Back in September, the New York City Police Department officially started giving people receipts when they stopped and frisked them. The procedure was designed to prevent dubious searches, increase officer accountability, and help repair the relationship between cops and minority communities.
— A new report was issued today by Peter Zimroth, the federal monitor overseeing reforms to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program. It says many officers and higher ups don't understand what's expected of them. Darius Charney with The Center For Constitutional Rights says we need a buy-in throughout the chain of command for real reform.
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Criminal justice reform has been on the table in Albany for the past year, but a big obstacle for lawmakers is disagreement over what should be done to ease tensions between police and the communities they serve. Part of the problem is information. We currently do not have an organized collection of data about policing in the state, but my next guest has a bill that would change that. The Police Statistics and Transparency Act would require the collection of data about interactions between police and the public.
Assemblyman Joseph Lentol and Senator Daniel Squadron are calling for New York to overhaul the system for collecting and reporting data on policing activity throughout the state.
Their Police-STAT Act (A.7698/S.6001) would allow the state to capture and publicly report statistics about policing across the state.
More than 50 people attended a press conference in the Capitol recently to call for more transparency among law enforcement data reporting.
The head of a city police union thinks Beyoncé should turn her attention to black-on-black crime.
“She should direct her message where it’s needed most, and that’s in the ’hood, because that’s where it all takes place,” Michael Palladino (photo r.), president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said Sunday on John Catsimatidis’ radio show, “The Cats Roundtable.”
Tuesday marked four years since Ramarley Graham was killed in his own home by members of the New York Police Department. At City Hall, activists, elected officials and the parents of Graham, Eric Garner, Anthony Baez, Shantel Davis and Mohamed Bah called for officers to be held accountable for the deaths of unarmed men.
NEW YORK -- It was still dark in lower Manhattan, a little before 6 a.m. Wednesday, when the parents of Ramarley Graham shook off their sleeping bags and assembled on the steps outside the Department of Justice office of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
A coalition of homelessness advocates and homeless individuals gathered on the steps of City Hall on Monday to call for a “formal investigation and review into the NYPD’s policing and treatment of homeless New Yorkers.”
More than 50 advocacy groups have asked an inspector general to probe how the New York Police Department polices the homeless.
Communities United for Police Reform released a letter sent to NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure on Monday.
“Homeless New Yorkers are entitled to the same rights as any other resident of the city, but some accounts appear to indicate that police have participated in activity violating that notion,” part of the letter states.
The NYPD Inspector General should investigate the policing of homeless New Yorkers, advocacy groups say.
Communities United for Police Reform, Picture the Homeless, and more than 50 other groups wrote to IG Philip Eure requesting the formal probe, saying there are rampant examples of cops unfairly targeting the homeless.