A few months ago, on a February evening in Grand Central, Brooklyn-based artist Enrico Miguel Thomas carried his drawing board a few paces away from where he had been set up, illustrating from a counter  — leaving behind a bag full of markers and a folded-up easel. After a brief moment of gathering the necessary detail on his subject, a process he characterizes as having taken no longer than five minutes, he turned to find a swarm of police officers gathering near his bags, which were less than ten feet away. After approaching the officers, claiming the bags, and identifying himself as an artist, the MTA police insisted on “clearing” his property with a K-9 bomb-sniffing dog.

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However, as Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian, the case against Haste was dismissed as "Bronx supreme court justice Steven L Barrett said the Bronx district attorney's office failed to properly instruct members of a grand jury in considering allegations against officer Richard Haste for his role in the death."

Via the Guardian:

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Kratz’s non-profit bi-weekly newspaper, theNorwood News, used the information in February 2008 to publish maps and a series of stories that illustrated crime trends in specific neighborhoods within the paper’s coverage area—the north Bronx’s 52nd Precinct.

Reader response in the roughly 130,000-person precinct was overwhelmingly positive.

Until that point, few locals had seen crime statistics beyond the NYPD’s weekly COMPSTAT reports, which track precinct-wide major crime trends.

“Although I feel safe in my neighborhood, evidently our autos are targets,” one reader commented on the paper’s website.

“Is it possible to receive these reports on a sector basis each month?”

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As Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian, in the third quarter of 2009 alone "Dang made a total of six arrests out of his 127 stops. He wrote one summons. He found contraband once. He never recovered any weapons and he only stopped people of color, primarily African Americans, 115 times to be exact. He never stopped a white person." Dang's record here is stunning enough alone. More telling still is the justifications he recounted to the court for making many of his stops, referring to repeated observation of individuals' general behavioral patterns, including "furtive movements" -- a vague policing phrase regularly stretched beyond the limits of all reasonableness. "We have a general idea of their behavior," Dang testified.

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Judge Steven Barrett expressed concern having reviewed the minutes of the grand jury proceedings that led to Haste's indictment. In an incident that helped fuel widespread anti-NYPD sentiment and bolstered the movement challenging stop and frisk, Graham was shot dead in his grandmother's Bronx bathroom. Police reports that Graham had been armed were challenged when no weapon was found at the scene. Haste has pleaded not guilty to charges of first- and second-degree manslaughter.

As Devereaux reported, Judge Barrett's concern resides in the fact that grand jurors, who moved to indict Haste, "may have received erroneous instructions during their consideration of the case." Via the Guardian:

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The NYPD’s roughly 34,500 officers serve a population of 8.2 million people, but multiple interviews with reporters who cover the police department, as well as organizations dedicated to transparency, reveal a police department stunning in its disregard for the information requests of citizens, advocacy groups and news organizations.

The city's Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who is running for mayor, recently released a report asserting that a third of all Freedom of Information records requests to the police department were ignored. The numbers are no surprise to journalists who cover the department, such as Leonard Levitt, a veteran cops reporter who now writes at NYPD Confidential.

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While Mayor Bloomberg has been mayor, the NYPD has carried out over 5 million stop-and-frisks. Analysis by the ACLU of official police data found that over 86 percent of the stops were of black or Latino individuals. The analysis of police data also revealed that 88 percent of the stops did not result in an arrest or summons (and of course an even smaller proportion ever lead to a prosecution, or conviction). The number of innocent people stopped alone serves as ample riposte to Kelly's suggestion that any demographic is "understopped."

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This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

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New York City voters, by a substantial 66 - 25 percent margin, support creating the position of inspector general to independently monitor the Police Department... Support ranges from 53 - 38 percent among white voters to 77 - 13 percent among Hispanic voters and 78 - 13 percent among black voters, the independent Quinnipiac University poll finds... Support is 51 - 42 percent among Republicans and 55 - 35 percent among voters over 55 years old. Voters in every other political, gender, age and income groups support the NYPD inspector general idea by 60 percent or more.

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State Sen. Eric Adams, a retired NYPD captain, took the stand Monday in the landmark Floyd vs. City of New York federal trial, which challenges the constitutionality of the racially skewed stop-and-frisk tactic. Adams told the court about a 2010 meeting between Kelly and New York's then-Gov. David Patterson. Adams, also present at the meeting, testified that the commissioner had expressly stated that black and Latino men should be targeted in police stops. Kelly, according to the city's attorney, has flatly denied making such claims.

Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian:

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I don't personally agree that this logic is a convincing justification for the American Police State, and when I hear such arguments, I inevitably find myself confused by the contradiction of police-state proponents proposing to curtail freedom in order to protect it. But whether or not you subscribe to the police-state tautology, you have to admit there is more than a bit of hypocrisy at work when those who forward the Big Brother logic simultaneously insist such logic shouldn't apply to them or the governmental agencies they oversee.

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This month, NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk policy -- which entails officers regularly stopping predominantly black and Latino men and frisking them for weapons and drugs -- went on trial in federal Court. The class-action lawsuit, Floyd v. City of New York, challenges the NYPD policy on the basis that it violates the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, and the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, the NYPD's own data show hundreds of thousands of unconstitutional stops in the past three years alone, and expert analysis of their data -- controlling for crime, neighborhood and patterns of police deployment -- has found that the mitigating factor in NYPD stops is race.

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If you knew you were going to be struck and killed by a car in New York City this year, would you trust New York’s Finest to get to the bottom of things? If not, you’re not alone.

Time’s Up, a New York City environmental group, is collecting online living wills from cyclists and pedestrians who are asking the New York Police Department to conduct full investigations in the event that they killed by a motorist. The project, dubbed “My Living Street Will,” was launched on March 19 and is hosting a growing number of statements from everyday New Yorkers who navigate the city’s streets on two wheels or two feet.

Keegan Stephan, a Brooklyn-based cyclist and Time’s Up volunteer, said the idea grew out of a planning meeting in which he and other volunteers were trying to figure out ways to increase awareness about the dangers faced by cyclists and pedestrians.

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The teen was reportedly stopped on the street in Harlem when he reached into his pants' waistband. The two officers that stopped him claimed to have been searching for a firearm, but Almonor was found to be carrying no weapons. He was nonetheless handcuffed, taunted and taken to the stationhouse.

Meanwhile, as Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian, an internal NYPD memo sent to commanding officers earlier this month "amounts to an admission that the [stop-and-frisk] program is deeply flawed. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the class action lawsuit against the city, objected to the memo being entered into evidence. The group argued that civil rights groups have been pushing for police to issue such directives for years; the release of such a memo on the eve of the landmark trial has thus raised some eyebrows. Via Devereaux:

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First, though, ABC's "This Week," the only one of the big three shows this morning to have another idiotic debate about budgets, began with George Stephanopoulos actually bragging -- bragging! -- that he had both Jim Messina and Karl Rove. Oh boy, two campaign strategists! When I am looking for well-considered and thoughtful commentary on national issues, I always turn to people who are good at managing political campaigns.

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While Mayor Bloomberg's administration has long maintained that independent oversight of the NYPD is not necessary, his ally, City Council Speaker (and mayoral candidate) Christine Quinn announced Tuesday that lawmakers had reached a deal to install an inspector general to monitor the vast police department. The call for an inspector general, who could have investigative powers and the ability to issue subpoenas, followed mounting evidence of widespread discriminatory policing, both in the form of stop-and-frisks (over 86 percent of which target black and Latino New Yorkers) and the NYPD's spying on Muslim communities. For a careful politician like Quinn to support such a proposal reflects a shifting political tide towards reform.

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