A New York Police Department (NYPD) officer keeps guard during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square December 31, 2014. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith (UNITED STATES – Tags: SOCIETY CRIME LAW) – RTR4JS50

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is sending out letters telling gun owners to turn over their rifles and shotguns — or else face the consequences.

New York City’s ban on rifles and shotguns that hold more than five rounds is now being enforced, according to a letter the NYPD is sending out to targeted city gun owners.

“It appears you are in possession of a rifle and/or Shotgun (listed below) that has an ammunition feeding device capable of holding more than five (5) rounds of ammunition. Rifles and shotguns capable of holding more than five (5) rounds of ammunition are unlawful to possess in New York City, as per NYC Administrative Code 10-306 (b).”

“You have the following options,” the letter explains.

“1. Immediately surrender your Rifle and/or Shotgun to your local police precinct, and notify this office of the invoice number. The firearm may be sold or permanently removed from the City of New York thereafter.

2. Permanently remove your Rifle and/or Shotgun from New York City and provide the following…Disposition Report/Registration Certificate…Notarized statement of permanent removal…Utility bill or other proof of residency regarding the address where the firearm will be stored outside the City of New York.

3. You may call to discuss the matter if you believe your firearm is in compliance…”

Departing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a major gun-control activist, with his coalition recently sponsoring an ad that depicts an Adam Lanza-type character entering a school full of children.

New York state, meanwhile, passed the NY SAFE Act in 2013 in response to the Sandy Hook shooting. The law, which bans “high-capacity magazines” and puts in place other stringent controls, was signed by governor and 2016 presidential hopeful Andrew Cuomo.

Patrick Howley, Political Reporter

By I Quant NY

New York City is a complex place to drive.  And when it comes to parking, there are plenty of rules and regulations to follow.  It’s no wonder that sometimes people get confused and end up getting their cars ticketed or towed.

But in all of these rules, there is one thing that very few drivers seem to know. As of late 2008, in NYC you can park in front of a sidewalk pedestrian ramp, as long as it’s not connected to a crosswalk.  It’s all written up in the NYC Traffic Rules, and for more detail, take a look at this article. The local legislation making these parking spots legal was proposed by Council Member Gentile, and adopted by the Department of Transportation before it ever made it for a vote.  Though few people seem to know about the change.

Is it a problem that drivers don’t realize that there are some extra parking spots they are now allowed to park in?  Not so much.  But, I’ve got a pedestrian ramp leading to nowhere particular in the middle of my block in Brooklyn, and on occasion I have parked there.  Despite the fact that it is legal, I’ve been ticketed for parking there.  Though I get the tickets dismissed, it’s a waste of everybody’s time. And that got me wondering- How common is it for the police to give tickets to cars legally parked in front of pedestrian ramps?  It couldn’t be just me…

In the past, there was not much you could do to stop something like this. Complaining to your local precinct would at best only solve the problem locally.  But thanks to NYC’s Open Data portal, I was able to look at the most common parking spots in the City where cars were ticketed for blocking pedestrian ramps.   It’s worth taking a moment upfront here to praise the NYPD for offering this dataset to begin with.  Though we are behind on police crime data in the city, we are ahead in other ways and the parking ticket dataset is definitely one of them.

What I found when I dove into the data surprised me.  To start, I found the top address where this ticket were given: in front of 575 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where over $48,000 in parking fines were issued in the last 2.5 years.

To my surprise, the spot, (or really spots since there are two ramps), are legal, since they are in the middle of the block, with no crosswalk.  $48,000 in tickets at a legally parked spot, and that is just the last 2.5 years.  If we had more historical data, I suspect we would see a similar story.

The next top spots on the list had the same story to tell.

1705 Canton Avenue in Brooklyn, 273 Tickets, $45,045: Legal.

270-05 76 Avenue in Queens, 256 Tickets ($42,440) Legal.

143-49 Cherry Ave, Queens, 246 Tickets, ($40,590).  Legal.

Those were of course the most extreme cases that topped the list.  I started to skip down the list.  This spot in Battery Park, ranked #16 on my list and the top spot in Manhattan, had 116 tickets ($19,140) and turned out to be legal.  (Yellow paint has no meaning in NYC traffic enforcement, and the spot has no crosswalk)

I started to skip down the list faster and faster.  Take #1000 in my top list, at 1059 Virginia Avenue, where 8 tickets had been given ($1320).  It is a classic T intersection, meaning it’s legal.

See the pattern?  I did.  So I then selected 30 random spots that had received 5 or more tickets over the time period, and based on Google Maps found that all of them appeared to be legal parking spots!  (Randomly selecting spots with a single ticket in the database showed some illegal spots as well, so I chose 5 as a conservative cutoff.)

How many spots received 5 or more of these pedestrian ramp tickets in the last 2.5 years?  We are talking 1,966 spots that are generating about 1.7 million dollars a year in tickets at parking spots that are mostly legal.  Are all 1966 spots legal?  Surely not, but the majority sure are and many more that have fewer than five tickets are likely legal too.

To see where the hotspots were for this sort of abuse of drivers, I mapped the top 1000 pedestrian ramps generating parking tickets below, so you can see if you have a spot in your neighborhood that the police have been wrongly ticketing.  Clicking on a spot tells you if the tickets are given in front of, or opposite the address, as well as how many tickets have been given.

My challenge to you…  click on a spot and then look at pictures of it on Google Maps to determine if its legal.  You will most likely find it is.

Other findings in the data:

Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct seems to have the most cars wrongly ticketed, bringing in over $100,000 in fines a year.  The 77th, also in Brooklyn, comes in second:

So what is going on here? Well, it seemed from my browsing that many police officers were systematically ignoring the 2009 rule change, all across the city.

But that is not where the story ends. As mentioned, we live in a city progressive enough to release parking ticket data.  I’ve repeatedly said that putting data into the hand of citizens will make our city run better and more equitably.  So, I reached out to the NYPD via the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer’s Office (who is one of NYC’s earliest NYC’s Open Data champions)  to tell them about the findings.  They helped me get in touch with the appropriate people at the NYPD, and then I waited.

After a couple of weeks, I received the following quote from the NYPD:

“Mr. Wellington’s analysis identified errors the department made in issuing parking summonses. It appears to be a misunderstanding by officers on patrol of a recent, abstruse change in the parking rules.  We appreciate Mr. Wellington bringing this anomaly to our attention.

The department’s internal analysis found that patrol officers who are unfamiliar with the change have observed vehicles parked in front of pedestrian ramps and issued a summons in error. When the rule changed in 2009 to allow for certain pedestrian ramps to be blocked by parked vehicles, the department focused training on traffic agents, who write the majority of summonses.

Yet, the majority of summonses written for this code violation were written by police officers. As a result, the department sent a training message to all officers clarifying the rule change and has communicated to commanders of precincts with the highest number of summonses, informing them of the issues within their command.

Thanks to this analysis and the availability of this open data, the department is also taking steps to digitally monitor these types of summonses to ensure that they are being issued correctly.”

I was speechless.  THIS is what the future of government could look like one day. THIS is what Open Data is all about.  THIS was coming from the NYPD, who is not generally celebrated for its transparency, and yet it’s the most open and honest response I have received from any New York City agency to date. Imagine a city where all agencies embrace this sort of analysis instead of deflect and hide from it.   (For comparison purposes, see NYC Department of Health response to earlier work as example of how NOT to respond to Open Data.)

Democracies provide pathways for government to learn from their citizens. Open data makes those pathways so much more powerful.  In this case, the NYPD acknowledged the mistake, is retraining its officers and is putting in monitoring to limit this type of erroneous ticketing from happening in the future.  In doing so, they have shown that they are ready and willing to work with the people of the city.  And what better gift can we get from Open Data than that.

——

See Previous Government Changes brought on by this blog below:
-DOT Repainting Streets due to confusing fire hydrant
-TLC Reprogramming Cabs due to odd tipping algorithms
-MTA Redoing subway vending machines due to change issues.

See all blog coverage on NYPD here.

——

Parking Ticket Data Available here, here and here.
Map made in cartodb
Analysis done in pandas with IPython.

A New York Police Department (NYPD) officer keeps guard during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square December 31, 2014. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith (UNITED STATES – Tags: SOCIETY CRIME LAW) – RTR4JS50

New York resident Corey Green had to undergo surgery over the weekend to restore blood flow to his genitals after a police officer in the city’s Brooklyn borough allegedly kicked him between the legs during acriminal investigation. Green, a 33-year-old pest exterminator with two children, had been standing with a group of men police were questioning in connection to the robbery of a takeout food delivery man in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood Saturday.

Even though he was not identified by the victim as the culprit, police accosted Green, with one officer allegedly throwing him to the ground and another allegedly stomping on his groin with a boot, crushing his scrotum, his lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, said. “This is certainly an outrageous example of wrongdoing, and we are calling on the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office to present evidence to a grand jury,” Rubenstein said, according to a New York Daily News report published Tuesday.

The New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating Green’s claims, but it has offered a significantly different version of events. An NYPD spokesman said Green sustained the injury by running from officers into scaffolding.

Green, who police also said had 15 prior arrests, told investigators Monday that cops ordered him and his friends to leave a nearby apartment at gunpoint and stand in a lineup for the delivery man, Rubenstein said. Police took him in on an outstanding warrant for a DWI arrest but later transferred him to a hospital when they determined he had sustained a serious injury, the police spokesman told the Daily News.

“It was inhumane. It was done to inflict a powerful pain,” said Corey’s father, John Green, 52. The case is far from the first time city officers have been accused of disturbing acts of brutality. In 1997, several NYPD officers were found guilty of assault and other offenses for arresting Haitian immigrant Abner Louima and later beating and sodomizing him with a broomstick at a police station in Brooklyn.

Quentin Tarantino became an enemy of the NYPD and other cops who viewed his siding with anti-police brutality protesters as a slap in the face. The film director was rumored to offer statements that he was apologizing and stepping away from the controversial protests, but it appears that was entirely untrue.

The chatter around Tarantino began after he appeared in New York last month at a rally in Washington Square Park. Tarantino delivered statements that NYPD police chief Bill Bratton took seriously to heart.

The response to Tarantino’s speech at the rally had police unions and other figures painting him as someone who hates cops and Tarantino sat down with the Los Angeles Times to fully clear the air.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Tarantino said his remarks at the rally last month were aimed at police officers who have been involved in unwarranted shootings of civilians.

“What they’re doing is pretty obvious,” he said of his critics. “Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out. And their message is very clear. It’s to shut me down. It’s to discredit me. It is to intimidate me. It is to shut my mouth, and even more important than that, it is to send a message out to any other prominent person that might feel the need to join that side of the argument.”

This tension between Tarantino and the police comes at a time where he’s promoting his upcoming film, The Hateful Eight. The Times suggested that the controversy might have an impact on sales of the film. Still, Taratino is doubling down with his support of the protestors against police brutality.

“I have a 1st Amendment right to protest against police brutality as I see it. And I’m not backing down from that,” Tarantino said.

When Joshua Lopez saw his picture on the front page of the New York Post last month, he was anything but excited. “I felt like I was let down by my city,” Lopez confessed. The photo in question shows Lopez flipping off NYPD Inspector John D’Adamo during an October 24th march protesting police brutality. The word “DISGRACED” is superimposed over the image in all caps.

The front-page headline accompanying the photo of Lopez and D’Adamo refers to the fatal shooting of officer Randolph Holder in East Harlem.

“They put a target on my back,” Lopez told us. “And now every time I encounter a police officer I’m afraid.”

Yesterday evening, a small crowd of about 15 activists, Lopez among them, assembled outside the tabloid’s midtown office to call for a boycott of the newspaper for what they considered to be biased, pro-police coverage.

While the cover suggests that the timing of the march was insensitive to Holder’s death, demonstrators at last night’s protest pointed out that there is never an ideal time to fight police brutality.

“Don’t tell us we should postpone our protest until the NYPD postpones brutalizing and murdering people,” said Carl Dix, a member of the Rise Up October movement who helped organize both the main event and last night’s demonstration. During the peaceful 3,000-person march on October 24th, 11 people were arrested on their way from Washington Square Park to Times Square.

Others have argued that the Post should have done its research about Lopez’s personal connection to the issue of police brutality. In 2011, Lopez’s uncle John Collado was shot and killed by plainclothes NYPD officer James Connelly when Collado stepped in to break up a fightbetween Connelly and another man. Connelly was not indicted.

A statement released by demonstrators argues that the NY Post’s coverage indirectly infringes protestors’ right to freedom of expression: “If peaceful protesters can’t express their first amendment right to protest without being targeted by the media, then it’s not only police officers that aren’t being held accountable—it’s the news media as well.” At the rally, “New Yorkers Against Bratton” organizer Josmar Trujillo said, “In a country that calls itself a democracy, the first organization coming out to cover up the murder of police officers is the media.”

To be sure, that same Constitutional amendment protects publications’ right to publish accurate, if opinionated, stories. As protestor Noelle Harris put it, “We have no say, so they can publish whatever they want.”

“They’re always blaming the victim, no matter how clear the evidence is,” Nicholas Heyward Sr. echoed. In 1994, Heyward’s son, Nicholas Heyward Jr., was fatally shot by a New York City housing cop after he was seen playing with a toy gun.

“The Post chose to call me and Joshua a disgrace because we stood up to this injustice,” said Heyward. “Well, guess what? I’ve been standing up for the last 21 years, and I’m gonna continue to stand up… The Post is guilty. The whole damn system is guilty.”

The NY Post did not respond to requests for comment.

Published by The Gothamist

A deaf woman who said she was wrongly arrested by cops who ignored her disability settled her case for $750,000 Tuesday — a figure her attorneys say is the largest of its kind.

Diana Williams charged in her suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court that the NYPD officers who slapped her in cuffs ignored police guidelines requiring them to request a sign language interpreter when interacting with deaf people.

“Deaf individuals have rights, and they do not have to tolerate discrimination and injustices of any kind,” her attorneys Andrew Rozynski and Eric Baum said in a statement.

“Ms. Williams hopes that the settlement will send a message to all law enforcement agencies across the country that they should adopt proper policies and procedures to ensure full communication access for deaf individuals.”

Williams’ ordeal began Sept. 11, 2011, when she called 911 for assistance evicting a difficult tenant from her Staten Island home.

Most of the people in the house were deaf, but cops allegedly ignored training requiring them to request an interpreter.

Diana Williams, who is deaf, was so panicked by her arrest she attempted to tell cops she needed to go to the hospital by scrawling a message on a police cruiser.

Without being able to explain to Williams what was happening, Officer Christian Romano arrested her and the tenant for allegedly getting in a fight, and for the next 24 hours police ignored her attempts to communicate, the suit said.

Williams was so panicked she even wrote the letters “HOSP” on the window of a police cruiser in an effort to tell them she needed to go to the hospital, the suit says.

Romano checked the “No” box on the arrest report asking if an interpreter was needed, according to documents. He later checked “No” on different paperwork asking if Williams had a disability.

Williams’ attorneys, who run the Eisenberg and Baum Law Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing, said they believe their client has received the largest payout ever to an individual alleging deaf discrimination by a public agency. A deaf advocate at the firm, Sheryl Eisenberg-Michalowski, also worked on the case.

“Settling was in the best interest of the city,” a Law Department spokesman said.

After spending a quarter century in jail for supposed participation in the 1990 murder of a tourist on a New York City subway platform, a judge has ruled that newly revealed evidence is sufficient to overturn the conviction of then-18-year-old Juan Carlos “Johnny” Hincapie. The killing occurred as a group of six to eight individuals, allegedly including Hincapie, were attempting to rob a family visiting the city from Utah. The victim, 22-year-old Brian Watkins, was stabbed and subsequently died.

That murder occurred in a period of elevated violent crimes in the city in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during an economic recession and the so-called crack epidemic. The Watkins homicide came the year after the highly publicized “Central Park Jogger” rape case. These were used by the police and news media to whip up a frenzy against minority youth and thereby justify intensified police activity, including the implementation of the notorious “broken windows” and “stop-and-frisk” policies.

Following the Watkins murder, news media were filled with screaming headlines such as “It’s Time to Take Off the White Gloves,” in a column by former mayor Ed Koch, “We Are Captives in Our Own Homes,” and “New York’s Streets Are Awash in Blood.” The New York Times alleged, “Tourist-Slaying Suspects Are Tied to a Gang of Ritualistic Muggers.”

Terms such as “wolf pack” and “wilding” were used to characterize working class youth as animals who had to be subdued. This was employed to promote a panicked atmosphere under which police felt emboldened to employ the most extreme measures to extract confessions, with little regard to the facts of the case. The aggressive and brutal tactics of the police led to numerous false convictions, only a few of which have subsequently been exposed and overturned.

The original trial judge was known for cultivating a “tough on crime” reputation and repeatedly ruled against the defense, thus biasing the trial.

Mr. Hincapie’s conviction was thrown out following a decades-long effort to win a new trial. The reversal was based on the statements by several witnesses who had not testified at the original trial that he was not among the group undertaking the robbery. Under New York law, Hincapie was convicted of murder as part of the group, even though he was not charged with having committed the act.

At the time, none of the surviving Watkins family members could positively identify him in a lineup, nor was he named as a participant by the other attackers. The original arresting officer told Hincapie’s mother that he did not need a lawyer because he was 18 years old. Furthermore, Hincapie stated that his confession had been coerced by the police following a severe beating. Other defendants also reported being beaten by police.

The current judge’s ruling was not a complete exoneration, but indicated that the new evidence was sufficient to raise doubt regarding the previous conviction. Prosecutors are considering whether to retry the case.

Among other notorious cases of the time was the conviction of five black and Hispanic youth in the 1989 Central Park Jogger incident, in which a woman was raped and beaten nearly to death. The five accused were held by police for more than 24 hours after their arrest and bullied into making incriminating statements. They were convicted despite the lack of physical evidence and the fact that the various “confessions” contradicted each other on key points. The five were subsequently released after another individual, a convicted rapist, was identified based on DNA evidence and found to have been solely responsible for the assault. The story was made into a movie, The Central Park Five, by Ken Burns (see “The Central Park Five: A story of injustice”). The defendants were subsequently awarded a $40 million compensatory settlement from the city.

These incidents were used as justification to dramatically increase police activity in the city. Following the Watkins murder, the then-mayor, Democrat David Dinkins, hired 6,000 new policemen.

Current New York City police commissioner William Bratton, who has built a reputation for aggressive policing, had assumed command of the transit police, then separate from the city’s main police force, five months before the killing of Watkins. Bratton has dismissed the reassessment of Hincapie’s conviction and denied the possibility of any wrongdoing by police.

Bratton was later appointed police commissioner under Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani, serving from 1994 to 1996. During that time, Bratton instituted the “broken windows” policy under which the police employ aggressive enforcement tactics, including the hated “stop-and- frisk,” for minor offenses in order to intimidate workers and youth. He has stated that the Watkins murder was a “tipping point” that helped make New York City safer. Research, however, shows that the reduction in crime during the 1990s was correlated with a notable drop in unemployment.

He was reappointed as commissioner in 2014 by Democrat Bill de Blasio following a period in the private security business and as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. It was under his broken windows policy that Staten Island resident Eric Garner was harassed and ultimately murdered by police for allegedly selling loose cigarettes.

Under the self-styled “progressive” de Blasio, Bratton has continued the buildup of the city’s police force, recently announcing the addition of another 1,300 members, and a continuation of the broken windows policy, newly rechristened “community policing.” De Blasio has come to the defense of police violence, even when they lead to citizens’ deaths.

by Phillip Guelpa published on https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/10/13/hinc-o13.html

After police have been looking for a man accused of masturbating at a Midtown subway station—and then flashing a gun at someone who tried to record him, they now arrested him thanks to a short video recorded by a passenger. Worse yet, it turns out that the masturbator is a retired cop named Steven Esposito.

According to the NYPD, the masturbation took place on Monday, October 19th, at 11:56 p.m. when a 38-year-old woman was on the southbound platform of the 5th Avenue N/R station “when she heard a hissing noise beside her. When she looked to see what the noise was, she observed the suspect manipulating his penis outside of his pants.”

Police say that when Esposito began to leave, the woman began to cry. A man asked her what was wrong, and she explained what happened—prompting the man to take out his cellphone and followEsposito to record him.

As he reached the exit, the suspect allegedly “pulled out a black handgun, pointed [it at the man]” and told him to mind his own business.”

There were no reported injuries. The police released the cellphone footage, showing a man with a mustache wearing a grey suit.

The 56-year-old retired cop admitted to brandishing his gun to threaten the man, was charged with misdemeanor public lewdness and menacing.

He was released without bail and is scheduled back in court on December 1, according toDNA Info.

While New York City has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, Esposito is allowed to carry a gun after he obtained  “good guy letter” from his former agency.

Dystopian truth is stranger than dystopian fiction.

In New York City, the police now maintain an unknown number of military-grade vans outfitted with X-ray radiation, enabling cops to look through the walls of buildings or the sides of trucks. The technology was used in Afghanistan before being loosed on U.S. streets. Each X-ray van costs an estimated $729,000 to $825,000.

The NYPD will not reveal when, where, or how often they are used.

“I will not talk about anything at all about this,” New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told a journalist for the New York Post who pressed for details on the vans. “It falls into the range of security and counter-terrorism activity that we engage in.”

He added that “they’re not used to scan people for weapons.”

Here are some specific questions that New York City refuses to answer:

• How is the NYPD ensuring that innocent New Yorkers are not subject to harmful X-ray radiation?
• How long is the NYPD keeping the images that it takes and who can look at them?
• Is the NYPD obtaining judicial authorization prior to taking images, and if so, what type of authorization?
• Is the technology funded by taxpayer money, and has the use of the vans justified the price tag?

Those specifics are taken from a New York Civil Liberties Union court filing. The legal organization is seeking to assist a lawsuit filed by Pro Publica journalist Michael Grabell, who has been fighting New York City for answers about X-ray vans for 3 years.

“ProPublica filed the request as part of its investigation into the proliferation of security equipment, including airport body scanners, that expose people to ionizing radiation, which can mutate DNA and increase the risk of cancer,” he explained. (For fear of a terrorist “dirty bomb,” America’s security apparatus is exposing its population to radiation as a matter of course.)

A state court has already ruled that the NYPD has to turn over policies, procedures, and training manuals that shape uses of X-rays; reports on past deployments; information on the costs of the X-ray devices and the number of vans purchased; and information on the health and safety effects of the technology. But New York City is fighting on appeal to suppress that information and more, as if it is some kind of spy agency rather than a municipal police department operating on domestic soil, ostensibly at the pleasure of city residents.

Its insistence on extreme secrecy is part of an alarming trend. The people of New York City are effectively being denied the ability to decide how they want to be policed.

“Technologies––from x-ray scanners to drones, automatic license plate readers that record license plates of cars passing by, and ‘Stingrays’ that spy on nearby cell phones by imitating cell phone towers—have brought rapid advances to law enforcement capacity to monitor citizens,” the NYCLU notes. “Some of these new technologies have filtered in from the battlefields into the hands of local law enforcement with little notice to the public and with little oversight. These technologies raise legitimate questions about cost, effectiveness, and the impact on the rights of everyday people to live in a society free of unwarranted government surveillance.”

A New York Police Department (NYPD) officer keeps guard during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square December 31, 2014. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith 

For all we know, the NYPD might be bombarding apartment houses with radiation while people are inside or peering inside vehicles on the street as unwitting passersby are exposed to radiation. The city’s position—that New Yorkers have no right to know if that is happening or not—is so absurd that one can hardly believe they’re taking it. These are properly political questions. And it’s unlikely a target would ever notice. “Once equipped, the van—which looks like a standard delivery van—takes less than 15 seconds to scan a vehicle,” Fox News reported after looking at X-ray vans owned by the federal government. “It can be operated remotely from more than 1,500 feet and can be equipped with optional technology to identify radioactivity as well.”

In her ruling, Judge Doris Ling-Cohan highlights the fact that beyond the privacy questions raised by the technology are very real health and safety concerns. She writes:

Petitioner states in his affidavit, and respondent does not dispute, that: backscatter technology, previously deployed in European Union airports, was banned in 2011, because of health concerns; an internal presentation from American Science and Engineering, Inc., the company that manufactures the vans, determined that the vans deliver a radiation dose 40 percent larger than delivered by a backscatter airport scanner; bystanders present when the van is in use are exposed to the radiation that the van emits… moreover, petitioner maintains, and it is not disputed by the NYPD, that ‘there may be significant health risks associated with the use of backscatter x-ray devices as these machines use ionizing radiation, a type of radiation long known to mutate DNA and cause cancer.

Finally, petitioner states, again without dispute, that, on August 2011, the United States Customs and Border Protection Agency, which used the vans to scan vehicles crossing into and out of the United States, despite repeated testing and analysis of the amount of radiation emitted by such devices, nevertheless, prohibited continued use of the vans to scan occupied vehicles, until approval was granted by the United States Custom and Border Protection Radiation and Safety Committee…

And since the technology can see through clothing, it is easy to imagine a misbehaving NYPD officer abusing it if there are not sufficient safeguards in place. Trusting the NYPD to choose prudent, sufficient safeguards under cover of secrecy is folly. This is the same department that spent 6 years conducting surveillance on innocent Muslims Americans in a program so unfocused that it produced zero leads—and that has brutalized New York City protestors on numerous occasions. Time and again it’s shown that outside oversight is needed.
Lest readers outside New York City presume that their walls still stand between them and their local law enforcement agency, that isn’t necessarily the case. Back in January, in an article that got remarkably little attention, USA Today reported the following:

At least 50 U.S. law enforcementagencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance. Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person’s house without first obtaining a search warrant. The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.

The overarching theme here is a law enforcement community that has never seen a technology that causes it to say, “We’d better ask if the public wants us to use this or not.”

Instead, the usual protocol is not only to adopt new technology without permission—regardless of the privacy, health and safety, or moral questions that it raises—but to keep having done so a secret as long as possible, and to hide the true nature of the technology in question even after the public has been alerted to its existence. The fact that this pattern has held in regards to a device that can look through walls while emitting radiation on the streets of New York City raises questions including “What’s next?” “What else don’t we know about?” and “Will any technology on the military-to-police pipeline ever cause cops to ask permission first?”

By Conor Friedersdorf for The Atlantic

The New York City Police Department is turning to a new tool in its effort to teach its future officers about tolerance and understanding – drama.

The city’s Police Academy has added the one-act play “Anne & Emmett” by Janet Langhart Cohen to its recruit training this fall. The play is an imaginary conversation between Anne Frank, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, and Emmett Till, who was killed by racists in Mississippi in 1955.

The play will be performed for some 1,100 recruits at their academy in Queens over two performances on Thursday, part of a push by the department to prepare future police officers to overcome community mistrust and their own bias.

“Sometimes you can’t get it in a text book. Sometimes you can’t get it in a lecture. But you can get it when human emotions are played live on the stage and that humanity can connect,” Cohen said Friday.

“If the play can reach one man or woman with a badge and a gun, I’m happy. Their training can take them only so far. The body cams will only cover so much. At some point, I’m hoping their humanity will kick in and hopefully this play with revive that humanity.”

It was Commissioner William J. Bratton who, after seeing a production downtown, asked to take it to the recruits. In a statement, he called the play “a poignant and thoughtful production that explores the respective histories and common experiences of two people cruelly victimized by racial and religious prejudice.”

Since Bratton took office in 2014, he has sought to change how the department interacts with the communities it serves, following years of rising mistrust and a stop-and-frisk policy that was found to have targeted minorities. But the death last year of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, helped fuel a national public outcry over how communities of color are treated by police.

In the play, the two teens meet and find similarities between their harrowing experiences. Cohen, a former journalist who grew up in segregated housing in Indianapolis and is the wife of the former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, said she jumped at Bratton’s idea.

“I thought, ‘Where better than at the tip of spear of law enforcement, where we African-Americans, in particular, are having so much trouble with excessive force, with police brutality, with disproportionate stop and frisks?'” Cohen said. “They don’t always see us the way they see each other.”

“Anne & Emmett” premiered in 2009 at the United States Holocaust Museum and has been performed in Washington, D.C., Indianapolis and Chicago. Its message of humility, dignity and empathy has played for students and Supreme Court justices. The New York police department is discussing making it a permanent part of its recruit training.

“We’re always looking for new ways for recruits to tackle the challenges of policing in a multicultural society like we have in New York City,” said Inspector Richard Dee, the executive officer of the police academy. “It’s a way for recruits to self-reflect. I think the production is going to cause them to reflect on the history of race relations and now their new-found role.”

From khpo.com