Former NYPD Boss Ray Kelly's Emails 'Inadvertently' Wiped Despite Court Order To Preserve Them

from the press-'delete'-to-retire dept

No surprises here, although the contempt for government authorities that aren't the NYPD is a bit audacious.

Most of former NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s emails on his desktop computer were deleted at the end of his tenure despite an order they be preserved for a high-stakes class-action suit alleging a summons quota system within the department.

The NYPD -- and its top officials -- have never been fans of transparency or accountability. The only shocking aspect is that the deletion was done in direct disobedience of a court order. The plan to secure Kelly's legacy by destroying his emails was likely in place long before his retirement. Back in 2013, it was made clear by Michael Bloomberg that there would be no effort made to archive the mayor's communications. Four government agencies were also on the "assured destruction" list, the NYPD being one of them.

By the time Kelly and Bloomberg left office, their emails were already slated for deletion. That makes the following statement both accurate and deceiving.

“The majority of former Commissioner Kelly’s locally stored emails were inadvertently deleted at the conclusion of his tenure,” city attorney Curt Beck wrote to Manhattan Federal Judge Robert Sweet.

"Inadvertently" is just another word for "automatically." Since no one was given the task of ensuring Kelly's emails wouldn't be deleted, the destruction went ahead as planned. But the wording suggests someone just hit the wrong key and nuked Kelly's emails.

And, as is far too often the case, those charged with preserving these communications were the last to know they were gone.

The city only recently learned of the mistakenly destroyed data, according to documents filed Wednesday.

It might be more believable if the city's story didn't keep changing. First, it claimed the order to preserve the emails wasn't "disseminated widely," leading to staffers "mistakenly" deleting communications when Kelly left office. A few hours later, the city "clarified" its original statement by claiming the deletion only affected emails "stored locally," which vanished when Kelly was given a new computer in 2013 -- and his old one wiped for reuse.

In the latter explanation, the city claimed the only emails affected were those "three years or older" or "otherwise selected for archiving." (This auto-delete would seem to completely undermine the "archive" function, not to mention the definition of the word itself.) The city also said it could search the inboxes of other NYPD/city officials for copies of Kelly's emails. Neither statement is very reassuring, considering the preservation order took effect in 2010 when the lawsuit was filed and the city has yet to produce a single email.

The city says this "accidental" deletion is "not a big deal." (Yes, that's a direct quote.) The double standard here is astounding. If the NYPD was pursuing a case against a criminal defendant, the deletion of communications would be used against the person charged and could result in additional penalties. The federal government -- thanks to law meant to prevent corporations from destroying evidence -- goes after people for far less overt actions. Sarbanes-Oxley makes the deletion of anything a possibly criminal act -- including periodic maintenance like deleting cookies/browser history. The law basically forbids any conceivable criminal defendant from deleting anything from their devices and computers, as evidence must not only be preserved for ongoing investigations, but also for "foreseeable" investigations

Public entities have a duty to preserve communications responsive to public records requests and must implement clearly-stated deletion policies that err on the side of retention. The wiping of emails the moment a controversial official leaves office should be suspect, even without the existence of a preservation order demanding the retention of these documents. The court may pursue sanctions against the city, but that won't help the plaintiffs much -- not if evidence of ticket/arrest quotas (the central issue of the lawsuit) was contained in the "inadvertently" destroyed emails.

Filed Under: deleted, email, evidence, nypd, ray kelly, spoliation

Former NYPD Chief Ray Kelly Still Trying To Sell His Post-Stop-And-Frisk Apocalypse But The Stats Aren't Backing Him Up

from the sorry,-don't-need-any-FEAR-today dept

Former NYPD police chief Ray Kelly is still telling his stop-and-frisk story to whoever will listen. The story is -- and always has been -- that if the NYPC isn't allowed to make hundreds of thousands of unconstitutional stops every year, the city will slide back into lawlessness. The supporting evidence offered for this pending apocalypse never added up. Kelly claimed stop-and-frisk kept guns off the street but statistics maintained by the NYPD itself showed that the difference between stop-and-frisk-free 2003 and 2012's 500,000+ stops was a grand total of 96 guns -- a difference of .02%.

What stop-and-frisk was good for was low-level drug busts, almost entirely for minor marijuana possession. If anything, the data would point to an increase in marijuana use rather than violence, but in a recent interview with WNYC, Kelly is still pushing the "deadly future" narrative despite data to the contrary.

I think the lawsuit was an abomination. The judge was removed from the case and I think every indication is if the appeal were allowed to go forward, it would have been reversed and it's a shame Mayor de Blasio did that because I think people will suffer. You see shootings up now; I don't know if there's a direct relationship now, maybe time will tell.

Kelly's data is correct -- at least as much as he's actually willing to quote. He hedged this assertion with "maybe it's related" (to a decline in stops), but most likely believes it actually is. He told WNYC's Brian Lehrer that "people will suffer" thanks to the court's decision. The problem is this: shootings are up 5.5% in New York City during a period of steep decline in stop-and-frisk stops (less than 33,000 stops in the last half of 2013 compared to 2012's total of 532,911 stops). But they are up 5.4% across the state, in areas where stop-and-frisk was never implemented or curbed.

Not only that, but despite the bump in shootings, there's been an overall decrease in violent crime in New York City during this same time frame. The New York Time's analysis of stop-and-frisk data shows violent crime dropping in four once-heavily targeted areas of the city. It's too early to tell if these numbers will hold as stop-and-frisk is phased out, but it's certainly a very different picture than the one Ray Kelly and then-Mayor Bloomberg tried to paint after the court's decision.

It also should be noted that even if crime does rise, that still isn't a justification for returning to the stop-and-frisk program. As Scheindlin noted, the city's claim that it was an effective deterrent (a claim that itself was questionable -- dramatic decreases in violent crime were noted in other major cities that didn't perform these random stops) ultimately had no bearing on the Constitutionality of the searches. In other words, just because warrantless searches have the potential to catch more criminals doesn't make warrantless searches OK.

Chief Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg sold a lot of fear from their respective offices during their tenure as city employees. Now, they've lost their platforms and their power to bend policy to fit their vivid imaginations. They both argued that the limitations imposed by the Constitution made it harder to police the city and would ultimately endanger its inhabitants. These claims are proving to be empty and showing them for what they actually were: power grabs fronting as concern for the safety of the public.

Filed Under: nypd, ray kelly, stop and frisk

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

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

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

The NYPD: Making New York Safer By Spying On Bicyclists, Relief Efforts And Republicans

from the let-the-circle-be-unbroken-severely-compromised dept

As more details continue to surface, the NYPD's activities are beginning to make the NSA's surveillance programs look like the paragon of restraint. We've already detailed how the NYPD (with help from a former CIA official) placed entire mosques under surveillance and infiltrated the Occupy movement.

Having effectively neutered the Handschu guidelines in 2003 (which placed severe restrictions on monitoring political activity), the NYPD was free to surveill all sorts of non-criminal, politically-focused gatherings.

So before and during the Iraq War, the organization of antiwar rallies was regarded as a fit matter for police surveillance; so were the monthly Critical Mass bicycle rallies, as well as groups protesting at the Republican National Convention in 2004, and a range of Islamic facilities, from mosques to college student clubs.

That's right. The NYPD cast its surveillance net over bicyclists. It also set its sights on the rescue/recovery efforts of Occupy Sandy, something that (perhaps due to it being a non-governmental effort) drew praise for its "nimble, effective work."

The PD's ongoing disregard for the civil liberties of New Yorkers (see also: stop-and-frisk) makes this news unsurprising. But it's worth noting that these spying efforts were ushered in by a former CIA officer who persuaded a judge to drop the limits governing the surveillance of political activities by playing the terrorist card shortly after the 9/11 attacks. If the NYPD is going to protect New Yorkers from future terrorist attacks, it's going to have to stop allocating resources to spy on non-terrorist, First Amendment-protected activities.

Then there's the problem with the undercover officers themselves. As we've seen in previous reports about undercover anti-terrorism work, many of the "plots" are crafted and propelled by undercover agents with minimal encouragement and involvement from their targets. How much trouble do these cops stir up just to maintain cover and justify their efforts?

One of the large, undiscussed questions of such surveillance is how civic dialogue can be influenced or distorted by police agents — perhaps as provocateurs, or possibly with no motive beyond maintaining cover. During the Republican convention, after a group making a film was arrested, a redheaded man standing on the street pounded on the back window of a police van, urging that the people inside be let go. A day later, the same man was videotaped being briefly put under a fake arrest, leading to tumult in the street from others who objected to his incarceration. They were unaware that the man was an undercover police officer who was walked down the street by uniformed officers, hands behind his back but uncuffed, and sent on his way: catch and release.

Like other efforts being made to make us "safer," these surveillance efforts lead to situations that are anything but. The widespread surveillance of non-terrorist, non-criminal entities both undermines the integrity of the infiltrated groups and actually leads to the commission of criminal activities that never would have been attempted if an NYPD officer wasn't there to instigate and encourage this behavior.

Filed Under: nypd, ray kelly, surveillance

Without Any Legal Basis, The NYPD Has Been Classifying Its Own Documents For More Than A Decade

from the aw,-how-cute!-it-thinks-it's-above-the-law! dept

Under the guidance of Chief Ray Kelly and Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the NYPD has transformed into an autonomous militarized force. Technically, it answers to Bloomberg and Kelly, but they've both shown extreme amounts of resistance to reining in any of the PD's excesses.

Any attempts at bringing oversight and accountability to the force are met with anger and condescension, despite the fact that the NYPD's casual abuse of New Yorker's civil liberties are the subject of major lawsuits and city council legislation, as well as a sizable contributor to the city's annual outlay of $700-800 million in settlements.

We've previously discussed the department's secretiveness that has seen it described by investigative journalists as worse than the NSA and FBI when it comes to responding to FOI requests. (Not for nothing does the New York law governing these requests do business under the acronym "FOIL.") But the NYPD is doing something no other city law enforcement agency has done: classifying its own documents.

Since at least 2003, the New York Police Department has been labeling some of its internal documents "Secret," a designation that has baffled government secrecy experts, journalists and civil liberties lawyers.

By labeling documents "secret," the Intelligence Division appears to be operating its own in-house classification system, similar to those used at federal agencies like the CIA, where Intel's chief, David Cohen, previously worked for 35 years.

Some of the documents also include the caveat, in all-caps, that "No portion of this document can be copied or distributed without the exclusive permission of the policy commissioner or deputy commissioner of intelligence."

Why is this "baffling?" Because the NYPD's in-house classification system has nothing legal to back it up.

"You know what that [label] means? It means diddly," said Robert Freeman, executive director of New York's Committee on Open Government. "I think the police department is following the lead of the federal government. The difficulty is, in my opinion, it does not have a legal basis for doing that."

Christopher Dunn, associate legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, told HuffPost he has only seen the label on documents created after 2001. He agreed with Freeman that "as far as I know, this marking has no legal significance."

The NYPD remains a law unto itself. Bloomberg has referred to it as the "seventh biggest army in the world" (and his own "personal army") and has, over the course of his three terms, indulged every excess. It should be noted that former CIA officer David Cohen got the ball rolling on the civil liberties-violating "Demographics Group" (the one that labeled entire mosques as terrorist entities) late in 2002, which would explain the noticeable uptick in "SECRET" documents in 2003. Nothing drives overclassification more than a combination of dubious legality and working hand-in-hand with national intelligence agency liaisons.

And it would appear that the NYPD still has lots of secrets it's not willing to share with the public. HuffPo points to this story from 2011 in which Chief Kelly makes the claim that the NYPD could "take down an airplane" thanks to its anti-aircraft weaponry. That itself should be troubling enough and a strong indicator that Bloomberg and Kelly are better qualified to run a banana republic than an American city, but when asked to comment on the PD's anti-aircraft guns, Bloomberg responded with this smirk of a statement:

"New York City Police Department has lots of capabilities you don't know about and you won't know about them."

That's comforting. Nothing like having the commander-in-chief of the "seventh biggest army in the world" tell you his force might have even bigger tricks up its sleeve than anti-aircraft weapons.

On the bright side, Mayor for life Bloomberg will be leaving soon and the front runner for his position, Bill De Blasio, gave the police force a failing grade for its responsiveness to FOI requests and will be likely looking to force the PD to shoot for a low-C at minimum. If Chief Kelly sticks around, though, De Blasio will have an uphill battle to fight against the ingrained arrogance and contempt that pervades the NYPD's upper management.

Filed Under: classification, michael bloomberg, nypd, ray kelly, secret

Judge Scheindlin Shuts Down NYC's Request For Stay On Ruling Finding Stop And Frisk Unconstitutional

from the Bloomberg:stop-and-frisk::pitbull:toddler dept

A few weeks back the city of New York filed a motion to stay Judge Scheindlin's ruling (pending appeal) that components of the NYPD's infamous stop and frisk program were unconstitutional. She also ordered the installation of an independent monitor and the deployment of body cameras at one station per precinct.

The city, of course, declared that pretty much everything about Sheindlin's decision would result in "irreparable harm" (as one does in these filings). Scheindlin has denied the stay and shot down every single claim presented by the city. Fun fact: several city council members and mayoral candidate Bill De Blasio all offered declarations of opposition to the city's motion to stay. (De Blasio's was an amicus curiae letter.)

As to the city's argument that carrying out the Finest message (i.e., instructing its officers to operate in adherence with the Constitution) will cause "irreparable harm" via confusion in the ranks (especially if Sheindlin's ruling is overturned on appeal), both in implementation and (possible) retraining (again, dependent on the success of the appeal), the judge had this to say:

The City’s first argument is circular. The Court’s orders simply require that the NYPD conform its policies and practices to well-established constitutional requirements. The City’s argument here is merely a restatement of its argument regarding the likelihood of success on the merits. Because it believes the Court’s decisions are based on an erroneous view of the law — despite repeated citations to Supreme Court and Second Circuit controlling law — it also believes that irreparable harm will result from basing any relief on those decisions. Thus, the City’s argument conflates the first two factors and fails to prove either one.

Follow the Constitution. Is that so hard? If the NYPD trains its officers to follow constitutional guidelines in its stops then there should be no confusion. The city's argument complains that it will first have to train its officers to respect the limits and protections built into the Constitution, but if Sheindlin's ruling is overturned, it will have to retrain its officers to resume their disrespect of the public's rights. That's the argument, and it's bizarre, and Sheindlin calls the city out for it.

As for the city's complaint that deploying body cameras will cause "significant harm" in terms of time, money and (ROFL) "possible impingement on the privacy rights of the public," Sheindlin offers this rebuttal:

With respect to the pilot project on body-worn cameras, it is undisputed that the project will require the expenditure of time and resources, but it is also clear that the Monitor will oversee the project to ensure that the privacy rights of both police officers and citizens are carefully protected. The purpose of the experiment is to ensure that both police and citizens benefit from the recording of stop and frisk encounters — which will provide a contemporaneous and presumptively incontestable record of what occurred during the encounter. Again, it does not appear that any irreparable harm will result from instituting a pilot project that will be carefully developed prior to implementation and that has been used by other police departments with apparent success.

While I'm slightly disappointed that Scheindlin didn't call the NYPD out for installing several thousand cameras around the city with no apparent concern for the "privacy rights of the public," it's good to see that she's not going to let the city refer to initial expenses as "irreparable harm." Roughly paraphrased: Of course implementing something that didn't previously exist will expend resources. That's a given. Quit acting like this order will somehow result in a permanent and debilitating blow to the NYPD's budget.

The city's third argument -- that the court's decision violates the principles of federalism by its "unjustified incursion into the municipality's authority to police its citizens" -- is handled the best. Sheindlin flips the city's own argument ("constitutional harm… is always irreparable") and uses it against it.

The City has the obligation and the right to police its citizens — but it must do so in compliance with the dictates of the United States Constitution.

There's your "irreparable constitutional harm" -- except that it's the city that's been causing "irreparable harm" on a massive scale for more than a decade.

Also of note on this particular argument: Mayor Bloomberg has sued the city council over a bill it passed that targets stop and frisk. Bloomberg argued that state laws governing criminal procedure supersede city policies. Because of that, the city council could not pass legislation aimed at regulating criminal procedure. Presumably, the US Constitution supersedes any New York state law (or city law). If Bloomberg manages to win this suit, all the city council has to do is redraw its stop and frisk bill a bit more along constitutional lines.

The city also claims that "public interest" favors a stay. Even without the statements from several city council members and Bill De Blasio's filing, this would be a ridiculous claim. The "public interest" stated here is a solely the imaginary product of the Bloomberg-Kelly brain trust. The city (read: Kelly and Bloomberg) argues (as they always do) that crime rates will rise precipitously and minorities will be "hurt" if stop and frisk is hindered in any way.

Scheindlin strikes this claim down with math. She points out that in the first half of 2013, 'stop and frisk' stops dropped 50% as compared to the previous year and yet, crime failed to skyrocket (or even tick upwards). Instead, the overall crime rate dropped 2.7%.

Sheindlin states that allowing the stay would send the wrong message to the public, telling them that the NYPD's stop and frisk program is a) constitutionally sound (when it isn't), and b) that the program actually curbs crime, and that going without it would be dangerous.

The case is still being appealed, but in the meantime the remedies ordered by will have to be put into practice. Bloomberg and Kelly are probably past the point of addressing this at a press conference but I imagine they're off somewhere fuming loudly.

Filed Under: michael bloomberg, nyc, nypd, ray kelly, stop and frisk

Least Surprising Thing Ever: Manhattan Speedster Afroduck Arrested

from the told-you dept

Well, that didn't take long. Remember that jackwagon that sped around Manhattan in a mega-illegal time-window of just over twenty-four minutes? Remember how he was all: pssh, you can't identify me! Remember how Ray Kelly decided to declare his own personal war on a man named Afroduck, proving that reality is way more insane than anything you can think of from Adult Swim?

Yeah, he got busted, and it only took a day or so.

ABC 7 News was on hand to see Afroduck get taken into custody early this morning at the 25th Precinct in East Harlem. They report that [Christopher Adam] Tang is 30 years old. He gives no comment to the reporters, and he smiles.

The report goes on to say that no details were given on how they found Tang or tied him to the dash cam video he uploaded, but when Ray Kelly boasted that they have license plate cameras for that kind of thing, he wasn't lying. Commenters in the original piece noted that the fact Tang wasn't pulled over as he went about his speed run seemed like a complete lack of police presence, but there's no shortage of license plate and traffic cams.

It will be interesting to see how an arrest based so heavily on evidence from this kind of technology, assuming we don't learn of some other method for the identification of Tang, is used in court. Until then, stop making speed runs in the country's largest city.

Filed Under: afroduck, nypd, ray kelly, speeding, youtube

Dumb Speeding Criminal Decides To Post Manhattan Speed Run Video Online

from the not-going-to-end-well dept

Ray Kelly is the NYPD Commissioner with a heart of gold and a severe case of the flip-flops when it comes to how security technology in his city is used. The potential DHS chief candidate is a huge fan of the complete failure known as "stop and frisk", as well as all the cameras and license plate readers the city has at its disposal, except when that technology is turned towards his officers. It's classic Orwellian thinking, in which LEOs and the government get all the toys while you have to find the blind spots in all the cameras just to write in your journal. That journal these days meaning the internet, which of course doesn't really offer any blind spots.

And that's how we get headlines today about Ray Kelly apparently declaring war on someone going by the handle AfroDuck, which is exactly the comic relief the world needs right now. Who is AfroDuck, you ask? Well, he or she is an idiot who decided to circumnavigate Manhattan, a twenty-six-plus mile trip, in just twenty-four minutes. Then, because idiocy and internet-braggery go hand in hand like spaghetti and meatballs, AfroDuck uploaded a dash-cam video of the feat to the internet.

The anonymous speed demon averaged about 66 mph during the late-night circuit, which was captured on a dramatic dashboard-cam video and posted to YouTube under the username AfroDuckProduction. The drive breaks the previous mark of 26 minutes set in 2010. In both runs, the drivers cut out the top of Manhattan above the Cross Bronx Expressway.

So, let's make this clear up front: this was a stupid thing to do. And, no, I'm not going to listen to anyone tell me about how a good driver can do this safely, or how over-protective we've become as a society. Shut up, you're wrong. This is Manhattan and you shouldn't be making speed runs, period, paragraph, full stop. And, while AfroDuck is getting the headlines for this, it should be noted that this isn't a particularly new concept. A few years ago, Wired covered a driver who was trying to break the cross-country driving record, noting that earlier on, he'd been focused on doing a similar speed shot around Manhattan.

Having said that, AfroDuck may have a serious problem.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly promised to hunt down the dangerous driver, saying, “We now have license-plate readers in the city that will assist in this type of investigation.”

Other reports have officers stating that Ray Kelly has "declared war on AfroDuck" and plans on using all of that shiny awesome tech at his disposal to go after the speed demon. And, if their willingness to use stop and frisk as a law enforcement technique is any indication, I doubt the NYPD will mind terribly utilizing all of those license plate cameras to build at least a reckless driving case against him.

“You frankly can’t identify who I am by just looking at the video,” AfroDuck boasted to the car-geek Web site Jalopnik about his Aug. 26 ride, “and records were meant to be broken.” AfroDuck used a 2006 BMW Z4 for the breakneck drive.

That may be, but the NYPD likely can review all the cameras they have to find the license plate of the Z4 that was barreling through Manhattan sometime in the past few weeks and that plate will point them back to AfroDuck. As I said, this driver is an idiot, but it might be new territory to have the chief of police going after an individual simply for bragging online about a speed run and then using all kinds of new technology to do it. It's a brave new surveillance state world, friends, which means you just can't brag about your dumb crimes online anymore.

Filed Under: afroduck, manhattan, nyc, ray kelly, speeding, videos, youtube