Stop "Stop and Frisk"

The New York Civil Liberties Union in conjunction with The Bronx Defenders filed a civil lawsuit in April of this year on behalf of 13 plaintiffs challenging New York's "Clean Halls" program. According to the complaint, thousands of residents in buildings enrolled in the Clean Halls program are subject to being stopped and illegally ticketed or arrested for trespassing in their own buildings if they fail to produce identification when they take out the garbage, check the mail, duck out to the store for a quart of milk. Young people growing up in these buildings, lawyers say, are routinely searched without legal cause and detained. The lawsuit, which charges the city with violating the Fourth Amendment and the Federal Fair Housing Act, is similar to one filed two years ago against the New York Police Department and the city’s public housing agency, which is alleged to have employed a similar patrol system. The New York Timesran a story on the lawsuit and the program. The Bronx Defenders are offering a "Stop & Frisk" T-shirt to raise money for the lawsuit as well as to raise awareness into this unconstitutional practice. You can get a t-shirt and support a good cause at the same time-always a win win. On June 7th, the New York Civil Liberties Union created a "Stop and Frisk" app that allows users to quickly record and report "stop and frisk" incidents. The NYPD were critical of the app, stating that it could put users in danger. A video demonstration of the app is available here and the app's functions are described below:

A spokesperson for the NYCLU, Jason Javier, described a stop and frisk incident. "As it's happening," he said in a PIX11 interview, "You're feeling defeseless, and even as it doesn't happen, it makes you feel it could happen." That sort of anxiety and frustration is what motivated software designer Jason Van Anden. "I believe in the power of technology to effect positive change," he said at a newsconference hosted by the NYCLU on Wednesday. He said his belief led him to create the Stop and Frisk app for Android smartphones. An iPhone app is not yet available, but is expected to be released next month. The app has three main functions: to record, listen and report a stop and frisk incident to the NYCLU. "The app allows you to record a stop-and-frisk as it's happening," Javier said about the record function. The listen function allows an app user to listen to any other stop and frisk incidents in the vicinity near the user. "This is especially helpful for community groups that monitor police activity," an NYCLU spokesperson says on the organization's website, http://www.nyclu.org/app, which is where the app can be downloaded. The report function leads the app user to a questionnaire with a series of questions pertaining to a stop and frisk the user may have just observed, including asking about the race and gender of the person who was stopped, and the race and gender of the officers involved. It also asks, among other questions, if force was used in the stop and frisk encounter. The user then sends the completed questionnaire to the NYCLU.

Midtown Community Court

Interesting Article Life as Undocumented Immigrant

Recently, the New York Times had an interesting article authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas where he admitted that he is an undocumented immigrant. His article highlights the plight of as many as eleven million illegal residents living in the United States. The article details Mr. Vargas's arrival in the United States, experiences in school as a non-native English speaker, and his experiences living undocumented. It is worth a read for those doing immigration work.

Counselor Rapes 3 Girls, Merely Sentenced To Probation

(Jezebel) - A New York City juvenile justice counselor raped at least three teenagers in his custody. His sentence? Probation. Meanwhile, one of his victims was sentenced to 12 months on a minor charge. How could something like this happen?

Tony Simmons is also known to have raped at 13-year-old in a holding area, as well as a 15-year-old who was sodomized behind a locker, which The New York Daily News says was "stocked with condoms and cookies."

His third victim was Ashley, who posed for the picture above (she said "I'm only scared of one man, and he already knows what I look like," and declined to give her last name, which she changed with marriage.) She was fifteen, on her way into court and being escorted by Simmons, when he took her to the basement and raped her. He placed finger over his lips to demand her silence.

She said, "I knew I was just raped. I knew it wasn't supposed to happen. I didn't think anybody would believe me."

Her 12-month sentence, she told The Daily News, was for filing a false report by telling the police she did not know the person who had attacked her on the way to school.

Ashley had hope that her attacker would be apprehended, and even named her child after the prosecutor, but he only managed to get probation for Simmons — from a female judge, no less — despite the fact that the original charges carried a maximum sentence of eight years. Why?

Partly, it's a systemic problem. As Lindsay Beyerstein points out, [Prosecutor Amir] Vonsover faced a strategic dilemma. If he offered a plea deal that carried serious jail time, Simmons and his lawyer might have preferred to take their chances in court. Vonsover probably agreed to a watered-down punishment because he wasn't sure he could get a conviction of the case went to trial.

That might have been a good call on Vonsover's part. Realistically, a jury might not have believed a black teen prisoner accusing a white court officer of rape with no witnesses and (as far as I can tell from media reports) no physical evidence. Simmons could easily have walked. He might even have gotten his job back. If Vonsover hadn't struck some kind of plea deal, Simmons could still be out there raping girls.

There is strangely little reporting on this topic besides The Daily News, though the district attorney has lambasted the verdict, calling it "an egregious breach of the public's trust. While a judge has the responsibility to decide what he or she thinks is a fair sentence, in our view today's sentence of probation is outrageously lenient given the admitted conduct."

Also of that opinion is New York City's branch of NOW, which has started a petition on the victims' behalf, asking, "If we cannot deliver justice for these three teen victims who were assaulted on the premises of the Manhattan Family Court building by an employee assigned to protect them, how can we expect justice for any women victims of violence?"

The NYPD Tapes: Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct Uncensored!

Two years ago, a police officer in a Bedford-Stuyvesant precinct concerned about how the police were serving the community began recording his fellow officers on the job: he recorded EVERYTHING including roll calls, his precinct commander, street encounters with other officers and the public, and station talk and office banter. Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant and obtained exclusively by the Village Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it's like to work as a cop in New York City. An Excerpt from the Voice (full article here):

As a result, the tapes show, the rank-and-file NYPD street cop experiences enormous pressure in a strange catch-22: He or she is expected to maintain high "activity"—including stop-and-frisks—but, paradoxically, to record fewer actual crimes.

This pressure was accompanied by paranoia—from the precinct commander to the lieutenants to the sergeants to the line officers—of violating any of the seemingly endless bureaucratic rules and regulations that would bring in outside supervision.

The tapes also reveal the locker-room environment at the precinct. On a recording made in September, the subject being discussed at roll call is stationhouse graffiti (done by the cops themselves) and something called "cocking the memo book," a practical joke in which officers draw penises in each other's daily notebooks.

In one tape, precinct supervisors talk about a specific "numbers" quota, warn cops to pick up their numbers, or else, and complain about outside inspections. In another tape recorded in September 2009, pressure for "numbers" are discussed (summonses, arrests, stop and frisks and community visits) because it was the end of the month and activity reports had to be filed.

New York City Police Records

The Criminal Records Section stores and maintains reports of crime and lost property, and provides information from these files to members of the public and authorized agencies, as required by law and Department rule.

The Criminal Records Section is NOT open to the general public.

Telephone inquiries can be made by the public, Monday through Friday between the hours of 8:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M.. Persons who have reported a crime, or lost property, may request a verification report by properly completing the necessary captions on a VERIFICATION OF CRIME / LOST PROPERTY [PD 542-061] form. This form is available at any Police Precinct, Housing Police Service Area or Transit District.

Requests submitted on VERIFICATION OF CRIME / LOST PROPERTY [PD 542-061] forms must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope and a non-refundable $15.00 service fee.

NOTE: The service fee is waived for the victims of a crime ONLY.

The completed form, along with the $15.00 service fee and a stamped self-addressed envelope to should be mailed to:

N.Y.C. Police Department
Criminal Records Section (Verification Unit)
1 Police Plaza
Room 300
New York, NY 10038

CRIME VICTIMS ARE ENTITLED TO A COPY OF THIS REPORT AT NO CHARGE.

New York Cabs Might Get Cameras-Many Cities Have Already Installed

Complete article at The Village Voice

Cabs companies around the world either installing cameras or asking for them to increase driver and passenger safety. Taxi Worker's Alliance president Bhairavi Desai calls the cameras "an invasion of privacy," and cab company group Committee for Taxi Safety wants the program to be voluntary, owing to costs.

Keep in mind, many cities already have cab cameras-both a blessing and a curse, cameras can lead to evidence where there might not have been any before but the trade-offs are the privacy issues.

Murder Suspect Has Witness: A MetroCard

From the New York Times:

When Jason Jones was arrested in a fatal shooting in the Bronx in May, he told the police that he had been nowhere near the scene. He said he had left work, ridden the bus with some co-workers and cashed his paycheck, and later had taken a subway to see his girlfriend.

Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Jones and his older brother, Corey, in the shooting, saying they had killed the victim because he had been a government witness in drug and gun cases. Both men could face the death penalty if the government decides to seek it.

But in recent weeks, the case has taken an extraordinary turn — because of Jason Jones’s MetroCard.

Full Story here.

Five Borough Defense-PD Blogging with Vision

Check out Five Borough Defense for the latest in the New York Public Defender community. Not just for New Yorkers and New York-a-philes, the site has some decidedly cool features and links listed including my personal favorite so far, Rate My Cop, which is an online forum for people to voice both praise and criticism of police officers. The site has listings for officers in police departments across the country and you can search by name, department, or state. Along a similar line is Bad Cops Police Oversight Portal which addresses police misconduct in a variety of tools including a law library, community action manuals for fighting police abuses, and suggested resources for building better communities that include police oversight. The Five Borough Defense states this in their about section:

Five Borough Defense is a meeting place for public defenders in New York City, and for anyone interested in public defense in New York City. “In New York City” and “public defense” are intended to be interpreted broadly.Happier people in engaged communities is the goal. Those ends cannot be met by even inconceivably ambitious new approaches to courtroom advocacy alone. So the topics on the site stray through trends in various outlets for social engineering.

It couldn't be said better. Our investigator community is an integral part of an engaged defense community wherever you may find yourself and social engineering fits right into our job description.