Results tagged “police”

A judge ruled that a group of demonstrators have the right to protest directly in front of Mayor Bloomberg's Upper East Side townhouse. The city initially rejected the protesters' application to rally against school closures and charter schools in front of the Mayor's East 79th Street home, but the demonstrators won the fight in court.

The body of officer Angel Brito lay in the morgue of Bellevue Hospital, where he worked, for two months until fellow officers finally claimed it yesterday. Brito, 49, had no family, so when he died in his East Village apartment of natural causes on November 4th, his body was sent to the hospital he had spent the last 14 years protecting.

Demonstrators are suing the city after the NYPD rejected their application to protest charter schools and school closings directly in front of Mayor Bloomberg's Upper East Side townhouse. The plaintiffs claim the NYPD "unconstitutionally and without any legal basis" denied their application to march single file on both sides of 79th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenue on Jan. 21. "Our voices haven't been heard, so we thought that the best way for the mayor to hear us would be for us to take our voices to his block," said protester Julie Cavanagh.

In court today a Community Affairs cop faced the first of four sex-related charges. In 2002 the Officer Wilfredo Rosario fined a woman for trespassing in Riverside Park after dark. But he offered her a deal: he said he'd rip up the ticket in exchange for a sexual favor, telling her "This is between us." It wasn't the last lewd request he would made while on duty. The victim, then just 18-years old told her story in detail.

Update below: Former Police Commissioner Howard Safir will not be charged for backing his Cadillac Escalade into a pregnant woman in the Upper East Side and then driving away, the Post reports. The Giuliani-era NYPD head struck Joanne Valarezo, who is seven months pregnant, on Third Avenue between East 80th and East 81st streets on Friday.

The police officer in charge when suspect Naquan Thompson slipped out of his handcuffs and briefly escaped from custody has been suspended from the force, according to NY1. Though cops arrested the escapee about 10 minutes after he broke free outside Staten Island 120th Precinct on Wednesday, a 17-year NYPD veteran — whose name has not been released — will be off the job for 30 days. The 22-year-old armed robbery suspect got away as he was being walked to a police van. He led officers on a chase to the St. George Ferry Terminal, where he was arrested after breaking his ankle in a jump from a station ramp to Staten Island Railway property.

The bus driver who hit and killed a cyclist — reportedly while driving in reverse — will not be charged, according to police. "I don't believe that anyone will be charged," an NYPD spokesman told Streetsblog. "The driver remained on the scene. Looks like it was just an accident." Considering that this is Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's first week on the job, the transit website ponders whether or not this case will be indicative of his office's stance on vehicular crimes. The victim's name has not been released pending family notification.

A prisoner broke free from a chain linking him to other detainees outside the 120th Precinct in Staten Island this morning and lead police on a wild chase before breaking his ankle and getting caught, the Advance reports. Cops chased the suspect — identified as 22-year-old Naquan Thompson — after he escaped as he was being loaded into a van that would have brought him to his criminal court for an arraignment on robbery charges.

A 49-year-old has been charged with murder for drunkenly shooting and killing another man in a pool hall in Williamsburg on Saturday. Mauro Lopez was cuffed just after the shooting, which broke out in a billiards room behind Maria's Grocery on Broadway at around 4 pm, according to the Daily News.

A female police officer was suspended from the force after cussing out a female sergeant who gave her a "chest bump" in Brownsville's 73rd Precinct — where crime is reportedly down, except near the stationhouse. Officer Naquawna Bethea has been placed on modified assignment since the Nov. 16 altercation, which reportedly began when the veteran of nearly six years arrived for duty at 8:09 am instead of 8 am, when her workday was supposed to begin, according to the Post.

The nine-year-old New Jersey boy who was stabbed and killed in a Harlem housing project on Saturday was murdered over a video game, according to the Daily News. Fourth grade student Anthony Maldonado was spending the weekend with his uncle in the General Grant Houses when 25-year-old Alejandro Morales — one of his uncle's roommates — plunged a knife into the boy's chest after an altercation involving a Tony Hawk skateboarding video game, according to police.

The certificate in the windshield of the illegally parked van that sat in Times Square for two days before sending the city into panic was stolen — and it doesn't have anything to do with parking, according to the nonprofit that issued the ID. Though it looks like an NYPD parking placard, a lawyer representing Detectives Crime Clinic of New Jersey and New York claims the certificate isn't supposed to carry any benefits and merely serves as a way of identifying members.

An employee of the city's Department of Homeless Services is accused of having a bit too much to drink before reporting to work on New Year's Day. Nathaniel Chambers, 45, is suspected of drunk driving on his way to pick up Commissioner Robert Hess, who was waiting for a ride to the Mayor's inauguration yesterday morning.

Gov. Paterson has pardoned a solider whose earlier conviction on gun possession charges barred had barred him from fulfilling his lifelong goal of joining the New York Police Department, the Times reports. In only his second pardon since taking office, Paterson granted clemency to Osvaldo Hernandez — a former paratrooper with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division — who was arrested in 2002 when police found a semiautomatic pistol beneath his car seat.

The city is on track for the lowest number of murders since reliable record-keeping began in 1962, according to the Times. As of Dec. 27, there have been 461 murders — 35 fewer than the record set in 2007. Twelve of the city's police precincts in areas ranging from Park Slope to Upper Manhattan recorded just one murder each, while the precinct that covers Central Park didn't log a single homicide, the paper reports.

Governor Paterson's security force has doubled from 100 to 200 officers since he took office in March 2008, and some critics say he's expanded the detail just to make himself look more important. "The governor wants to have an entourage—three or four cars—wherever he goes because he thinks it makes him look more gubernatorial, it helps him politically," one unidentified "senior official" tells the Post. Now the State Troopers Police Benevolent Association is calling Paterson out for draining police manpower at a time when he's cut the state police force to battle the budget monsters.

Less than a month after a CD-seller was shot and killed when he opened fire on police, street musicians have returned to Times Square to sell their wares — and scam tourists, according to the Post. On Dec. 10, rapper Raymond "Ready" Martinez fired at a cop who had questioned him about conning tourists into buying his record by scribbling their names onto discs and demanding $10. Martinez was shot and killed in front of the Marriott after his stolen gun jammed because he was holding it sideways.

The city will enact a new protocol allowing police officers to more quickly administer blood tests to suspected drunk drivers who have refused to take Breathalyzer tests. After several DWI suspects who declined field sobriety tests didn't have their blood drawn for hours — allowing them to sober up — the police department and the city's district attorneys forged the new agreement on Sunday to speed up the blood-testing process.

A man who was beaten by an underage drunk in front of a Wall Street-area bar is suing the pubs that served the young boozer and police who purportedly witnessed the brawl and didn't break it up.

A group of pugilists roughed up five off duty cops outside a Queens nightclub on Dec. 16. The officers allegedly got into a brawl in front of the Tropix Bar and Lounge at around 4 am after an officer flashed his badge to a bouncer in an attempt to get into the Queens Boulevard venue, which was closing for the night. A group of men outside the club began shouting at the cops — who had just left a housing police holiday party — and a fight broke out, according to the Daily News.

A day after investigators revealed they hadn't found the gun used in the grisly killings that rocked the Upper West Side last week, police recovered a bloody handgun near the Amsterdam Avenue crime scene. But the .380-caliber Beretta that police discovered was wedged between two trash bags in a garbage can about half a block from the place where the suspected gunman fell to his death from a fire escape, raising questions about how the firearm turned out in the garbage can and who put it there.

Police divers rescued a woman who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge wearing just pajamas yesterday morning. The 22-year-old Manhattan resident, whose name has not been released, leapt from the span near its midpoint into the East River just after 7 am.

A 32-year-old woman arrested for marijuana charges hung herself inside a Brooklyn holding cell, according to the Post. The woman "used her pants to form a crude noose, which she slung around a horizontal cell bar" inside the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville yesterday at around 6:47 pm. She was found dead about 40 minutes after she was locked in the room.

Forced to choose between listening to his girlfriend or following the law, a Staten Island 17-year-old decided on the latter — and now he faces up to seven years in prison because of it. An Oakwood teen, identified in the Staten Island Advance as Sean Potop, told police that he and his girlfriend were at a Mariners Harbor movie theater on Dec. 7 when they saw a woman accidentally drop her car keys on ground. Potop claims his girlfriend grabbed the keys, waited for the woman to walk away, and stole the 2005 Mitsubishi Galant.

While crime is down throughout Brownsville, the blocks around Brooklyn's 73rd Precinct stationhouse have been played host to a number of recent shootings. In the past four months, there have been seven shootings within 10 blocks of the stationhouse — two of them fatal. These crimes come at a time while shootings have declined precinct-wide from 82 at this point last year, to 67 so far this year. Those are encouraging figures, according to NYPD spokesman Paul Browne: "The fact that overall crime is down by 6%, shootings are down by 18%, and murder is down by 23% reflects well on the precinct command's crime suppression."

Some of the Santas in the costumed Santacon bar crawl yesterday were naughty, according to police sources. An NYPD spokeswoman tells Gothamist that officers cracked down on holiday-clad revelers who were boozing in public in Washington Square Park. "There were 33 criminal court summonses issued for open containers," she said. "All of these were in the confines of the 6th Precinct."

Two cycling activists suspected of repainting the Bedford Avenue bike lane turned themselves in at the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg yesterday. According to the Post, 26-year-old Quinn Hechtropf and 24-year-old Katherine Piccochi were among the bikers who used paint rollers, spray paint and stencils to recreate the South Williamsburg cycling path, which was removed by the city last week with little explanation.

The Bronx street where police fired 41 shots at an unarmed black man in 1999 has become an unlikely tourist attraction, according to the Daily News.

A Bronx renter stabbed his landlord to death after an argument about a spare mattress on Tuesday, according to police. The brutal crime occurred after suspect Omari Richards, 26, got into an argument with his landlord's fiancee over a spare mattress, the Daily News reports. Apparently, when the woman told Richards he couldn't use the spare bed because she needed it for her son, the suspect got angry and started shouting. "I heard [him] saying, 'She's a f------ liar,'" the fiancee said.

A Brooklyn federal judge declared that NYPD officers regularly fabricate criminal charges and lie under oath — and the city condones it. Judge Jack Weinstein said "there is some evidence of an attitude among officers that is sufficiently widespread to constitute a custom or policy by the city approving illegal conduct."