NYPD Foils FOIL Request For NYPD FOIL Handbook

from the in-other-news,-NYPD-denies-it-exists,-forwards-requests-to-Mailboxes,-Etc. dept

The NYPD's approach to transparency has been negatively compared to the CIA, FBI and NSA by prominent investigative reporters, who noted that these other agencies will at least respond even if they're not particularly interested in kicking the requested documents loose. The NYPD often won't even respond, and when it does, it tends to drag the process out to the point of absurdity before finally deciding that no, it won't release the requested information.

Muckrock points out that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton once stated, "there should be no secrets in the NYPD." The NYPD, under Ray Kelly (and apparently, going forward as well), has responded with, "Move along. There's nothing (EVER) to see here."

In what can only be described as a new low for the NYPD, it has denied Muckrock's FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) request for the NYPD's FOIL handbook.

I have written a number of times about ongoing difficulties with the New York Police Department's FOIL Unit. From rejecting routine requests to claiming "inability to locate" documents even when provided with a form number, NYPD seems hellbent on obstructing access to its records.

Last week, NYPD's freedom of information squad determined that its own handbook is exempt from disclosure under FOIL, New York's public records statute.

Somehow, the NYPD feels that attorney-client privilege applies to its internal handbook on FOIL requests and has used that exception to reach this illogical, Heller-esque nadir in department transparency. If Muckrock's challenge of the NYPD's rationale is denied, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for the tight-lipped department, as Shawn Musgrave points out.

I very much hope that a competent lawyer who is familiar with NYPD's obligations under FOIL prepared the department's records request manual and training materials. But just because something was prepared or reviewed by an attorney does not mean that an agency can withhold it. If this were true, the vast majority of policy documents prepared by any agency counsel would be immune from disclosure, as would most talking points memos, reports and communiques that endure lawyerly vetting. This is simply not how attorney-client privilege is meant to work.

It may be time for the DOJ to declare the NYPD a "rogue agency" (or whatever) and start steering the department back into the calmer waters of public service. It certainly fits the description. It apparently answers to nobody, routinely rewrites laws and guidelines to justify unconstitutional behavior and sends its uninvited personnel to the scenes of terrorist attacks around the world. Ray Kelly called it the seventh-largest standing army in the world, but it behaves more like a law unto itself.

Filed Under: bill bratton, foi, nypd, ray kelly, transparency

The NYPD Sent Two Officers To The Kenyan Mall Shooting And Their Findings Are Directly Contradicted By The FBI's Report

from the TEAM-NYPD:-WORLD-POLICE dept

Just recently, we covered the NYPD's insistence on playing police force to the world by sending officers to foreign nations to impede investigations and damage international relations. Not only were these officers' presence unwelcome, but they were in no position to gather local intel as they lacked the security clearance needed to work directly with local law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The biggest motivator of the NYPD's Ugly American program was its feeling that the FBI wasn't sharing enough intel with it. Or doing it fast enough. Or competently enough. So, to beat the FBI at its own investigative game, Police Chief Ray Kelly sent NYPD officers to various locations around the world to gather better, faster intel for the city's anti-terrorist division. As Kelly himself noted as he exited office, the FBI just "can't be trusted" to protect New York from terrorist attacks. That's why local police officers have been stationed overseas for more than a decade at this point.

Inside officials, however, declared the program to be a waste of money that generated no useful intelligence, hardly an equitable exchange for arriving unbidden at crime scenes and annoying local agencies.

The flow of useless intelligence is still ongoing. As The Guardian reports, an FBI official's statement on the Kenyan Mall attack directly contradicts an earlier report compiled by officers sent by the NYPD.

Dennis Brady, the FBI legal attache in Nairobi, said in an interview posted Friday on the bureau's website: "We believe, as do the Kenyan authorities, that the four gunmen inside the mall were killed."

"Our ERT [Evidence Response Team] made significant finds, and there is no evidence that any of the attackers escaped from the area where they made their last stand," he said. A very secure crime scene perimeter made an escape unlikely, Brady added.

"Additionally, had the attackers escaped, it would have been publicly celebrated and exploited for propaganda purposes by al-Shabaab. That hasn't happened.”

This statement diverges greatly from the report compiled by two NYPD officers sent unbidden to Kenya while the siege was still underway. According to that report, the four attackers most likely escaped after turning away cameras recording their ad hoc HQ and making their way through the "loose perimeter" set up by the Kenyan military.

The State Dept. wasted very little time distancing itself from this report, stating the NYPD's report "did not reflect the US government position."

The FBI, which beat the NYPD to the scene (arriving on day one), maintains that the perimeter was "secure." The NYPD claims the opposite. So, who's right? Well, if you consider the sources and what they respectively have to lose if they're wrong, it would appear that the FBI's conclusions are more apt to be accurate. After all, it does have an international presence and the clearances needed to work with local intelligence officials. The NYPD has none of these advantages and, as was noted earlier, a tendency to offend local agencies with their very existence. It's kind of hard to compile useful intel if the locals won't talk to you.

Worse, though, is the fact that the NYPD's overseas deployments tend to show up uninvited, giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies one more thing to worry about when securing a scene or, in this case, hunting down four terrorists in a crowded mall. Even if the NYPD's investigators are more skilled than the FBI's, the simple fact that they're uninvited renders them mostly useless. People expect the FBI -- a federal agency -- to appear at occurrences like these. What they don't expect to run into is an officer from a police department halfway around the world. The NYPD's foreign placements aspire to out-FBI the FBI, but undercut their own goal simply by existing.

Filed Under: fbi, kenya, mall, nypd

Posting Of NYPD Officers Around The World Found To Be A Waste, Embarrassment

from the overreach-of-the-NYPD:-now-in-international-form! dept

As we mentioned recently, NYPD Chief Ray Kelly took a shot at the FBI on his way out of office, claiming the agency was unable to protect New York (and presumably lesser cities) from terrorist attacks. The problem, according to Kelly, is that the agency failed to share intelligence with his department, at least not enough to satisfy his counterterrorism officers. To that end, he formed the so-called Demographics Unit to violate the rights of surveil Muslims, mosques and anything else deemed potentially "terrorist-related" and placed it under the command of a former CIA official.

Not only that, but Ray Kelly figured his department could beat the FBI at its own intelligence-gathering game overseas. It sent out NYPD officers as uninvited guests to cities around the world. Again, this was done to fight the good fight against global terrorism. In reality, it was a waste of money that failed to produce useful intelligence, and the officers stationed overseas spent a lot of their time treading on the toes of the locals.

[F]ormer federal officials who served overseas told “On The Inside” the NYPD detectives are ineffective, often angering and confusing the foreign law enforcement officials they are trying to work with, and are usually relegated to the sidelines because they lack national security clearance.

For example, when bombs exploded at resorts in Bali in 2005, killing 20 and injuring hundreds, the Indonesian National Police “were astonished and irritated that the NYPD showed up,” a federal source explained.

Yes, even on an international scale, there's never an NYPD officer around when you need one -- just plenty of "help" no one asked for. (Presumably, the Bali police informed the bumptious interlopers that no one's rights needed violating at the moment…) Not only did the NYPD's ad hoc diplomats show up at the worst possible time, but they weren't even in their (very loosely defined) "jurisdiction."

That's because those NYPD Intelligence Division detectives were based in Singapore, and were sent into a chaotic terrorism scene where they had no previous relationship with local law enforcement.

And even in Singapore, those detectives had no security clearance and no standing with the Singapore Internal Security Department, which is the agency tasked with combating terrorism.

The end result of all this bumbling? The NYPD's overseas officers declared that the Bali bombing had "no nexus" with the bombing in New York -- something US federal agents had already determined and passed along to other agencies in the pipeline, including the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force.

But the bumbling wasn't limited to offending Bali police or Singapore security forces.

Another source said that NYPD detectives showed up at the funerals of victims of the Madrid rail bombings in 2004, angering local officials and victims' families.

So, in addition to further damaging international relations, the NYPD's forcible insertion of itself into tragedies occurring in other nations failed to produce nothing useful in the way of terrorist plots disrupted. This falls directly in line with its domestic efforts -- casually stomping on civil liberties and civilian sensibilities in order to chalk up another zero in the "plots prevented" column.

Remember, the impetus for this program was Kelly's belief the FBI didn't share enough info with the department... or share it fast enough. But FBI agents who worked with the NYPD task force remember this a bit differently.

The NYPD already has more than 100 detectives on the FBI-Joint Terrorist Task Force with access to all the cutting-edge terror data available to the intelligence community. But apparently that's not enough.

"The police brass always complained we were holding back information," a top FBI official complained to me. "It bothered the s--- out of me. We shared everything and never held back. Sometimes, they thought we were. But sometimes, we just did not know!"

Kelly trusted his own men more than he trusted the feds. There's nothing specifically wrong with having confidence in your underlings. But when it results in the baffling decision to place NYPD eyes and ears around the world without seeking the permission or cooperation of local officials, it's a problem. Kelly's time at the helm of the NYPD has been marked by an insularity verging on paranoia.

Now that he's leaving, it will be up to Commissioner Bill Bratton to decide whether the program, as useless (and expensive -- $100k per officer per year) as it is, is allowed to continue. And, unfortunately, Bratton seems to believe the NYPD's attempt to out-think the feds still has some merit.

He said he "understands Commissioner Kelly was very strongly supportive of it" and "I’ve heard nothing negative about it, quite frankly.”

That's hardly a shocker. Maybe Bratton should consider asking someone not so heavily invested in obstinately pursuing useless programs to futile ends.

Filed Under: counterterrorism, foreign investigations, nypd

President Of CBS News Knew 'Reporter' John Miller Would Go Back To NYPD Before His 60 Min Propaganda Piece Aired

from the so-why-did-the-piece-still-air dept

So we've already discussed the massively conflicted John Miller, employed by CBS News while clearly being about to take a job in counterterrorism, reporting for 60 Minutes the most amazing pro-NSA propaganda infomercial you can imagine. At the time, the rumors were already swirling that Miller was about to take the job as head of counterterrorism for the NYPD, though he denied it. He also, laughably, insisted that he'd asked hard questions of the NSA, none of which made it to air (assuming he actually did ask hard questions). In response to all of this, Miller insulted his critics as not being real reporters (despite the fact many of them were), and then confirmed the big conflict that most people expected, taking the job that everyone knew he was going to take.

A NY Times piece on Miller notes that the offer to take the job was actually "informally" given to him over dinner with incoming police commissioner (and close friend of Miller) Bill Bratton on December 5th. That's a week and a half before 60 Minutes aired its piece. And, among the "everyone" who knew he was taking the job was... David Rhodes, the President of CBS News.

“As soon as the reports came out that de Blasio” -- Bill de Blasio, the city’s new mayor -- “was thinking of bringing Bratton back, I immediately assumed that John would be going too,” Mr. Rhodes said in an interview. “It was literally the first thing that I thought of.”

And yet... he still allowed Miller's highly conflicted story on the NSA to air. That raises all sorts of questions, especially for CBS News, whose editorial failings over the past few months have received a tremendous amount of attention.

Filed Under: 60 minutes, bill bratton, bill de blasio, cbs news, conflict of interest, david rhodes, john miller, nsa, nypd, propaganda
Companies: cbs

NYPD Decides To Ape FBI's Tactics And Cite The 'Mosaic Theory' As The Reason It Won't Disclose Budget Data

from the NYPD-forces-NYC-to-secede-from-nation,-run-as-martial-state dept

The NYPD apparently feels it's one of the Big Boys. Presiding over a city of 8 million citizens and given free rein to operate outside the confines of the Constitution (while being tirelessly defended by the mayor and police chief) has given the department an outsized sense of self-worth. Now, it's deploying fed-level talking points to further deny access to public records via freedom of information requests.

The New York City Police Department is invoking a concept frequently employed by intelligence agencies like the FBI and CIA to deny a request for financial records on the unit that surveils Muslim communities.

Even to release a budget for the secretive Zone Assessment Unit, the NYPD claimed in a letter to HuffPost, would allow someone to "form a mosaic that depicts covert public safety activities that would be jeopardized."

Observers will note this is the same excuse given by the FBI to turn down perfectly legal FOIA requests from Ryan Shapiro, a former punk rocker turned animal rights activist. Shapiro utilized privacy waivers to make multiple requests for the same documents. Multiple versions of the same documents uncovered anomalies in the redactions, allowing Shapiro to access info that he wouldn't have received with a single request. The FBI's argument was basically that it sucked at consistent censoring, therefore Shapiro shouldn't be allowed to receive any documents as the result of FOIA requests.

As Matt Sledge at the Huffington Post points out, this "mosaic theory" has been deployed by administrations as far back as Reagan's in order to avoid complying with FOIA requests. But this is the first time a local law enforcement agency has used the theory to block access to public documents.

[Bob] Freeman, one of the state's leading authorities on FOIL law, said he has never seen a local law enforcement agency deny a records request on the basis of the mosaic theory. Nor has Jeffrey Light, a lawyer who litigates both federal FOIA lawsuits relating to intelligence agencies and Washington, D.C., police public records requests.

The NYPD also denied HuffPost's requests for information on policies relating to its cooperation with foreign governments under the International Liaison Program, which has placed NYPD officers in a dozen foreign countries to report on terror attacks. The NYPD stated that it had no records of such policies. The department also rejected requests for records on financial support from the New York City Police Foundation and federal agencies like the White House's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program. The Associated Press revealed last year that White House funds had been used to pay for Zone Assessment Unit vehicles and computers.

In addition to the mosaic theory, the NYPD also cited a slew of reasons why it couldn't release the records, ranging from the fear that they might reveal confidential sources and information, to ongoing litigation against NYPD spying, to a public records law exemption for intra-agency privilege. It did not cite which exemptions were being applied to which records requests.

The first issue here is the "mosaic theory" itself. The fear that dedicated requesters could piece together classified information by requesting multiple documents is an indictment of the system itself. Routine overclassification has made it impossible for those charged with vetting and releasing requested documents to do their job effectively. The bar for declaring something classified has been set so low that its use is almost entirely subjective. Instead of having verifiable standards that span each agency, every FOIA request is turned over to a variety of fiefdoms. Classified info leaks because there's no standard being applied. Everyone deploys the black marker differently, largely based on self-interest.

The other issue is the NYPD itself, which has been described as worse than the CIA, FBI and NSA when it comes to responding to FOIA requests. The department deploys every tactic possible to refuse requests and that's often following weeks of stonewalling. Just recently, the department went so far as to refuse public access to precinct police blotters, a staple of public information that it has shared without issue for decades. And this latest affront to open government and accountability is over budget documents of all things, and yet the PD claims it will expose methods and operational data.

Freedom of Information laws are specifically in place to thwart government agencies' natural tendency to obscure and obfuscate. The NYPD has never been much for sharing info with the public, dating all the way back to Giuliani's mayoral reign. Under Chief Kelly, the antagonistic attitude towards the public has only increased, along with the NYPD's secretiveness. Now, it's deloying the sort of anti-FOIA rhetoric normally reserved for federal investigative agencies and presidential administrations. New York City may be the largest city in the nation, but this is still a police department -- albeit one that insists on punching above its weight.

Filed Under: fbi, freedom of information, mosaic theory, new york, nypd

Retiring NY Police Chief Kelly Takes One Last Swing At The FBI -- And His Critics -- On His Way Out The Door

from the buh-bye dept

New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly is nearly nothing but history, but that hasn't stopped him from doing his best to secure his legacy before calling it a career. (And exiting with $1.5 million worth of personal bodyguards paid for by the city city's residents…)

In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly defended the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program, first stating that he was "polling well" and following that up with the usual defense that crime numbers had declined over the past decade. Of course, neither he nor his interviewer bothered to point out his tenure coincided with a period of steep decline in violent crime nationwide nor did they mention the fact that Judge Scheindlin, in her decision finding the program unconstitutional, stated basically that the ends don't justify the means. Crime numbers would probably drop further if the NYPD performed warrantless house-to-house searches, but that still wouldn't make it justifiable.

But Kelly went further than shrugging off criticism of the city's most notorious law enforcement program, targeting the FBI for its apparent inability to prevent domestic terrorist attacks.

The interview turns to 2002 and those post-attack days when Mr. Kelly returned to the commissioner’s office. One of Mr. Kelly’s professors at Harvard, Graham Allison, studied nuclear terror and released prospective blast maps for New York City.

Mr. Kelly did not need to see blast maps. He lived in Battery Park City, within sight of ground zero.

He smiled grimly. “It was gloom and doom,” he said. “Our prime lesson is that we couldn’t rely on the feds alone.” [...]

For his part, Mr. Kelly could not resist another jab at the F.B.I. and its failure to tell the Boston Police Department everything suspicious that it knew about one of the men who later bombed the Boston Marathon.

“We want information right away,” he says. “I think in retrospect the mayor in Boston and the police commissioner in Boston feel the same way based on what they knew or didn’t know relative to the Boston Marathon bombing.”

In a way, he's right. The failure of government agencies to share information on suspected terrorists failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks as well as contributed to the Boston bombers eluding detection until it was too late. (But our NSA provided "valuable" intel suggesting the Boston bombing was an isolated attack.)

But more troubling is the underlying assertion that the NYPD can do a better job on its own. Under Ray Kelly, the NYPD became known for its pervasive surveillance of Muslims and their places of worship. Thousands of reports were generated and hundreds of informants were deployed to infiltrate these communities. This is the NYPD's other shame -- widespread rights violations and little to nothing to chalk up in the "results" column.

Kelly employed a former CIA official to run this program who leveraged the post-9/11 attack climate of fear to convince a judge to strip civil liberties protections granted by a previous court decision (the "Handschu Agreement"). Using this weakened "agreement," the NYPD began placing Muslims under surveillance while they engaged in First Amendment-protected activity. The means used to acquire intel were so questionable, the CIA itself was unable to use anything the NYPD provided because the methods deployed violated several of the CIA's own rules. If the CIA find "evidence" collected by a local law enforcement agency unusable, there's obviously some serious flaws in the methods deployed to gather intelligence.

Kelly may have been frustrated by the lack of interagency sharing, but his decision to make the NYPD a law unto itself was the wrong response. And again, there's no indication that this widespread surveillance and infiltration prevented terrorist attacks. Kelly seems to feel the lack of terrorist attacks speaks for itself -- and justifies the ongoing civil liberties violations performed by his department.

Filed Under: crime, fbi, nypd, ray kelly, stop and frisk

NSA's Personal Propagandist For CBS Officially Takes Counterterrorism Job Everyone Knew He Was Getting

from the journalism! dept

When 60 Minutes did its hack PR job for the NSA a few weeks ago, lots of people called out the fact that the reporter who handled the segment, John Miller, wasn't just a former intelligence official working for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (which oversees the NSA), but that he was widely rumored to have worked out a deal for a new job for the NYPD, heading up "counterterrorism." Even though there were multiple reports at the time, including one that claimed it was a "99.44% done deal," when asked about it, Miller lied. He told a reporter, "you know as much about this as I do."

That was clearly Miller lying -- something that Miller has had an issue with in the past -- as the "rumor" is now confirmed and Miller has accepted his job doing "counterterrorism" for the NYPD. And while some might say that doing counterterrorism for a city police force is different than working for national intelligence, that's only because you're not familiar with the NYPD, which has set up something of a shadow NSA/CIA to do all sorts of activities not normally associated with a police force.

And, of course, since the press was clearly familiar with Miller's expected role, it raises serious questions about why 60 Minutes allowed the puff piece to move forward with a seriously conflicted "journalist." While Miller has lashed out at critics, rather than respond to a single point raised, the brand that comes out worst in all this is clearly CBS and 60 Minutes -- which basically let an intelligence official do an entire propaganda piece on the NSA. 60 Minutes used to be about hard hitting journalism. Now, apparently, they think it's "journalism" to shill for the surveillance state.

Filed Under: 60 minutes, cbs news, conflict of interest, john miller, journalism, nsa, nypd, propaganda
Companies: cbs

NY Police Chief Kelly Taking $1.5 Million Worth Of Publicly-Funded Bodyguards With Him When He Retires

from the famous-bulletproof-golden-parachute dept

New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly has spent years defending the harassment of minorities via the PD's stop-and-frisk program. Kelly (and Mayor Bloomberg) have constantly pointed to the decline in violent crime stats as evidence the program works (and as justification for its unconstitutional aspects).

But the city must not be safe enough. Ray Kelly's retiring, but he won't be doing it unaccompanied. According to police sources, Kelly will be taking a small battalion of personal bodyguards with him wherever he goes, post-employment.

The NYPD's Intelligence Division — with Kelly’s input — is recommending that Kelly take with him a 10-officer complement of taxpayer-funded bodyguards, up from the six-officer detail the commissioner had wanted last month.

The detail will now include a lieutenant, three sergeants and six detectives to chauffeur and protect Kelly and his family around-the-clock in the Big Apple and even out of town after he ends his 12-year run atop Police Headquarters — at an estimated cost of more than $1.5 million a year, sources estimate.

This does seem excessive, especially considering Kelly will be retiring far from the mean streets, not heading to prison. In fact, he doesn't personally put people behind bars, so it's not as though he'd be much more than a symbolic target in the big house.

On the other hand, spending a decade deploying (and championing) a questionable program that gives NYPD officers the right to stop anyone (almost exclusively minorities) for any reason didn't exactly make Kelly a whole lot of friends. If an investigator was to ask whether anyone had a motive for doing something horrible thing to ex-Chief Kelly, the list of suspects would probably rival the New York City phone book.

But that's also an abstraction. The streets won't be less safe once Kelly steps down. They'll be roughly the same as they are now. Unless Kelly's already traveling with an armed entourage, there's really no reason he'd be less safe once retired. If anything, no longer being the figurehead of the NYPD should make him safer.

Supposedly, the Intelligence Division has some solid reasoning backing up this decision. According to information dug up by Matt Sledge at HuffPo, Ray Kelly has every reason to fear for his life.

[T]his May 17 declaration from Deputy Commissioner David Cohen in one of the NYPD surveillance lawsuits may provide some insight on the perceived threats to Kelly's safety.

After the officers who shot Sean Bell were acquitted, Cohen wrote, surveillance was ramped up citywide "in response to the possibility of unlawful activity and allowed for informed decision-making on the likelihood of violence or other unlawful activity, as well as resource deployment decisions."

"The shooting and subsequent trial sparked demonstrations across New York City and widespread threats of violence against members of the NYPD, including Police Commissioner Kelly, who was the target of a murder plot motivated by the Sean Bell matter," Cohen wrote.

Frightening, except for the fact that Kelly's stalking death threat came in the form of a person not much suited for stalking/death-dealing. (Nor was he in the position to front the $65,000 needed to send a more able-bodied person to do the job.)

Sounds pretty serious. Until you learn who was behind the 2007 "plot": a 400-pound, imprisoned, impoverished wheelchair-bound "mentally ill" man with a rap sheet the length of your arm.

As it stands now, Kelly will leave office with more bodyguards than any previous police chief since Howard Safir's retirement in 2000. Safir took 12 bodyguards with him, citing "vague threats." (Presumably, the same "vague threats" law enforcement and security agencies have used to weaken policies and expand power over the past decade-plus...) Not only that, but he'll be one of the few allowing the city to pick up the tab for post-career protective services.

True, this $1.5 million will be a drop in the bucket considering the size of NYC's budget, but considering the fact that Ray Kelly seems intent on making himself the sort of example other police chiefs shouldn't follow post-retirement, this should probably be opposed on sheer principle. Or, at the very least, his request should be trimmed down to a more reasonable number of bodyguards.

If Kelly's made an enemy of the people, there's really no one else he can point the finger at. If this means he'll be living in fear for the rest of his retirement, maybe he'll develop a bit of empathy for the thousands of minority citizens who have been harassed repeatedly over the last decade under the color of law.

Filed Under: bodyguards, nyc, nypd, ray kelly, taxpayers

NYPD Now Preventing Journalists From Accessing Police Blotters

from the forms-own-Ministry-of-Information;-immediately-burns-it-to-the-ground dept

AP investigative journalists Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman memorably proclaimed the NYPD to be "less transparent than CIA, FBI and NSA" when it came to responding to FOI requests. Apparently, the NYPD finds this assessment of its obfuscation skills to be underwhelming, as other notable entities like "the Kremlin in its Cold War prime" and "the North Korean Ministry of People's Security 1948-present" were not included in the journalists' depiction of the department.

DNAinfo reports that the NYPD is now shutting down local journalist's access to police blotters.

The NYPD has ordered the city's 77 police precincts to stop giving out any information to the media about crimes taking place in their neighborhoods, cutting off a long-standing source of information for New Yorkers.

According to a terse NYPD edict transmitted citywide, precinct commanders were instructed: “Any requests by media to view complaint reports be referred to the office of the Deputy Commissioner For Public Information.”

This was first reported by Amanda Woods at The Nabe, who discovered this while attempting to do the site's weekly rundown of the 88th Precinct's police blotter.

Every Wednesday morning, a reporter from The Nabe visits the 88th Precinct and is handed forms outlining the previous week’s felony crime reports, which includes information on all murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary or theft or property in the precinct. The reporter copies down the information, asks the officers lingering questions from the reports and writes up the crime blotter post. This will no longer be allowed. Reporters must now contact the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information (DCPI) for all crime inquiries, according to the officer.

Funneling everything through the DCPI creates an info bottleneck, as is surely the intention of this new policy. A source inside the police department said the DCPI is a "small unit" and would most likely be unable to cope with the influx of information requests.

Not only that, but the DCPI has already been pushed by Chief Ray Kelly to clamp down on the amount of information it releases to the public.

Under his stewardship, DCPI has systematically diminished the type of information it provides as well as overall access to department personnel. The clampdown evolved even though Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a media mogul, pledged that his administration would be a beacon of open government and transparency.

This leaves journalists with two options: queueing up for whatever scraps the DPCI might throw in its direction or filing FOIL requests. The latter is even less likely to result in any response, much less a timely one. The NYPD's antagonistic attitude toward public information requests is well-documented. As Salon noted earlier this year, the NYPD stalls or denies a majority of requests, only begrudgingly parting with information when civil liberties groups (like the New York Civil Liberties Union) get involved.

So, unless journalists have an infinite amount of time and the willingness to go to court to battle for information they're rightfully entitled to have, the NYPD will simply be able to play a waiting game, hoping those looking for info simply give up once the info requested loses its timeliness.

Filed Under: journalism, nyc, nypd, police, police blotters

Unarmed Man Charged With Assault Because NYC Police Shot At Him And Hit Random Pedestrians

from the NYPD:-Times-Square-is-the-hottest-third-person-shooter-on-the-market dept

Stop me if you've heard this one:

An emotionally disturbed but unarmed man walks into heavy traffic near Times Square. Police officers arrive on the scene and try to apprehend him. The unarmed man reaches into his pocket, prompting police to open fire in a crowded area. Man is unwounded but two bystanders are shot.

I don't really remember the middle part of this joke but the punchline is this:

An unarmed, emotionally disturbed man shot at by the police as he was lurching around traffic near Times Square in September has been charged with assault, on the theory that he was responsible for bullet wounds suffered by two bystanders, according to an indictment unsealed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Wednesday.

While you're letting that sink in, here are some more details.

Initially Mr. Broadnax was arrested on misdemeanor charges of menacing, drug possession and resisting arrest. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office persuaded a grand jury to charge Mr. Broadnax with assault, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years. Specifically, the nine-count indictment unsealed on Wednesday said Mr. Broadnax “recklessly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death.”

“The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.

Here are some more details from the original coverage of the incident.

The police arrived and the crowd grew. The hulking man continued on, ignoring the officers’ commands while eluding capture. Then the man reached into his pants pocket, withdrawing his hand as if it were a gun, the police said, and pretended to shoot at some of the officers.

As Scott Greenfield points out, this descriptive wording is a prime example of Creative Writing 101 (Law Enforcement Edition).

Note the language of the article. “Hulking” man. “Withdrawing his hand as if it were a gun.” These aren’t the words of a news account, but the language of justification and excuses.

Broadnax didn't even have a gun, as officers plainly saw before opening fire. He had a Metrocard in his hand, and no matter how hulkingly he pointed it at officers, it still didn't turn into a weapon capable of wounding other people. His weaving around in traffic was potentially dangerous, but more to himself than others.

Returning once again to the "language of justification and excuses" deployed by the DA's office: someone wandering around in traffic in New York City is hardly creating a "grave risk of death." NYC has plenty of pedestrian traffic, not all of which crosses only at the corners. The man certainly created a "disturbance" but the shots fired by the responding officers created the only injuries. And yet, it will be the man shot at (and missed) who will pay for the mistakes of the officers.

The narrative being pushed (back at the time of the incident and again by the DA's office) is that the officers had no choice but to risk firing shots in a crowded area because the man wouldn't cooperate (and menaced officers with a Metrocard). But recordings of the incident suggest the cops actually had many more options are their disposal.

There are no doubt times when shots must be fired, and there are no doubt times when a bullet will strike a bystander despite the best, and most competent, efforts of police. But the video of this, taken by a bystander who was not shot, shows a great many cops in the area before the two cops shot at Broadnax, and makes it difficult to understand why the newspapers don’t question why all those cops couldn’t manage to take down one big crazy guy without shooting up the bystanders.

The video Scott Greenfield posted back in September no longer exists. But this video shows a swarm of NYPD officers attempting to apprehend Broadnax before the shots are fired.

Broadnax was finally subdued by a single officer with a Taser but not before two pedestrians had been shot in an effort to ensure their safety. Holding the arrestee responsible for the bad decisions (and worse aim) of two cops basically sends the message to officers that irresponsible gun usage is perfectly fine, as long as the intentions are pure. If in the future officers hit other bystanders by firing in crowded areas (as they have in the past), the blame will be passed along to the intended target for "forcing" the police to make unwise decisions.

[Postscript: Ken White at Popehat has more thoughts on the NYPD's resemblance to Ike "Don't Make Me Hit You" Turner.]

Filed Under: assault, nyc, nypd, pedestrians