The policy shift will allow cops to continue using condoms as evidence in sex trafficking cases. “This is a reasonable approach to targeting the most at-risk community as it […]
The NYPD disbanded its Demographics Unit — responsible for sending plainclothes agents to spy on Muslim communities — last month, but the spying hasn’t stopped. As the New York Times reports, the department’s Citywide Debriefing Team began asking local Muslims arrested for low-level crimes to inform police of the goings-on at mosques, cafes, and restaurants in exchange for […]
Michael Setiawan, a former member of New York’s finest, was arrested Sunday and charged with spray painting anti-Semitic messages all over Borough Park, Brooklyn — a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Seitawan left the NYPD in 2007 and has been arrested six times since then, through previous charges against him have been sealed. The New York […]
As part of its ongoing quest to scrub NYC clean of fun things, the NYPD has arrested 96 subway dancers this year so far. Forty-six were arrested for reckless endangerment, and 50 got disorderly conduct charges. Last year, cops arrested two dancers. This, then, is the work of new commissioner Bill Bratton, pomiser of building […]
Josh Boss, a journalist who was violently arrested while documenting a peaceful Occupy Wall Street March in 2011, will receive a $55,000 settlement from the city. A video of the altercation surrounding Boss’s arrest — in which Thomas Purtell throws him to the ground, then puts his knee in Boss’s face — is above. Boss […]
Yesterday, the New York Police Department did a very dumb thing. Using the hashtag #myNYPD, the department asked New Yorkers to share their photos of New York’s finest on Twitter. What happened next was utterly predictable. Activists seized upon the moment to show the NYPD for the violent, megalomaniacal, often racist organization it is, tweeting scenes […]
Finally, the NYPD unit responsible for the department’s widespread spying on Muslim communities has been disbanded. The Demographics Unit sent infiltrators into student groups, surveilled mosques, and collected data on the daily comings and goings of Muslim people in the city and New Jersey. According to an NYPD chief’s testimony in 2012, it generated no […]
The New York City Department of Records has just released 30,000 more photographs to their online archive, particularly touting 187 new images taken by the NYPD’s Alien Squad in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The purpose of the Alien Squad was to monitor “potentially subversive organizations throughout the five boroughs.” Among them is a set of photos from […]
Good news for Kang Chun Wong, the 84-year-old man who was knocked down, bloodied, and arrested by NYPD officers after allegedly jaywalking on the Upper West Side earlier this year: all charges against him — jaywalking, resisting arrested and disorderly conduct — were dropped. Wong, who speaks very little English, maintains the light was green when he […]
Philip Eure, a longtime leader of the Office of Police Complaints in Washington, D.C., will be the first Inspector General of the NYPD. The new office was created after City Council passed the Community Safety Act, legislation designed to increase NYPD oversight, last year. Eure’s police-regulating bona fides appear to be in line: in D.C., he […]
