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Bloomberg appeared on John Gambling's WOR-NY radio show, Capital New York reports, to discuss two bills passed by the New York City Council -- one that would create an inspector general to oversee the NYPD, and another to allow people to sue over racial profiling by the police. "The racial profiling bill is just so unworkable," Bloomberg said. "Nobody racially profiles."

From Capital New York:

The mayor went on to cite the city's murder rate, which has fallen dramatically during his tenure, and argue that now is not the time to conduct a "social experiment."

"There is this business, there's one newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, 'Oh it's a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group,'" he went on. "That may be, but it's not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little."

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The New York Daily News reports:

The Council voted with veto-proof majorities for bills creating an inspector general's office to oversee the NYPD and allowing people to sue over racial profiling by police.

The IG bill passed 40-11. The profiling bill passed 34-17 -- exactly the number of votes needed to withstand Bloomberg’s expected veto.

Bloomberg's counsel Michael Best objected to the bills in a letter to the Council, arguing that they “would seriously impede the ability of the Police Department and the City to protect 8.4 million New Yorkers” and cause an “avalanche of new lawsuits against police action.”

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"The baby was dangling, basically straddling the fire escape," said Torre. He then fell, and Torre's instincts kicked in. "I just put out my arms when I saw him coming down and luckily, he literally landed in my arms, straight on his back," she told ABC 7.

Joe Torre said in a statement that "I am very proud of my daughter Cristina's actions today during an incident in Brooklyn involving a small child. Fortunately for that child she was in the right place at the right time to lend a hand."

The NYPD has charged the parents with negligence.

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In a lawsuit being filed Tuesday, the lawyers said the spying has hindered the ability of residents to freely practice their religion. It is the third significant legal action filed against the NYPD Muslim surveillance program since details of the spy program were revealed in a series of Associated Press reports in 2011 and 2012.

The lawsuit said that Muslim religious leaders in New York have modified their sermons and other behavior so as not to draw additional police attention. The suit is expected to be filed against Mayor Michael Bloomberg, police commissioner Raymond Kelly and the deputy commissioner of intelligence, David Cohen.

The lawsuit, which accuses the city of violating the First and Fourteenth amendments, is the latest legal challenge to the activities of the NYPD Intelligence Division. A year ago, the California-based civil rights organization Muslim Advocates sued the NYPD over its counterterrorism programs. Earlier this year, civil rights lawyers urged a judge to stop the NYPD from routinely observing Muslims in restaurants, bookstores and mosques, saying the practice violates a landmark 1985 court settlement that restricted the kind of surveillance used against war protesters in the 1960s and '70s.

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“I don’t think it ever should have been made secret,” Kelly said on Monday. The commissioner didn't criticize the surveillance programs themselves, just the secrecy surrounding them:

I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone, it’s going to be recorded and it goes to the government... I think the public can understand that. I see no reason why that program was placed in the secret category.

Kelly -- who again and again has rejected greater oversight for his department -- suggested too that the NSA may need more oversight. Azi Paybarah of Capital New York noted the irony in his morning brief:

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The revelations of NSA’s collection of “metadata” -- as cybersecurity expert Susan Landau explained on "Democracy Now" -- is, in fact, even more invasive than actual content collection. She gives an example of how that can be the case: Even if all the NSA does is trace the one or more calls from your home to your doctor on a day when you would normally be at work, followed by one or more calls from your phone that is now located at the doctor’s office to your family, that information strongly suggests that the content of the call was bad news.

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New York city officials were told of Holder's decision Wednesday, according to the News. On Tuesday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly reportedly "vigorously objected to the plan in telephone conversations with Holder."

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Here was Murdoch this weekend:

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As Media Matters reports, Fox News' "Fox & Friends" rather quickly and blatantly began praising Kelly and saying he should run for mayor. (Fun fact: Ray Kelly's son Greg is a Murdoch employee and former "Fox & Friends" co-host.)

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The actress, who was arrested last week on charges of drug possession and reckless endangerment after she allegedly dropped a bong out of her high-rise apartment window, has repeatedly written on Twitter that she was sexually assaulted by the police who arrested her and threatened to sue the New York Police Department. (Bynes has threatened to sue various entities over the course of the past few months, including many gossip news outlets and her apartment building.)

Bynes' erratic behavior has also included a series of tweets directed at the pop star Rihanna -- since deleted and disavowed entirely by Bynes, but preserved in screenshot form on the gossip site TMZ -- in which she mocked the singer's appearance and her abuse at the hands of Chris Brown, a former boyfriend. Bynes' tweets at Rihanna made the covers of both New York daily tabloids over the Memorial Day weekend; the ethical conundrum of how to cover a breaking-down star has only grown more intense as Bynes has continued to apparently decompensate and once authorities got involved.

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A recent New York Daily News investigation traced Sbarra and his team's muddied record, noting how his 2011 promotion evidenced -- for police department critics -- "how the NYPD turns a blind eye to the mountains of litigation filed against it every year, and its nonchalant attitude toward police misconduct."
Via NYDN:

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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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