Brooklyn Ron

MSNBC: Kelly and Bloomberg Allow Police to Assault Wall St. Protesters

MSNBC's predictability on national issues generally turns me off; but this piece by Lawrence O'Donnell shows a heart-felt outrage generally lacking in cable news. Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly are targets of this plea for decency. It's worth listening to in its nine-minute entirety.

Bloomberg and Kelly Make Life Miserable for Generation of Black and Latino Males, Manhattan Borough President Says

From speech given by Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer, Sept. 24, 2011:

Today I would like to discuss the NYPD’s escalating use of street stops, or stop and frisks, as a crime prevention tool – a policy that impacts the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers of color every year.

The police department argues that these frisks are critical for keeping guns off our streets. I know we all agree that ridding our city of illegal handguns must be one of our highest priorities.

But let’s be honest – last year, in 99.8 percent of all police stops, no guns were recovered.

The unintended consequence of this policy is that we remain separate and unequal on the streets of New York more than 45 years after Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in this very pulpit and talked about “the fierce urgency of now.”

We only have to look at the numbers.

The NYPD made six hundred thousand street stops last year and is on track to exceed seven hundred thousand this year.

And yet only seven percent of those stops ended in arrests.

Judge Betty Staton, Brooklyn's Model for Living and Giving

[This article appeared on Bed-Stuy Patch and was written by C. Zawadi Morris, who also took the photo. Betty Station is a good friend of Brooklyn Marilyn's.]

By C. Zawadi Morris

 “In South Carolina, I walked three miles every day, to and from a little wooden school, while a bus full of white kids would pass us on the way to the brick schoolhouse. So I was aware early on there was a difference made between African-American children and white children,” said Judge Betty Staton.

Today, well into her 70s, Staton is still walking, every day, to and from Restoration Plaza, where she works as executive director at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Legal Services. (Read the whole article and see more photos here.)

'Slick Dick' Kelly, Master of Media, Says Cops Will Stop Minor Pot Arrests

One thing that's clear is that Ray Kelly would not have issued this order - telling officers to cease arresting large numbers of Black and Latino males for small amounts of marijuana, as police have been doing for years - without protests like the one pictured here.

[Photo shows Bed-Stuy/Fort Greene Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries - second from left, with handkerchief in pocket - and Flatbush Councilman Jumaane Williams, far right. Signs say police policies have been 'racist.' Photo appeared on Bed-Stuy Patch.]

Remember, readers, that Councilman Williams was himself detained and handcuffed by police on Labor Day, an episoide he says reflects city practice of targeting young Black and Latino men.

Some of you older ones might recall that cops used to be called "dicks," a kind of shortening of the word detective.

Bringing that suggestive moniker back, Kelly might be called a "slick dick."

We say this because Commissioner Kelly knew he could counter news about the marijuana announcement - the mere reporting of which was bad PR for him - by coming up with another piece of news.

And he did! He spread the word that his department had the capability of shooting down drones!

Now that story - kind of ridiculous on its face, no? - is all over the place and there's nothing about the hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino men who every year get stopped and frisked or arrested for possession of small amounts of pot.

But that's the kind of PR advice you get when your boss and adviser is a billionaire, Billionaire Bloomberg!

Inspector Anthony Bologna Pepper Sprays Young Women - and Walks Away.

Detective Inspector Anthony (Tony Baloney) Bologna pepper sprays four defenseless women without provocation, reports The Daily Kos. Bologna violates policy further by callously walking away leaving the women to lie on the ground in agony without the required medical assistance. Bloomberg and Kelly remain sildent until pressure builds. See slow motion video and/or read Daily Kos.

Rick Perry Eats It

Love this photo of Rick Perry at a picnic at St Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Oil City, outside Pittsburgh, where he ate a foot long corndog.

In the background is a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

(Thanks to Kuwan Cornelius @wans2cents on Twitter.)

Sent from wireless phone. Excuse typos.

Cops Stop More Brooklynites Than Others. Even Bronx Gets Fewer Stops.

[image by Patrick Leger]

By my calculation, police in Brooklyn stop more than 500 people a day, questioning them without evidence of a crime and without arresting them.

Increasing numbers of New Yorkers are saying this is a serious injustice to the mostly black and Latino young men who are the targets of this massive stop-and-frisk policy.

It goes almost without saying that the bulk of these detentions happen in neighborhoods like Bedford Stuyvesant, Flatbush and Brownsville.

Aplogists for the city's policy argue that these are high crime areas and that's why there are so many people being stopped and frisked.

But civil liberties lawyers are challenging that assertion, saying the percentage of those stopped and frisked is extremely high even adjusting for the high crime rates of certain neighborhoods.

More on all this later, but in the meantime it's worthwhile to see these figures from David Floyd et. al. versus New York City, filed in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.

Gay Men Couples Outnumber Female Couples in City -- but in Park Slope Lesbians Rule

"" About the 2010 Census, WNYC has noted:

"[G]ay male couples make up 60 percent of the same-sex couples in the city. However, exceptions exist, namely in parts of Park Slope, Brooklyn, where lesbian couples outnumbered gay male couples."

Once again Brooklyn stands out for setting trends in the city and the country and the world.

This presence in Park Slope of gay female couples has long been known, especially in Brooklyn; but the continuation of the trend and its special-ness in the city's residential patterns was confirmed in the recent Census.

Arun Venugopal did the WNYC report online a couple of months ago.

To see an interactive map allowing you to select a Census tract and click on the number of gay households -- and whether they are two men or two women -- you can click the link below.

Admittedly, it's not the easiest thing to know precisely the boundaries of a given Census tract, except by going elsewhere online to match the numbers given in this map.

Also these maps tend to work like very early beta programs, overly sensitive to the mouse or touchpad.

Lotsa luck.

Here's the map.

Taxpayers Want I.D. of the Officer Who Maced These Young Ladies

Bed-Stuy Dying, Bed-Stuy Reborn: A Portrait in Numbers

This is a fairly breath-taking set of figures showing the decennial population changes between 1970 and now.

That is, by most definitions, a span covering more than a generation -- my entire adulthood, although I have to say that much of my time over those four decades was spent outside New York, a good bit of it outside the country, in fact.

But think of it. Bed-Stuy was all but dying from the 1960s onward, and we can see here the very notable decline in population during the '70s, as the city went through a very difficult patch, with a painful city debt crisis that was a localized version of what the nation and world economies are facing now.