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June 23, 2015 Liam Mathews

Mayor De Blasio announced Monday that the city will hire 1,300 new NYPD officers as part of a $78.5 billion budget deal, the New York Times reports. The announcement came as a surprise, as Mayor De Blasio as recently as June 5 said that hiring more cops was unnecessary, since crime is at near-historic lows; […]

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June 10, 2015 Liam Mathews

Here we go: Bill Bratton is demanding a “retraction and correction” of the Guardian story that quoted him saying, “We have a significant population gap among African American males because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them,” while discussing why the NYPD has a disproportionately low […]

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June 9, 2015 Liam Mathews

Last month I wrote a somewhat sarcastic post called “Commissioner Bratton Is Off His Damn Rocker,” where I criticized Bratton’s statement about how “cop haters” who post videos of cops arresting to social media were making officers’ jobs needlessly difficult. I suggested that he take a vacation to clear his head. But after reading this […]

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June 1, 2015 Liam Mathews

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has been using the nonprofit New York City Police Foundation as a piggybank, according to the New York Post, giving out over $2 million in consulting contracts to people outside of the department, including 6 people who Bratton has known since the 1970s. Former NYPD officials accuse Bratton of using the […]

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May 21, 2015 Liam Mathews

Is NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton okay? He seems like he’s at the end of his rope. He’s been on a tear of saying some crazy shit in public the past few days: on Sunday he said he needed 450 new cops so he could fight ISIS, and on Wednesday, Capital New York reports (link behind […]

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May 19, 2015 Prachi Gupta

As part of a new initiative, NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton on Tuesday unveiled the latest in high tech, state-of-the-art policing: a ginormous van that will put suspects on blast by rolling video of them on side-mounted screens. Bratton made the announcement at 11 AM on Tuesday at Harlem’s 28th Precinct. ABC reports that the […]

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May 18, 2015 Liam Mathews

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who wants to hire more officers but hasn’t been able to do so, finally threw up his hands and more or less said, “You know ISIS, right? They’re scary, right? Well, they’re trying to kill us. Right now. They’re on their way here. So we need 450 new cops so we […]

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May 1, 2015 Liam Mathews

The Daily News sent a reporter to Manhattan summons court to talk to people who were there for minor quality-of-life offenses, and the near-unanimous verdict is that broken windows policing is dumb. “It’s a waste of time,” said a man named Michael Joseph, 42, who was there to combat a ticket for not paying a […]

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April 3, 2015 Liam Mathews

Police union leaders are not known for their strong grasp of reality. Here’s another one: Detectives Endowment Association President Michael Palladino complained during a Thursday press conference about Commissioner Bratton’s discipling of Detective Patrick Cherry, who was placed on modified duty after he was caught on video verbally abusing an Uber driver. According to DNAinfo, […]

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April 2, 2015 Liam Mathews

Capital New York examined data from reported police stops between 2005 and 2014 and compared those numbers with shootings in the city and found no conclusive link between number of stops and number of shootings. The controversial, unconstitutional policy of stopping “suspicious” people is ideally meant to stop violent crime before it happens, but mostly […]

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