Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio's pick for Police Commissioner prompted a range of reactions across the city Thursday.
Prominent New Yorkers, the police unions and civil rights groups at loggerheads with the NYPD over "stop-and-frisk" policing all weighed in on the selection of former top cop Bill Bratton to replace outgoing Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
Last week, Communities United for Police Reform hosted an open dialogue at the Talking Transition tent in Chelsea on the future of public safety in New York City. A panel of social justice advocates engaged in social discourse and discussed issues that highlighted a direction the de Blasio administration should take on policing community safety to keep our streets safe without discrimination.
The stop and frisk debate continues and now a new study has been thrown into the mix.
The New York Attorney General’s Office released a report last week that supports the claim that the policy targets mostly young men of color and did not reduce crime.
“Supporters and opponents of the practice agree that only 6 percent of all stops result in an arrest,” the report reads. “Yet until now, no known study has sought to assess what happens following those arrests.”
The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and three other police unions announced today they will file an appeal to intervene in the stop-and-frisk case in anticipation of mayor-elect Bill de Blasio's withdrawal of the city's challenge to the suit.
The four unions representing 29,000 police officers, detectives, lieutenants and and captains plans to file the motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit. This marks the second time the law-enforcement unions are attempting to be part of the case.
CNN anchor Don Lemon credited the heavily-criticized “stop and frisk” approach by New York City police with a dramatic reduction in local crime in a radio commentary on Tuesday, and suggested that tampering with it would hurt not just the city’s residents, but its economy.
The ruling by a federal appeals court to block the widespread changes to the controversial stop and friskprogram of the New York Police Department has drawn a widespread disappointment and criticism from elected officials and activists.
Opponents of New York’s stop-and-frisk policy cheered a judge this summer when she ruled the law unconstitutional and ordered a series of changes. But on Thursday, a higher court kicked Judge Shira Scheindlin off the case and put her decision on hold, accusing her of impropriety.
The main NYPD union filed a lawsuit Tuesday, as expected, in a bid to get the City Council's bias profiling law tossed out, claiming the measure will make it difficult for police officers to do their jobs.
The complaint filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association claims the law is pre-empted by the state criminal procedure code and is too vague to give police guidance on what they are permitted to do.
A New York City police officer is speaking out against the department's stop-and-frisk policy in a new video.