BQE bums

From the Queens Chronicle:

Assemblyman Francisco Moya (D-Jackson Heights) is looking to improve the situation at an underpass by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Jackson Heights, saying it’s become a hangout for vagrants.

“They’re lighting fires,” Moya said. “They’re smoking marijuana, drinking. It creates a very unsafe area for the residents who are living there.”

The lawmaker personally visited the underpass, by 35th Avenue and 69th Street, after a constituent emailed his office about the problem. They were joined by a community affairs officer from the 115th Precinct.

In addition to homeless people sleeping and loitering there, Moya said the underpass is “very dark, even during the daytime.”

The assemblyman has requested the NYPD temporarily place floodlights at the site and increase patrols in the area.

He’s also looking for the homeless people there to be brought to proper housing and get the services they need.

We just can't have nice things

From the Daily News:

The city announced Wednesday it’s pulling the plug on the kiosk’s web browsing capabilities after a slew of complaints about people using them to check out smut sites.

The kiosks, which replaced outdated pay phones, will continue to grant users free phone calls, and access to maps and 311 services. And people can still use the hundreds of kiosks — sprinkled throughout Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens — as a hot spot for Wi-Fi for their own devices.

“There were concerns about loitering and extended use of LinkNYC kiosks, so the mayor is addressing these quality-of-life complaints head on,” said Natalie Grybauskas, a spokeswoman for Mayor de Blasio.

Some predicted that they would be a problem even before the first kiosk went up earlier this year.

Raymond Sanchez, the general counsel for Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. who was involved in the franchise deal, said worries about “misconduct” were brought up in the contract talks.

At the time, he said City Bridge, the private company that partnered with the city to turn old pay phones into high-tech kiosks, said they could add firewalls to block inappropriate sites, and would have timers so people couldn’t sit all day and watch videos.

The company did install safeguards to try to block porn, but it appeared that many users found ways to get around them.

Quinn pushes legislation to keep more illegals

From CBS New York:

New York City leaders are drafting legislation to limit the city’s participation in the federal Secure Communities program.

The program will give immigration officials access to fingerprints of undocumented immigrants in local jails, including those in New York City.

Along with other City Council members, Speaker Christine Quinn is proposing local measures to stop federal authorities from deporting immigrants Quinn and her colleagues define as posing no threat to the safety of the city.

“Under the new law, the city will be prohibited from honoring detainer requests from immigrants who are youthful offenders, immigrants who have no criminal record, immigrants who have been accused of low-level offenses, or convicted of certain misdemeanor offenses,” Quinn said Thursday.

Those offenses include loitering, prostitution, or driving without a license.

Yes, let's keep the hookers and people who can't drive. Great idea.

City pays through the nose for bogus arrests

From the Daily News:

The city has agreed to pay $15 million to 22,000 New Yorkers — many of them homeless panhandlers — who were arrested for loitering using laws that were struck down decades ago.

The settlement was approved Monday in Manhattan Federal Court, lawyers said Tuesday.

The state’s anti-loitering law, passed in 1964, was ruled unconstitutional three times by state and federal courts in the 1980s and 1990s.

But the NYPD continued arresting beggars or hustlers under the statute for more than two decades. Most of those arrested lacked the resources to fight the charges.