“Commissioner, facts are facts… A disproportionate number of people being stopped are people of color.”
This week’s cover, The NYPD Tapes Confirmed:
The report police hid for nearly two years that corroborates a Voice investigation — and vindicates a whistle-blower the NYPD tried to destroy.
Truly incredible work from Graham Rayman.
King said he was dismayed by the rhetoric coming from some of the candidates for mayor and wondered “what kind of city they want to create.”
He referred to a City Councilman who said people in his district are more frightened by the NYPD than they are of drug dealers. (He could also have been referring to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who expressed that sentiment in a rally calling for an end to the department’s stop-and-frisk policy over the weekend.)
“I find those remarks absolutely disgraceful,” said King.
“Absolutely,” said Kelly. “Well, you know, pandering is going on, that’s the season that we’re entering now.”
NYC police commissioner Ray Kelly holds up bloody fragments of a bullet taken earlier this evening from the base of an NYPD officer’s skull. The officer survived the gunshot. The perp is in custody. The bullet may go down as a very strange prop in NYC history.
a press conference calling for #nypd commissioner ray kelly to resign- via @azipaybarah
The Third Jihad - The “hate-filled film about Muslims” shown to more than 1,400 NYPD officers during trainings. This morning, the Times called on Ray Kelly to apologize for screening the film.
ODB’s FBI file opens with a 10-page narrative describing the NYPD’s investigation into the group. Detectives discovered information that suggested Wu Tang was buying guns from contacts in Steubenville, Ohio, a small town which was home to a Wu affiliate. Arrested sellers of the guns identified Wu Tang members as purchasers via photo spreads. One of the Steubenville guns was identified as the murder weapon in the killing of Robert “Pooh” Johnson, a Wu affiliate killed in Staten Island on December 30, 1997. The files state that detectives believed the murder was ordered by someone within Wu Tang. (The case remains unsolved.)
Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Kelly swore in 898 new police officers.
Photo from the NYC Mayor’s Office Flickr, by Edward Reed.
(via NYCDigital and Azi’s briefing)
Meg Robertson, who works for MSNBC, said unreasonable interference is exactly what she found when she sought to cover the protest near the corner of 53rd Street and 7th Avenue, where demonstrators had been corraled into a “free-speech zone,” demarcated by police barricades, near the Obama event.
“I identified myself to a number of NYPD as a member of the press and they would not let me close to the penned in area,” she wrote to Capital in an email account of the events last night.
“I was told to stay in Maison restaurant or exit the restaurant to be escorted outside security fencing on Broadway and 53rd. NYPD outside of Maison refused to escort me to the street to speak with anyone from NYPD Community Relations, even after I identified myself as a member of the media.”
Professor Dinkins sprung up from his chair and instructed the young man to “take it easy.” Several students asked if he was even registered for the course. “No, I go to NYU,” he said. A groan went up and students began asking him to leave.
Also signing the letter, which takes the NYPD to task for a failure to reply to several previous letters of complaint, are signatories from the New York Post, the Daily News, the Associated Press, NBC Universal and WNBC-TV, Dow Jones, WCBS-TV, WABC-TV, Thomson Reuters and others. The New York Civil Liberties Union has sent a companion letter to the mayor’s office.
The letter reads in part: “The signatories below wish to express their profound displeasure, disappointment and concern over the recent actions taken against the media. … Over the past few months we have tried to work with [the Office of the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information] to improve police-press relations. However, if anything, the police actions of the last week have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.”
