Some New York City police officers say they’ve been pressured by their bosses to reduce the number of felony incidents reported, in an effort to keep crime statistics low, reported the New York Times.
Shari Archibald’s black handbag sat at her feet on the sidewalk in front of her Bronx home on a recent summer night. The two male officers crouched over her leather bag and rooted around inside, elbow-deep. One officer fished out a tampon and then a sanitary napkin, crinkling the waxy orange wrapper between his fingers in search of drugs. Next he pulled out a tray of foil-covered pills, Ms. Archibald recalled.
Stop-and-frisks are down, Dave Seifman reported today, and critics of the practice don't much care.
"If past is prologue, we can expect that NYPD officers subjected at least 1,000 innocent New Yorkers a day to humiliating and unjustified street stops," New York Civil Liberties Union's executive director Donna Lieberman said in a statement. "That is nothing to brag about."
San Francisco's mayor Ed Lee recently said that he's considering adopting a stop-and-frisk strategy similar to one employed by the New York Police Department under Ray Kelly.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has recently adopted a somewhat conciliatory tone with critics of the police department’s stop-and-frisk practice, pledging that police officers will be trained to behave more courteously and promising that the number of stops will decline.
The Christopher Street Pier — known as a longtime safe haven for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color — has been threatened in recent years due to the city’s desire for private development on nearby Pier 40, according to members of an LGBTQ youth-advocacy group.
POLICE TRAINING HEADQUARTERS — Standing in front of a classroom at the NYPD’s training headquarters at Rodman’s Neck in the Bronx, Detective James Shanahan, a veteran police academy instructor, stressed the importance of courtesy during police stops.
"People need to be treated with dignity and respect," said Shanahan, standing at a lectern in the building, where thousands of officers will receive training this year. But this time he wasn't speaking to cops.
Beneath the sounds of birds and children playing in Central Park, thousands marched quietly down Manhattan’s 5th avenue on Sunday afternoon carrying signs bearing the faces of a decade of victims of police violence and the words “Stop Racial Profiling: End Stop and Frisk.” Contingents from nearly 300 groups including labor unions, community groups, national civil rights organizations as well as the unaffiliated gathered in Harlem and marched past khaki-clad upper east siders walking their poodles, to the home of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Their demand?
