Tag: NYPD
Great news: the City Council voted today to override Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s vetoes on two bills known collectively as the Community Safety Act. The bills will create an independent Inspector General’s office to oversee the NYPD, make it illegal for cops profile citizens, based on a slew of factors including sexual orientation and housing status, […]
Al Jazeera America has a fascinating profile on Jose LaSalle, a parks worker who has made it his personal mission to ensure New York City cops aren’t overstepping their bounds when it comes to stop-and-frisk. Nightly, LaSalle patrols the streets of Harlem, Brownsville, or the Bronx with his camera, looking for cops stopping and frisking teenagers […]
The federal ruling that deemed the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics unconstitutional was a landmark decision, but the battle is far from over. Mayor Bloomberg, who recently said “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” already said he’s going to appeal the decision. In the meantime, to keep the pressure on, ANIMAL teamed […]
A detail that we (and others) neglected to report when yesterday’s “stop-and-frisk is unconstitutional” ruling came in: police in the precinct with the highest number of stops in each borough will be required to wear cameras for a one-year pilot program, in an effort to bring more objective evidence around the tactic. “The recordings may […]
In a landmark legal ruling, Manhattan federal judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice violated New Yorkers’ constitutional rights. Scheindlin, who according to the New York Times stated “that police officers have for years been systematically stopping innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing,” plans to […]
“Weed World vans around NYC are selling phony marijuana pops that don’t contain pot,” reads the New York Post headline, and below it, a banner screaming “EXCLUSIVE.” That paper’s intrepid reporter Susan Edelman has discovered the unthinkable, the candy peddled by the folks in NYC’s near-ubiquitous weed vans isn’t actually going to get you high. She even […]
Until recently, if you were stopped and frisked, arrested or issued a summons, then had all charges against you dropped, your name and address would go into a big database the NYPD could use against you in future investigations. Now, thanks to a lawsuit from the New York Civil Liberties Union, that’s no longer the […]
Next month, artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer will turn the Park Avenue Tunnel into an interactive multimedia installation that celebrates free speech. Pedestrians (!) will record messages into an intercom, which will then be broadcast through the tunnel along with lights and other sounds. I can’t wait to try it. The NYPD, never content not to rain […]
Attention, all ye who dare question the wisdom of New York’s boys in blue: the NYPD officers union has a new tool that’s sure to squash any and all supporters of the anti-stop-and-frisk Community Safety Act. One glance at these totally badass promotional pens, to be handed out at a union meeting this evening, is […]
More important work from New York’s finest. After a February raid on a Midtown store selling counterfeit Justin Bieber cologne failed to stop the shop from hawking the goods, the city is suing the establishment–Jacks Perfume, at 1220 Broadway–with the intent of shutting it down. “Our job is to come here and to sell,” a […]
