A Park Slope high school held a town hall meeting to discuss recent reports that school safety officers have been demanding students leave the neighborhood when school gets out.
Park Slope School Holds Meeting to Discuss Reports About School Safety Officers
Sat, 11 Oct 2014 04:14:58 GMT
Rapper Jay-Z said he will go forward with his plans to release a line of clothing with luxury retailer Barneys following allegations the store racially profiled multiple shoppers.
Jay-Z Moves Forward With Barneys Clothing Line Despite Discrimination Lawsuits
Sat, 16 Nov 2013 15:53:33 GMT
Responding to a Daily News story about an officer reprimanded for speaking a single Spanish sentence to a colleague, Bloomberg said the ban on other languages is a 'life and death' issue.
By Jennifer Fermino / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, June 24, 2013, 9:51 PM
Mark Bonifacio/New York Daily News
Mayor Bloomberg said all officers need to be able to understand the same commands instantly "when lives are on the line." Critics say the wide-reaching policy should not extend to everyday conversation between officers, however.
Related Stories
Calling it a “life and death” issue, Mayor Bloomberg on Monday defended the NYPD’s English-only policy as crucial to running the largest and most diverse police force in the nation.
“I don’t see how you can ever run any company or any organization unless everybody speaks the same language,” said Bloomberg, who routinely ends his news conferences in Spanish.
Hizzoner was responding to a Daily News story Monday that exposed the controversial policy so strict that one cop was cited for uttering one sentence in Spanish.
“In America, in New York, I think it’s fair to say that a majority of people speak English and so that’s the language that we have to communicate in,” Bloomberg said.
“This is life and death . . . Everybody has to be able to understand the same commands instantly and go in the direction they’re ordered to go when lives are on the line.”
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who frequently boasts about the diversity in the police department, said he’s “proud” that more than a quarter of NYPD officers are Hispanic.
But that doesn’t mean they should should go around speaking Spanish, he said.
“Suppose you are a citizen and you walk into a police station and you find the police officers speaking Gaelic,” said Kelly. “It would be somewhat unsettling, right?”
But critics say Kelly and Bloomberg are missing the point.
RELATED: NYPD OFFICER REPRIMANDED FOR SPEAKING SPANISH
“We’re talking about conversations between officers. Not emergencies,” said Anthony Miranda, chairman of the National Latino Officers Association.
Miranda is a former NYPD sergeant who retired in 2002.
The News report Monday highlighted Officer Jessenia Guzman, who was issued an order of reprimand last month for speaking Spanish while on duty at an upper West Side precinct.
Department brass have also begun informing management trainees in the Police Academy to begin enforcing the strict policy across the agency.
“I find being told that I can’t speak the language my grandmother taught me degrading,” said one officer of Puerto Rican descent.
The crackdown on speaking other languages comes as the NYPD seeks to attract immigrants and minorities, particularly since Kelly took over in 2002.
In the past several years, non-English speakers have accounted for one in five Police Academy recruits, according to the NYPD.
After English, the second most-common language is Spanish.
Other languages include Farsi, Finnish and Igbo, which is spoken in Nigeria.
Mayor Bloomberg defends NYPD's controversial English-only policy
Rafael Martínez Alequín
Tue, 25 Jun 2013 14:10:00 GMT
The lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s program of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking people came to a close at midnight Wednesday after pending for five years, four months and 12 days.
Holder mugs NYPD
Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:05:49 GMT
The civil rights lawyers who filed the lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s stop-question-frisk program were bolstered by a strategist who had no business offering advice: the very judge presiding over the case.
The fix was in
Editorials
Tue, 07 May 2013 08:00:22 GMT
As two police officers took the stand Wednesday in the Manhattan federal trial regarding the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy, a newly released police memo dating from March 5 shows that officers now have to describe in their own words why they made a stop-and-frisk. | See the full NYPD memo.
Memo Reveals NYPD Change To How Stop-And-Frisks Are Documented
Thu, 28 Mar 2013 02:30:11 GMT
After two FDNY EMTs, including the commissioner's son, were revealed to be horribly bigoted on their public Twitter accounts, the NYPD is sitting its own people down for a little lesson. The police department has issued its first social-media standards guide, the Daily News reports, reminding officers, "Members of the service should be aware that activities on personal social media sites may be used against them to undermine their credibility as members of the department." It's a little late.
From the gory message-board postings of the Cannibal Cop to the racist Facebook groups about the West Indian American Day parade, police officers have already had their share of embarrassments out in the not-so-new frontiers of social media. Recently, a captain used a Twitter account for his precinct to identify and warn of released convicts, but the new rules ban the creation of profiles for any specific precincts or units.
Individual cops are told "not to disclose or allude to their status as members of the department" and not to post pictures in uniform unless they're at specific events. But there are work-arounds for those who want to risk it, or just have to vent their off-color frustrations online: "Cops need to change their names on their Facebook and twitter accounts and use nicknames," said an anonymous poster on one public NYPD forum, calling the rules a violation of the officers' civil rights. "IAB will be using searches with their names," the person added. "Lol."
Read more posts by Joe Coscarelli
Filed Under: the internet ,nypd ,facebook ,twitter ,technology
NYPD Orders Cops Not to Be Racist on Social Media
Joe Coscarelli
Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:59:44 GMT
As the trial over the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics continued in Lower Manhattan Wednesday, the court heard recordings made by a Bronx police officer who says his bosses had quotas for arrests, summonses and stops.
Court Hears Tapes Of NYPD Bosses Allegedly Explaining Stop-And-Frisk Quotas
Thu, 21 Mar 2013 01:55:49 GMT
Officials: NYPD Muslim Surveillance Efforts Did Not Violate NJ Laws
New Jersey's attorney general announced Thursday the results of a three-month investigation that finds the NYPD's surveillance of Muslim businesses, mosques and student groups in the state did not violate any of their laws.
Officials: NYPD Muslim Surveillance Efforts Did Not Violate NJ Laws
Thu, 24 May 2012 20:00:00 GMT
Stop-and-frisk lawsuit gets class status
A federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit alleging the New York Police Department unlawfully targeted blacks and Hispanics with its stop-and-frisk crime reduction program.
Stop-and-frisk lawsuit gets class status
Thu, 17 May 2012 04:00:00 GMT
An NYPD Stop-and-Frisk Alternative
In an effort to improve New York City policing practices, Mayor Michael Bloomberg held a discussion with local clergy surrounding stop-and-frisk procedures, a part of policing that has become routine and disproportionately targets African-American and Hispanics. the Rev. David Brawley and Grant Lindsay offer a stop-and-frisk alternative in their op-ed in the New York Daily News.
The question the mayor and police commissioner keep asking is: What other alternatives exist to rid the streets of guns and apprehend the criminals in our midst?
There are credible answers. Here are ours:
An NYPD Stop-and-Frisk Alternative
The Rev. David Brawley
Mon, 14 May 2012 05:16:39 GMT
More Than Half New York's Congressional Delegation: Punish NYPD For Muslim Surveillance
More than half New York's Congressional delegation voted to punish the NYPD for spying on Muslim communities. Our Alison Gendar reports: The mostly symbolic vote was aimed at getting the NYPD to stop any efforts to quietly monitor or infiltrate mosques, bookstores or cafes, and to get rid ...
More Than Half New York's Congressional Delegation: Punish NYPD For Muslim Surveillance
Thu, 10 May 2012 19:08:18 GMT
Will Police Racial Harassment Ever End?
After examining racial disparities among the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk victims in 2011, BlackAmericaWeb blogger Michael H. Cottman says it time for the contemptible practice to stop.
Will Police Racial Harassment Ever End?
Michael H. Cottman
Mon, 27 Feb 2012 04:31:33 GMT
Lawsuit Says NYPD Has "Secret List" Excluding Blacks From Promotions
The NYCLU has filed a lawsuit with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of a group of NYPD detectives who say the department's elite Intelligence Division is racist. The lawsuit alleges that the NYPD "has chosen to cloak promotions in secrecy and give the all-white high level supervisors who run the Intelligence Division unfettered discretion to handpick white detectives for promotions over more qualified African American detectives." Black detectives also claim there is a so-called "secret list" from which white officers are promoted within the division. [ more › ]
Lawsuit Says NYPD Has "Secret List" Excluding Blacks From Promotions
John Del Signore
Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:19:32 GMT
Black Baby Doll Hung by Noose at Parks Dept
A worker at the city's Parks Department headquarters in the Bronx found the doll hanging by its neck from a metal chain. Police also found three "KKK" markings etched into a bathroom in the building. The NYPD is investigating the incident as a hate crime.
Filed Under: hate crimes
Black Baby Doll Hung by Noose at Parks Dept
Brett Smiley
Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:13:11 GMT
Black Males And Cops: Are We Living In A Police State?
When I went to the screening of Spike Lee’s movie Malcolm X , Rodney King was sitting in the front row and I was seated next to Alice Walker. At that time he was the proof of what Black men had been saying for so long: The police are trying to kill us unjustly and abuse us regularly. It was something most of White America denied until the footage was replayed over and over again.
Since then, not a lot has changed. I might mention the names of Amadou Diallo Sean Bell or Oscar Grant in any given conversation. To many people outside of the Black community these names may not even register. Almost all African American men will know more than their names. We’ll know their faces, we know where they got shot and we know what reason was given for their “justifiable homicide” by police.
The social friction between cops and young Black males reaches far back into American history. It began shortly after Abraham Lincoln signed Emancipation Proclamation. White overseers were asked by the plantation owners to “police” the perimeter of the land, fearing newly freed Blacks would try to rob and attack them. As a result, young Black males were an instant target.
A recent article in the New York Times Nicolas K. Peart highlights the experience of his life as a 23 year old Black male in Manhattan. He shares how at 14 his mother taught him to be respectful to police, show ID and to never run- lest he be shot. It goes on to explain how many random stops he’s undergone since his 18th birthday. How the NYPD seem to almost go out of their way to harass him and humiliate him:
Here are a few other facts: last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means.
His accounts to be honest, are not unlike many of my experiences in my youth. When I was 16 my father told me to always keep my hands on the steering wheel if I ever got pulled over. He said make sure to say what hand you are moving, where you are moving it to, why and to do it slow- because you can die failing to it.
He wasn’t wrong. Not three years later a cop much smaller than me put his 9 millimeter pistol in my face because my friend made an illegal u-turn on a street with no traffic. In my youth I fit the description for car thieves, robbers, purse snatchers, drive by shooters and a ton of other crimes so long I really can’t remember. Mr. Peart continues:
One of the officers asked which of the keys they had removed from my pocket opened my apartment door. Then he entered my building and tried to get into my apartment with my key. My 18-year-old sister was inside with two of our younger siblings; later she told me she had no idea why the police were trying to get into our apartment and was terrified. She tried to call me, but because they had confiscated my phone, I couldn’t answer.
Today I spend a lot of time working with ghetto youth crushed under the heel of American poverty. Most of them hate the police on site. However, its because I work where I do, that I have met some police officers of the highest integrity.
I’ve met cops who went out of their way to not send kids to juvenile hall. Cops who were White, Black, Latino, Asian and Arab. These good relationships with police have altered the instinctive emotions I’ve had about cops since my youth.
But those emotions can’t cloud reality for too long. My son is almost 13. He’s almost as big as me. I am a lean 200 pounds, and stand 6 foot 3 inches. He can almost wear my shoes. The Dr. said he’s going to be 6 foot 9 inches tall when he stops growing.
While many fathers would be excited and daydream of a NBA and NFL ceremonies, I’m scared. I’m scared because I don’t know if America will let him live long enough to get that tall. I saw what happened to Oscar Grant. I ride those trains. My son will ride those same trains soon. It’s frightening to the core of my soul. The cops don’t know he’s amazing at math and studies film. They don’t know he likes to read Hill Harper and samurai classics. They’ll only see in him the same criminal they saw in me when I was his age.
Almost 20 years ago, my mother suggested that Black men who have perished unjustly from police officers should have a wall like Vietnam vets have a wall. As crazy as it might sound, it makes so much sense. Songs like N.W.A’s F*** The Police, Talib Kweli’s The Proud, Paris and T-KASH’s Don’t Stop The Movement and Dead Prez’s Police State don’t exist without reason. They exist simply because no constructive conversation on how we got here and how we might get out has taken place.
The question is, where and how do we have truly meaningful conversations about Black males and police? What preventative steps can we take to ensure that these conversations don’t just descend into shouting matches? What steps can the Black community take on to police themselves better? What steps will police departments across the country begin to take to change the culture of how Black men are viewed on site by officers? What needs to happen to make this situation truly progress?
Read the full story in the New York Times.
SEE ALSO:
Black Males And Cops: Are We Living In A Police State?
Adisa Banjoko, West Coast Editor
Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:20:23 GMT
Arizona Sheriff Discriminates Against Latinos, Feds Say
PHOENIX — The federal government issued a scathing report Thursday that outlines how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office has committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and discrimination and carrying out heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged citizen complaints.
The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release, is a result of the U.S. Justice Department’s three-year investigation of Arpaio’s office amid complaints of racial profiling and a culture of bias at the agency’s top level.
The Justice Department’s conclusions in the civil probe mark the federal government’s harshest rebuke of a national political fixture who has risen to prominence for his immigration crackdowns and became coveted endorsement among candidates in the GOP presidential field.
Apart from the civil rights probe, a federal grand jury also has been investigating Arpaio’s office on criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009 and is specifically examining the investigative work of the sheriff’s anti-public corruption squad.
The civil rights report said federal authorities will continue to investigate complaints of deputies using excessive force against Latinos, whether the sheriff’s office failed to provide adequately police services in Hispanic communities and a large number of sex-crimes cases that were assigned to the agency but weren’t followed up on or investigated at all.
The report took the sheriff’s office to task for launching immigration patrols, known as “sweeps,” based on complaints that Latinos were merely gathering near a business without committing crimes. Federal authorities single out Arpaio himself and said his office, known as MCSO, has no clear policies to guard against the violations, even after he changed some of his top aides earlier this year.
“Arpaio’s own actions have helped nurture MCSO’s culture of bias,” wrote Thomas Perez, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, adding that the sheriff frequently gave such racially charged letters to some of his top aides and saved them in his own files.
“MCSO is broken in a number of critical respects. The problems are deeply rooted in MCSO’s culture,” he said Thursday.
The Justice Department’s expert on measuring racial profiling said it’s the most egregious case of racial profiling in the nation that he has seen or reviewed in professional literature, Perez said.
Investigators interviewed more than 400 people, including Arpaio, reviewed thousands of documents and toured county jails as part of its probe, he said.
If the sheriff’s office doesn’t turn around its policies and practices, the federal government could pull millions of dollars of federal funding.
Arpaio’s office did not immediately respond to AP requests for comment.
The report will require Arpaio to set up effective policies against discrimination, improve training and make other changes that would be monitored for compliance by a judge. Arpaio faces a Jan. 4 deadline for saying whether he wants to work out an agreement. If not, the federal government will sue him and let a judge decide the complaint.
Arpaio, the self-proclaimed toughest sheriff in America, has long denied the racial profiling allegation, saying people are stopped if deputies have probable cause to believe they have committed crimes and that deputies later find many of them are illegal immigrants.
Arpaio has built his reputation on jailing inmates in tents and dressing them in pink underwear, selling himself to voters as unceasingly tough on crime and pushing the bounds of how far local police can go to confront illegal immigration.
The report also said he and some top staffers tried to silence people who have spoken out against the sheriff’s office by arresting people without cause, filing meritless lawsuits against opponents and starting investigations of critics.
One example cited by the Justice Department is former top Arpaio aide David Hendershott, who filed bar complaints against attorneys critical of the agency along with bringing judicial complaints against judges who were at odds with the sheriff. All complaints were dismissed.
The anti-corruption squad’s cases against two county officials and a judge collapsed in court before going to trial and have been criticized by politicians at odds with the sheriff as trumped up. Arpaio has defended the investigations as a valid attempt at rooting out corruption in county government.
The civil rights report said Latinos are four to nine times more likely to be stopped in traffic stops in Maricopa County than non-Latinos and that the agency’s immigration policies treat Latinos as if they are all in the country illegally. Deputies on the immigrant-smuggling squad stop and arrest Latino drivers without good cause, the investigation found.
A review done as part of the investigation found that 20 percent of traffic reports handled by Arpaio’s immigrant-smuggling squad from March 2006 to March 2009 were stops – almost all involving Latino drivers – that were done without reasonable suspicion. The squad’s stops rarely led to smuggling arrests.
Deputies are encouraged to make high-volume traffic stops in targeted locations. There were Latinos who were in the U.S. legally who were arrested or detained without cause during the sweeps, according to the report.
During the sweeps, deputies flood an area of a city – in some cases, heavily Latino areas – over several days to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders. Illegal immigrants accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted by his office since January 2008, according to figures provided by Arpaio’s office.
Police supervisors, including at least one smuggling-squad supervisor, often used county accounts to send emails that demeaned Latinos to fellow sheriff’s managers, deputies and volunteers in the sheriff’s posse. One such email had a photo of a mock driver’s license for a fictional state called “Mexifornia.”
The report said that the sheriff’s office launched an immigration operation two weeks after the sheriff received a letter in August 2009 letter about a person’s dismay over employees of a McDonald’s in the Phoenix suburb of Sun City who didn’t speak English. The tip laid out no criminal allegations. The sheriff wrote back to thank the writer “for the info,” said he would look into it and forwarded it to a top aide with a note of “for our operation.”
Federal investigators focused heavily on the language barriers in Arpaio’s jails.
Latino inmates with limited English skills were punished for failing to understand commands in English by being put in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day or keeping prisoners locked down in their jail pods for as long as 72 hours without a trip to the canteen area or making nonlegal phone calls.
The report said some jail officers used racial slurs for Latinos when talking among themselves and speaking to inmates.
Detention officers refused to accept forms requesting basic daily services and reporting mistreatment when the documents were completed in Spanish and pressured Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms that implicate their legal rights without language assistance.
The agency pressures Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms by yelling at them and keeping them in uncomfortably cold cells for long periods of time.
The Justice Department said it hadn’t yet established a pattern of alleged wrongdoing by the sheriff’s office in the three areas where they will continue to investigation: complaints of excessive force against Latinos, botched sex-crimes cases and immigration efforts that have hurt the agency’s trust with the Hispanic community.
Federal authorities will continue to investigate whether the sheriff’s office has limited the willingness of witnesses and victims to report crimes or talk to Arpaio’s office.
“MCSO has done almost nothing to build such a relationship with Mariciopa County’s Latino residents,” Perez wrote.
Arizona Sheriff Discriminates Against Latinos, Feds Say
Associated Press
Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:58:32 GMT
1 Student Arrested Every Day In NYC Schools, 94% Are Black Or Latino
According to new data released by the NYPD [pdf], an average of one student is arrested every day in the city's school system, and three others are issued summonses. During summer school from July through September, four students each day are arrested, and 94% of those arrested are black or Latino, and 83% are male. "The data raise concerns about black students being disproportionately arrested in the city's schools," Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the NYCLU says in a release. "If the Bloomberg administration is truly serious about closing the achievement gap, then they must address this disparity and focus more attention on educating children—not arresting them.” [ more › ]
1 Student Arrested Every Day In NYC Schools, 94% Are Black Or Latino
Christopher Robbins
Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:27:22 GMT
Despite the fact that none of the 26 new shows on network TV feature an African American lead character, several African American characters play secondary roles, also known as the “Black Best Friend.”
Two new popular shows, “Grimm” and “Up All Night” feature Russell Hornsby and Maya Rudolph playing the role of “Black Best Friends.”
See Also: Hitch A Trip To The Windy City Also Known As Chicago, Illinois
The Washington Post reports:
What they have in common — besides not being white, of course — is a devotion to helping their white friends achieve, sometime to the detriment of their own circumstance. And despite the BBFs often having an amazing pedigree, with cool jobs, prestigious careers or intriguing personal history, viewers rarely see their lives away from the lead character.
Indeed, there are so many BBFs on new fall shows this year — I count 13 shows, from NBC’s canceled “Playboy Club” to CBS’s hit “2 Broke Girls” and Fox’s “The New Girl” — that you can stick them in their own categories.
Latest TV Trend? The Black Best Friend
Casey Gane-McCalla, Lead Blogger
Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:16:51 GMT
