NEW YORK — A watchdog group on Monday urged a judge to mandate sweeping changes to the New York Police Department's practice of stopping and questioning people on the street, saying in court papers that it remains concerned about civil liberties, racial disparities and transparency.
NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill announced Thursday the creation of an independent panel that will review how the nation’s largest police department disciplines its officers.
The review board will scrutinize every aspect of the disciplinary process — from how investigations into officer misconduct are initiated to how penalties are determined and ultimately doled out by the commissioner.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new marijuana policy was met with a backlash from the Manhattan district attorney and other critics, who said the change wouldn’t do enough to diminish racial disparities among those who face punishment for the low-level crime, the Wall Street Journal reports. De Blasio and New York Police Department officials announced Tuesday that instead of arresting people caught smoking marijuana in public, officers would iss
Most pot smokers caught puffing in public won’t get arrested starting on Sept. 1, Mayor de Blasio announced Tuesday.
The new policy is expected to cut the number of pot arrests by about 10,000 a year. Last year, there were 17,500 arrests.
De Blasio made the announcement at a recreation center in East Harlem, the neighborhood that has topped the city for pot busts.
Holidays like Father’s Day are hard for those who’ve lost a patriarch, especially when the loss is due to a violent death at the hands of the police.
The de Blasio administration’s new marijuana policy is being panned by community advocates and criminal justice experts who say it will do nothing to address the racial disparity in policing public smoking offenses.
The families of Eric Garner, Delrawn Small, and Saheed Vasell – all fathers who missed Father’s Day with their families – and their community supporters have called for Mayor de Blasio to take immediate action to hold the officers who killed them accountable.
All of the families are being denied accountability by the de Blasio administration, with the NYPD failing to take actions to discipline and fire the officers responsible and withholding vital information from the families and public.
Make it public.
Elected officials, civil rights advocates and relatives of those killed by police officers gathered at City Hall to call for the repeal of a state law they say is obscuring police transparency and protecting bad cops.
The law, known as Section 50-a, is a provision of the state’s civil rights law that shields the personnel records of law enforcement officers from public disclosure.
THE NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT has quietly expanded its gang database under Mayor Bill de Blasio, targeting tens of thousands of young people of color for increased surveillance even in the absence of criminal conduct.
New Yorkers have been added to the NYPD gang database under de Blasio at a rate of 342 people per month, nearly three times the rate of the prior decade. That’s despite both historically low crime levels and the fact that gang-motivated crime makes up less than 1 percent of all reported crime in New York City.
Former tennis pro James Blake has spoken out in response to the news that the NYPD officer who tackled him in 2015 received a penalty of five lost vacation days.
Officer James Frascatore lost five vacation days for his use of excessive force against Blake, the New York Daily Newsreported — half of the penalty recommended by the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an independent NYPD oversight office.