Researcher finds 95,000 NYPD Stop & Frisks Unconstitutional / Stop & Frisk to be Big Issue in 2013 Vote

According to a new report analyzing stop-and-frisk data made public by the New York Police Department, 95,000 stops were unconstitutional. MORE

At Capital New York, By Azi Paybarah, December 12, 2012 4:44 pm

According to a new report analyzing stop-and-frisk data made public by the New York Police Department, 95,000 stops appear to have been unconstitutional.

The report released today is from the Center for Constitution Rights and professor Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University, a critic of stop-and-frisk who is currently part of a class-action lawsuit against the city.

The report says that "based on the information recorded on NYPD stop-and-frisk forms by police officers themselves, more than 95,000 stops lacked reasonable articulable suspicion and therefore violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures."

Asked about that claim, MYPD spokesman Paul Browne responded by email, "Stops save lives and they comport with descriptions provided by victims of violent crime."

Go to Capital NY for the conclusion of the article.
One of the more telling findings about the upcoming New York mayoral race in a new Quinnipiac poll of city residents is buried deep within the survey. MORE

At Capital New York, By Blake Zeff, November 21, 2012 12:42 pm

The article on a Quinnipiac University poll begins with the usual concerns of which candidate's ahead (the poll shows Quinn the first choice of 32 percent, versus 10, 9, 5, and 4, respectively for Bill Thompson, Bill de Blasio, John Liu, and Scott Stringer). However, this poll was taken before Stringer quit the mayoral race.

Yet, it closes with a note on how stop and frisk is heavily opposed by Democratic, African-American and Latino voters.

A more telling finding in the poll, in my view, regards police practices. New Yorkers strongly support the performance of police commissioner Ray Kelly (68-23) and that of the NYPD as a whole (62-31), but they sharply oppose stop-and-frisk tactics (by 53-42) that have mostly targeted black and Hispanic men. This dichotomy indicates that the disapproval of stop-and-frisk is not merely a proxy or byproduct of blind hatred toward (or even dissatisfaction with) the police department, but rather, a stand-alone concern about which there is very real discontent.

Dig deeper into the stop-and-frisk question, and the numbers are even more telling: Democrats oppose the practice by 62-33, black voters by 70-28, and Hispanic voters by 64-33.

Don’t think this has escaped the attention of the candidates and their campaigns. If you’re a Democrat running for mayor in 2013, this is an issue you must address if you want to connect with the base of your party.

New Yorkers have plenty of positive things to say about Michael Bloomberg’s tenure. Impressively, 57 percent think his health initiatives have either been right or have not gone "far enough.” Nearly two thirds are somewhat or very satisfied with the way things are going in the city today.

Stop-and-frisk is a glaring exception. I’d expect we’ll be hearing a lot about this from the candidates in 2013.

Haimson reports: 1st mayoral ed debate / Stringer leaves 2013 mayoral race / Quinn leads / Spitzer wonders if Liu is finished

Leonie Haimson on the the forum of prospective 2013 mayoral candidates to succeed New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg: "The First Mayoral Debate on Education!," NYC Public School Parents, November 19, 2012.

Azi Paybarah, "Eliot Spitzer wonders if Liu really counts as a contender anymore," Capital New York, November 21, 2012.

Dana Rubinstein's November 18 article after the forum of prospective mayoral candidates: "On education, the mayoral candidates vie to be the un-Bloomberg, Capital New York, November 19, 2012.

Azi Paybarah, "Quinn runs up-front, with qualifications," Capital New York, November 21, 2012. Paybarah offered the main qualification the fact that the poll was taken prior to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer's leaving the field. Paybarah ventured that the poll actually represented name recognition.

Azi Paybarah in Capital New York reports that Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has left the tentative field for 2013 New York City mayoral competition. Stringer will contend for the comptroller position, now held by John Liu.

Paybarah Saturday surmised reasons why Stringer left the race:

Why Scott Stringer's 2013 Mayoral Campaign Ended Before 2013

There's an unobstructed view of City Hall from the Manhattan borough president's office at 1 Centre Street. But for Scott Stringer, the mayor's office was out of reach.

On Sunday, Stringer is expected to announce formally that he is abandoning his all-but-announced campaign for mayor and running instead for New York City comptroller.

Stringer is bright and well-qualified, with impeccable liberal credentials, a solid donor base and even, improbably, a stable of celebrity supporters.

But this year, as became clear to him, that wasn't enough.

The political demise of former congressman Anthony Weiner, a progressive outer-borough Jew, and the fund-raising scandal surrounding New York City Comptroller John Liu, seemingly knocked out two well-funded formidable rivals.

But Stringer, overshadowed as the Manhattan candidate by Bloomberg ally and relative establishment favorite Christine Quinn, wasn't able to capitalize.

In part, it's a function of his office, which provides a public platform but few actual powers to its occupants. (Just ask Marty Markowitz.)

But it's also just the way the field was set up.

Stringer was the only Jewish candidate, once Weiner disappeared. But that didn't guarantee him much.

Two other mayoral candidates have clearly defined prospective bases: Former city comptroller Bill Thompson drew a large amount of support from African-American and Hispanic voters four years ago and is expected to do so again. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio of Brooklyn is the outer-borough white candidate who has strong union ties but he's also hoping to attract some black support, on the strength of his African-American wife and family and his ties to the Clintons.

And then, right in Stringer's backyard, there's Quinn.

Since 2006, Quinn has been the speaker of the New York City Council, the second highest ranking Democrat in the city. She's well-known and tacitly backed, if only as the best of the plausible mayoral options, by the mayor and the Bloomberg-adoring business establishment. Quinn will likely get more slack from many progressives for her Bloomberg ties than she otherwise would, on the basis of her background as a gay-rights activist, and her status as the potential first female or openly gay mayor of New York.

Stringer had criticized her from time to time for not providing a strong enough check against the mayor,. and from the perspective of the Democratic primary electorate, he may have had a good point. But it wasn't an argument that was going to get him where he needed to go.

Not Again!: Another Police Shooting of an Unarmed Man of Color in NYC

Yet again we have the news that a New York Police Department officer has shot an unarmed young man of color. This is not the instance of the police shooting a man who is actively presenting an imminent danger, as in the case of the shooter at tourist-crowded Empire State Building incident several weeks ago. The latest case is an entirely different circumstance.

Early Thursday morning an NYPD detective shot and killed an Army reservist on the Grand Central Parkway on his way home from one of his two jobs. Now, it is unfortunately not uncommon for New York City area motorists to make ill-informed driving choices, speeding and switching wrecklessly. It is very dangerous, but it is not grounds for the police to shoot the driver.

Here is how DNAinfo reported the story:

QUEENS — An NYPD detective shot and killed an unarmed man behind the wheel of a car on the Grand Central Parkway on Thursday morning as an off-duty cop slept in the back seat, police said.
Noel Polanco, 22, was in his 2012 Honda Fit Hybrid with two female passengers — one of them a police officer who was placed on modified duty recently because of a disciplinary issue — when he was spotted driving erratically in the eastbound lanes about 5:15 a.m., police said.
Friends said Polanco, whose nickname was Sparks, was an U.S. Army reservist who lived with his mother and recently lost his stepfather to suicide.
"He's been stressed since, but he never really did anything wrong," said Tito Cordero, 27, a friend of Polanco's. "He doesn't fight. He doesn't drink. He doesn't smoke. He just works to get his mind off all the problems."
Polanco allegedly cut between two unmarked NYPD Emergency Service Unit Apprehension Team vehicles, police said. He then darted into the left lane and tailgated another vehicle, the NYPD said. After that vehicle didn't move, Polanco shifted back between the two police vehicles in the right lane, hitting the brakes and forcing the NYPD vehicles to slow down, sources said.
Cops turned on their lights and sirens and attempted to pull Polanco's car over, sources said. The NYPD vehicles positioned themselves in front of and behind the Honda until it finally came to a stop at Exit 7 near LaGuardia Airport, police said. Two cops — a uniformed sergeant and a detective — came out of the police vehicle in front of the Honda and approached the vehicle.
As Det. Hassan Hamdy approached on the passenger side of Polanco's car, he saw Polanco reach down and grab an object that appeared to be a power tool, sources said. Hamdy fired a single shot through the passenger window into Polanco's abdomen, sources said.

The last quote gives the police's official story. Notice that there is always some kind of excuse: the police shooting victim is "reaching" for something. And that something often turns out to be non-threatening, a wallet, a candy bar, in this case, even the police are citing an object not likely to be used at that instance --don't power drills need power, have they ascertained that the drill in Polanco's hand, pointed at the officer? Not even that much was in the police's excuse. When Polanco's passenger is quoted, we hear that his hands were on the steering wheel, and that this shooting could be a road rage incident on the police detective's part.

"Noel didn't have a chance to put his hands up. They screamed, 'Put up your hands!' and shot at the same time," said Diane DeFerrari, 36, a bartender who was riding in the front passenger seat, according to the New York Daily News. "It was simultaneous. There was a pop and Noel gasped."
Sources said DeFerrari told investigators that Polanco's hands were on the wheel when Hamdy shot him.
"They acted in pure road rage," DeFerrari told the newspaper.

The rest of DNAinfo's story can be read here. Here is the Daily News's report on the story.

Parallels to another tragic shooting by the police
This story has echoes of another very questionable police shooting this year. In Feburary police in the Bronx trailed Ramarley Graham to his home, and shot him when he was inside. The Socialist Worker reported,

On February 2, 18-year-old Ramarley Linden Graham was shot and killed by New York City police officer Richard Haste in the bathroom of the home where he lived in the Bronx.
Graham's grandmother, Gwendolyn Henry, and 6-year-old brother, Chinnor Campbell, watched in horror as officers broke down the door of their home, cornered Graham in the bathroom and shot him in the chest. Henry was then dragged off to the NYPD's 47th Precinct--where, after the shock and trauma of watching officers kill her beloved grandson, she was subjected to seven hours of interrogation.
Predictably, police claim the officers thought Graham had a gun, but admit now he was unarmed. Police also say they were in "hot pursuit" of Graham, but surveillance video disproves this, too--Graham can be seen walking at a leisurely pace, entering his home and closing the door behind him before Haste and his supervisor, Sgt. Scott Morris, force their way in.
More than three months have passed, and Ramarley Graham's family is still waiting for answers and demanding that police be held accountable for murdering their son.

The rest of Socialist Worker's article can be read here.

As reported in the Nation magazine, Graham's case has been a cause for community mobilization. With the shooting of Polanco, there is another occasion for the community to mobilize against police violence. Where and when will this stop? Why are the out of control police reactions in response to encounters with you men of color?

Ray Kelly's NYPD has a lot of explaining to do on a range of issues: whether it is billing a dead man's family for a dented NYPD vehicle --that caused the man's death (it also made the news in Cincinnati press!), or for the harassment of press at the Occupy Wall Street: "Journalists: NPPA Sends Letter To Ray Kelly Denouncing Police Abuse Of The Press."
(The NPPA's general counsel wrote to Kelly:
It is our strongly asserted position that while the press may not have a greater right of access than the public, they have no less right either...Given these ongoing issues and incidents we believe that more is needed in order to improve police-press relations and to clarify the ability of credentialed and non-credentialed journalists to photograph and record on public streets without fear of intimidation and arrest. Therefore, we urge you meet with us once again so that we may help devise a better system of education and training for department members starting from the top down.) Additionally, AlterNet reported, September 27, 2012, that "The NYPD has expanded into a massive global anti-terror operation with surveillance and military capabilities unparalled in the history of local US law enforcement."

WNYC: Ray Kelly: Police Stops are Fact of Urban Life

WNYC is a mouthpiece for education deform, maintaining a chummy tone with Joel Klein in his tenure, maintaining an uncritical loyalty to the education deform movement key plank of charter schools. Somehow, on education WNYC is virtually a government organ, a radio counterpart to the New York Post, reporting mayoral or chancellor pronouncements on perverted teachers, as though they are characteristically twisted.

Yet, on other topics WNYC can run pieces that are closer to the verve of real citizens. Its Radio Rookies included interviews with Bronx residents in preparation for its story on police stops. The reporters included quotes of an immigrant in the Bronx on the disturbing overreaction on the part of the New York City Police Department (NYPD).

WNYC News: Radio Rookies: The Effect of Stop and Frisk in the Bronx
Friday, August 31, 2012
WNYC
By Ephraim Fromer / Veralyn Williams / Courtney Stein / Temitayo Fagbenle

Listen to Rookies’ conversations with Bronx residents and their frank meeting with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in the audio above.

Five Radio Rookies walked the streets of the Bronx recently to learn more about how residents of the borough, which is 90 percent black and Latino, interact with the police.

Earlier this month, a WNYC investigation revealed that prosecutors in the Bronx drop almost a quarter of all cases if a victim isn’t interviewed within 24 hours after an arrest. This happens in part because the victims don’t cooperate.

Some Bronx residents said they don’t talk to law enforcement out of fear of retaliation. But Radio Rookies found in their roughly two dozen interviews with residents of the Bronx that stop and frisks have also soured relations with police.

A Ghanaian immigrant in the West Bronx said police pulled him over in his car and accused him of talking on the phone. He said he was then frisked by police.

"They used force and twist my arm, so I said, 'Woah! Officer why you doing that for?'" he said.

Later, he said they threw him to the ground and charged him with resisting arrest.

Police in the 44th precinct in the West Bronx use force during stop and frisks more than anywhere else in the city, according to a New York Times report.

When Rookies sat down with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly he said crime has gone down 80 percent over the last two decades and that stop and frisk is one tactic that has helped bring the rate down.

When pressed about police interactions with the public, Kelly said "the best thing for a person to do when being stopped is cooperate. Accept it as a fact of urban life. It overall is helping to keep New York City safe."

Kelly said that being a police officer is a tough job.

"We teach officers to interact with people with courtesy and respect," he said. "I believe most officers certainly strive for that but it's important to keep your eye on the big picture."

Kelly was asked if he gives equal importance to protecting the city and maintaining a good relationship with its people.

"We’d love to have a great relationship with people but sometimes because of the decisions that we make, the things that we have to do, people may not be happy with the police," Kelly said.

Radio Rookies Temitayo Fagbenle, Veralyn Williams, Ephraim Fromer, AJ Frazier, Bree Person and Vikky Cruz contributed reporting
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Radio Rookies is a New York Public Radio initiative that provides teenagers with the tools and training to create radio stories about themselves, their communities and their world.

Kelly's Absent Police Reserve? Shades of Things to Come for Teachers Under a Kelly Administration?

Factors that send teachers into the Absent Teacher Reserve are said to include age, salary and sometimes, principals' dispositions (nice way of saying preference or bias).

Apparently, the last factor has a strong parallel in the parallel universe of New York Police Department (NYPD) professional limbo: thousands of police are in a demoted, limbo status for an interminable period. What has got them there? --Partial clearance from accusations or charges of wrongful behavior, and from one phrase, "out of favor," we can surmise that it means, falling out of favor with supervisors or not quite fitting in or playing along with the institutional culture of a particular unit.

It is interesting, the media has wide-spread indignation and immediate presumptions of guilt regarding teachers in a similar status: assignment to Teacher Reassignment Centers (TRCs) or rubber rooms or Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR). Yet, here we have a quite parallel phenomenon in the police department and no copy-cat articles by other media organizations after the article, "Ray Kelly's Gulag", hit the sidewalk Village Voice bins this Wednesday. Where are the front page articles in the New York Post?

Speaking of hypocrisy and double-standards, this brings to mind the four year free pass that one Mychael Willon, and educrat with a public lewdness conviction (Kansas, 1989) (and see this post also for reference) got from the New York City Department of Education. The DOE never looked into his past but instead allowed him hired him from 2005 to 2009, for one period, to monitor all levels of education personnel in the very cushy job of LIS (Local Instructional Superintendent) in the Bronx's District 9 and later, the Director of the Principal Candidate Pool. He then went on to become a chief officer at a DOE vendor that contracts to provide supplemental tutoring to NYCDOE students. Aside from his infraction at the Wichita bookstore, he distorted his credential on his DOE application, misrepresenting his dubious doctorate from a diploma mill. Needless to say, infractions on this last matter alone would get a sub-superintendent DOE employee into very deep water. Interestingly, this story only got traction at a New York City oriented blog.


Aside from an interesting look into the background of assignment to the Police Department's dumping ground or long-term desk duty, this article brings up the profound degree to which NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly micromanages the assignment of officers' files and assignment to long-term desk duty. (The key phrase is more of a mouthful than just "desk duty." It is: "do not transfer without PC approval.") Commissioner Kelly's monitoring has no limits of enthusiasm, for example, he apparently goes to headquarters on weekends to look into the files.
This picayune enthusiasm does not bode well for teachers, should he become mayor.
One can be sure that he will have the opportunity to stroll into Tweed Department of Education headquarters on his slow weekends and pore into files. And one cannot put it past him that he might have the will to choose to make lives hell, particularly to go after the activist teachers, and more specifically the ones at rallies around Foley Square or NYPD HQ.

Here is the lead page of the article by Graham:
(Disclaimer: there are indeed some bad apples in NYPD limbo or APR status, e.g., such as some of those officers involved in the killing of Amadou Diallo. Some others in the limbo status we can surmise are there, not fro misdeeds, but from rubbing some supervisor the wrong way. The latter do not deserve to suffer professional limbo. Again, speaking of media hypocrisy, how is it that officers responsible from Diallo's death are still on the force and suffer no endless media campaign, when the standards are harsher for teachers???)

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly keeps a secret list of police officers who cannot be transferred without his specific approval. The list, which the Voice obtained from an NYPD employee, is part of a 23-page spreadsheet that contains the names of 2,300 officers, their ranks, their ID numbers, old units, new units, and coded descriptions of thousands of personnel decisions throughout the past several years. Strangely, the document isn't marked with any police insignia or command titles.

In all, according to the list, Kelly banned transfers without his specific approval for at least 96 police officers over the past several years and rejected pending transfers for at least 59 more, which overrules his subordinates. He also transferred 228 officers to VIPER, where cops sit and stare at video screens to monitor crime in public housing—a unit seen as a dumping ground for those in trouble or out of favor, where careers can languish for years. Hundreds more names on the list are of officers "transferred for cause," or sent to another command for some transgression, which could be anything from serious misconduct to irritating a commander.

Most of the officers who made the list don't know that the commissioner essentially froze their careers in place, in what some department insiders say is Kelly's version of the city's notorious former "rubber room" system for teachers awaiting adjudication of their cases, where they were asked to sit indefinitely in classrooms away from students. Others call the list Kelly's "gulag," a way of punishing officers without forcing them to retire or quit.

Once a name goes on the list, it doesn't come off, even after years have passed and an officer has been brought back into the fold—a circumstance that someone likened to being forced to wear a scarlet letter for the duration of his or her career. In its stark, clipped language, the secret spreadsheet offers a rare insight into how the department is run by Kelly, who will soon become the city's longest-serving police commissioner. It also might give an indication of how he would run the city if he runs for and is elected mayor.

Most importantly, the list confirms Kelly's reputation as a micromanager who reviews just about every transfer that takes place in the largest police department in the country.

Paul Browne, a police spokesman, did not respond to Voice requests for a discussion of the spreadsheet.

Ray Kelly has a big job, overseeing 40,000 employees and a multibillion-dollar budget larger than that of at least five states. But he is apparently also involved in many decisions that used to be delegated to subordinates.

To put it in context, prior to Kelly, police commissioners did not bother with low-level, routine transfers.

"In the old days, the police commissioner didn't get involved in that," says a former Kelly staffer. "The borough commanders would call each other and say, 'I need to move a guy,' or, 'I need a guy from Precinct X.' Kelly centralized all of that."

Insiders attribute Kelly's involvement in these decisions to the behavior of his predecessor, Bernard Kerik, who, over Kelly's objections, promoted a large number of his NYPD cronies during his last days in office.

The source says that he often saw Kelly come into his 14th-floor office at One Police Plaza on Sunday afternoons to pore over transfer requests and related documents.

That's a different image than the one Kelly himself has been promoting lately as his department is hit with a series of corruption cases. Kelly has put these problems down to a "few bad apples," as if there were things going sour in his department that he was unaware of.

Murray Weiss, a respected longtime police reporter now writing for DNAinfo, recently noted that the "bad apple approach may deflect a troublesome story, but it has insidious shortcomings. It sends the message that the NYPD is a closed society that will protect its own."

The spreadsheet illustrates, however, that Kelly is even more hands-on than he lets on with individual police officers he considers problematic in some way. In this story, we have looked at some of the many decisions Kelly has made that are indicated in the spreadsheet. In some cases, we do not have a complete set of facts or history to explain Kelly's decisions. For that reason, the Voice is withholding some names that appear on the list.

One of the officers designated "do not transfer without PC approval" is James Albertelli, who was indicted in 2005 on bribery and coercion charges when he was assigned to the 13th Precinct in Manhattan.

But in 2006, he was acquitted of all charges, and Patrolmen's Benevolent Association boss Patrick Lynch called it a "politically motivated case." "With nothing more than a bogus complaint and no evidence, the DA's office charged two honorable police officers in a successful attempt to generate pre-election publicity," Lynch said.

And then, in January 2008, Albertelli was transferred to the 111th Precinct with the notation "Don't move again without PC approval."

Was that failed indictment enough to plant the scarlet letter on Albertelli for the rest of his career? Did he get in trouble for something else?

Read the entire article at the Village Voice at this link.