de Blasio funds the tone police

 

City Journal

Amid a staggering wave of gun violence in New York City, with shootings this year measuring 42 percent higher than the same period in 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he plans to deploy the NYPD to track down and question people who have expressed “hate,” albeit without committing any crime or violation.

Speaking to reporters about anti-Asian attacks that have occurred around the country, the mayor encouraged people who have “witnessed or experienced any act of hate” to report it. “Even if something is not a criminal case,” the mayor explained, “a perpetrator being confronted by the city, whether it’s NYPD or another agency, and being told that what they’ve done was very hurtful to another person and could if ever repeated, lead to criminal charges, that’s another important piece of the puzzle.”

Asked how the NYPD would confront someone who has done something “hateful” but committed no crime, de Blasio enlarged on his prescription. “One of the things officers are trained to do is to give warnings,” he said. “If someone has done something wrong, but not rising to a criminal level, it’s perfectly appropriate for an NYPD officer to talk to them to say that was not appropriate. . . . I assure you if an NYPD officer calls you or shows up at your door to ask about something that you did, that makes people think twice.”

The mayor did not go into detail about the kind of behavior he was talking about, but we can surmise—since he explicitly stated that it wouldn’t rise to the level of criminality—that it must involve speech. Racial slurs or negative references to racial or ethnic identity, while nasty and rightfully unacceptable in civil society, are generally not prosecutable. Promising to involve the police in pursuing people who make intemperate, obnoxious remarks seems like an odd way to prioritize public-safety concerns.

The idea of a special category of “hateful” crime violates good sense. If a crime is a crime, sufficient mechanisms already exist to prosecute and punish offenders. What makes beating someone up “hatefully” worse than beating them up . . . lovably? The point of hate crimes as a category is to express how especially heinous society finds crimes motivated by ideologies of bias like racism, anti-Semitism, or homophobia. To this extent, hate crimes legislation essentially creates a class of political crime.

Does this mean the NYPD will respond for hate speech like "I'm going to rape you", "Gimme your cellphone or I'll stick you" or "Shoot that motherfucker"

 

Mayor de Blasio is utilizing a shady app to avoid keeping records of his communications

NY Daily News

Mayor de Blasio has joined the 21st century — and found a way to hide his communications.

Hizzoner joined encrypted messaging app Signal over the weekend. The tech lets users send disappearing messages to one another and protects the content with encryption.

So if the mayor wanted to discuss something controversial with an aide or campaign contributor, all he’d have to do is time his messages to disappear after a few minutes and the public would never know.

De Blasio’s use of the app poses legal and ethical problems, said Alex Camarda, a senior policy adviser for good government group Reinvent Albany.

“We don’t think that any elected official should be using an app that does not preserve communications that are subject to the Freedom of Information Law and the records archiving laws,” he said.

Under state law, “any information kept, held, filed, produced or reproduced by, with or for an agency ... in any physical form whatsoever” is subject to FOIL requests requiring agencies including the mayor’s office to turn over the info.

“We don’t see how it’s possible to use that kind of app and be in compliance with those laws,” Camarda said of Signal.

This is SOP for our secretive and above all laws mayor. I tend to think he's been pulling this craven stunt for years during his daily Park Slope Y workout routine.

Violent anti-violence activist earned more city money than the mayor last year

 

NY Daily News

An embattled anti-violence advocate accused of threatening a neighbor with a Bloods gang attack was paid a whopping $282,990 salary using city money, documents reveal.

Shanduke McPhatter’s astonishing earnings for fiscal year 2019 exceeded Mayor de Blasio’s salary of $258,541.

City Hall ordered McPhatter to reduce his salary following an audit by the Mayor’s Office of 

Criminal Justice. McPhatter’s paycheck was slashed to $157,828 in July, a mayoral spokeswoman confirmed.

The advocate’s nonprofit, Gangtas Making Astronomical Community Changes, has a $2.3 million deal for a wide array of services in 2020 to reduce violence behind bars and on the streets. 
Documents and tax records indicate the vast majority of the group’s funding comes from the city. A 

 City Hall spokesman confirmed the entirety of McPhatter’s salary was paid by the city. The vast majority of G-MACC’s funding comes through city contracts, documents show.

“Many millions of taxpayer dollars are allocated to community based organizations across the city and the integrity of the process is paramount,” said Councilman Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island). “I hope the city can come together with us in the Council to ensure this doesn’t happen in the future.”

McPhatter’s group, commonly known as G-MACC, has partnered with the city since 2014 on anti-violence initiatives. Its members have led conflict mediation at Rikers Island and juvenile detention facilities. G-MACC also ran a program called “Mackin’ to Be Elite” through the Education Department.

City Hall credits G-MACC for no shootings in a roughly six-block stretch of East Flatbush between May 2019 and January 2020 .

McPhatter’s salary steadily increased as G-MACC expanded its partnership with city agencies including the Department of Correction, Administration for Children’s Services and Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. He earned $85,000 in 2016 as the group’s CEO, according to filings with the Comptroller’s Office. That figure jumped to $115,585 in 2017 then $134,196 the following year before ballooning to $282,990, tax records show.

Mortality rates of homeless people went up

 

NY Post

More homeless New Yorkers died last year than in any other in the past decade — despite promises by Mayor Bill de Blasio to make their lives better.

Homeless deaths from July 2018 through June 2019 totaled 404 — a staggering 39% increase from the previous fiscal year and the highest number since 2006, when the city began recording the deaths.
Sixty percent died in a hospital. The rest died outdoors or in other places that the city didn’t specify in its annual report, which is mandated by law.

The top five causes of the deaths: drugs, heart disease, alcoholism, unspecified accidents and cancer.
Ten people were killed; 15 killed themselves.

Far more men died than women — 313 to 91.

Even with the deaths, the homeless population spiked in fiscal 2019 — reaching an all-time high in shelters of 63,839 in last January, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

The number of homeless has climbed nearly every year since the de Blasio took office, and spending on city homeless services has more than doubled.

This, despite the mayor’s repeated promises to “turn the tide” on homelessness.

“An ever-growing homeless population is unacceptable to the future of New York City . . . it will not happen under our watch,” de Blasio said days before his swearing-in on Jan. 1, 2014.
In response to the skyrocketing number of deaths, a coalition spokeswoman called on the state and the city to provide more affordable housing.

“No person should have to live — or die — without stable housing,” Jacquelyn Simone said. “This report should serve as a tragic reminder why Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo must both step up with housing solutions at a scale to meet the need.”

The Great NYC Ferry Subsidy Robbery and city bus austerity

NY Post

Ferries help the poor? That’s rich.
 
Mayor Bill de Blasio has insisted that his administration’s heavily-subsidized ferry service would help poor New Yorkers get around, but newly revealed data shows it’s been a plaything of the rich almost from the jump — figures the city sat on for months.
 
An internal survey taken in July 2017 — two months after the service’s inception — found that the median rider’s income ranges between $100,000 and $150,000, a trend that held as of another poll conducted in the winter of 2018.
 
The results of the surveys were obtained by The Post through an eight-month Freedom of Information 

Law battle with the Economic Development Corporation, the city-controlled non-profit that manages the ferry service and solicited the data.
 
The EDC for months rebuffed The Post’s requests as it claimed it was still searching for the records — but City Councilman Antonio Reynoso had a different explanation for it.
 
“The city was being misleading about what information they had, and also didn’t want to give the information because it would prove a point that many of us were already making,” said Reynoso (D-Brooklyn/Queens).

Impunity City

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”
                                                                                                S’chn T’gai Spock.

The NY Post reported the other day that the prime demographic that frequently uses the NYC Ferry are upper class people making six figures.

But we all knew it.

The fucking New York City Economic Development Corporation knew it.

The goddamn New York City Mayor knew it.

And both of them fucking spent every second of city time trying to hide it for two years.

The NYC Ferry is mostly used by the wealthiest commuters by the river towers that are owned and run by all of Mayor deFaustio’s developer overlord donors. Notably at the ports on the west Brooklyn coast line where it’s a leisure walk away from them (plus Hunter’s Point in Queens).


The current cost for each taxpayer for each $2.75 ride across the rivers and under the bridges is currently at $9.75. A seven dollar loss for each ride millions of people don’t take or don’t bother to take because they don’t live near the ports. And because they probably have no need and use for the boats because they are just plain inconvenient for where they are located and where they need to go.

If they are not the overvalued rental market rate rent paying tower people, it’s tourists and hipsters going to Rockaway Beach. Which is probably the most popular destination of the city gentrification yachts. Which is where some of this profligate spending on this boondoggle is located.


Because whats constantly overlooked about this obscene and overtly useless and consistently vacant aqua transit service is that there is a free shuttle bus service when you get off the ferry. Although ever since this started, you have to pay another fare to get on a city bus. 



 Now above is the Rockaway port, the picture was taken in 2017 late in the summer when it first started. It should be noted that these stylish shuttle buses weren’t available until late August and the city was actually using big ass charter buses to transport upper class denizens to the beach.

 

Above is the city bus stop for the Q22, now why are free ferry shuttle buses necessary when you can just set up a free transfer from the city bus to go to your desired destination, because both buses go to the same places east and west of the peninsula. Why clearly spend money irresponsibly on some private company buses when you got a long time city transit service right there in front of your face?

Bill de Bastard

Impunity City


“This is your city”. When Mayor Bill de Blasio ran for re-election in 2017 barely a year after he dodged charges for running an anarchic pay-to-play system with corporations and agencies with municipal business with this city, this bland platitude was his campaign slogan. It looked like it was supposed to mean that his vow on his first day in office back in 2014 to end the tale of two of them had been achieved and it singularly belonged to all us New Yawkers.

As everyone is aware, it is 2019. And it’s still an inequitable fucking mess for this city’s working poor and middle class who still make it run. But it’s crystal clear who the Mayor was talking to when he said “your city” and it’s not only who you would expect by default meaning the benefactors and profiteers of the Gentrification Industrial Complex, the overlords of real estate development or even the transplants that stupidly overspend for their studio and one bedroom apts (and gut converted tenement ones in their portfolios). Nope. The one he was talking about was himself, Bill de Blasio.

Since his farcical presidential run ended, Bill has been a real huge dick lately. Actually it was just a week before he decided to terminate it, when he went on WNYC for his weekly Friday bloviating interview with the sappy host Brian Lehrer. A citizen called in concerning the affordable housing program that he runs has not made it out to the lower income earning people or the ballooning homeless population that need it the most. And this is how this monster responded:

“We can’t just do affordable housing for the lowest income folks,”

Now I have been thoroughly critical of this mayor since the start of this digital publication 3 years ago mostly because of what his morally bankrupt decisions have had on his constituents, but with that tone-deaf statement and with yours truly being a full-time working poor low income folk, now it’s fucking personal.

Asswipe Mayor de Blasio overspends on city toilet paper

NY Daily News

New York City is literally flushing millions down the toilet.

The city has spent at least $8.8 million on cheap toilet paper since June 2013 – and the costs are piling up under Mayor de Blasio.

Around $1.58 million was wasted on toilet paper last fiscal year, a 12% bump since 2014, according to records obtained by The Daily News. Last month alone, the city bought $126,000 worth of toilet paper rolls.

The city uses about four million rolls every year, buying only cheap, single-ply toilet paper, according to the Citywide Administrative Services. An average of $1.45 million was spent on potty paper annually over the last few years.

That’s about 35 cents a roll.

DCAS dumps the rolls in all municipal buildings, including City Hall, police precincts, parks and firehouses.

"It’s a waste of money,” one Democratic councilman, who asked not be name in order to cover his behind, quipped. “Taxpayers are watching their money flushed down the toilet.”

 

Another councilman tried to perfume the issue slightly.

 

 “It seems like a lot of money for toilet paper, but at least we now have a solution for all the crap coming out of City Hall,” Councilman Joseph Borelli (R-Staten Island) said.

Mayor de Blasio, the man who gave us Vision Zero, was a passenger in a car crash that was caused by his NYPD security team and covered up by their commanding officer

 NY Daily News

On a Saturday morning in August 2015, Mayor de Blasio was in the back seat of a black NYPD Chevy Tahoe bound for an event in Harlem when a driver changing lanes slammed into his ride.

No one was hurt, but the commanding officer of the mayor’s executive protection unit, Howard Redmond, was furious. Text messages obtained by the Daily News show he immediately ordered the incident be covered up to protect de Blasio’s image.

“As per CO [the commanding officer] no one is to know about this,” Sgt. Jerry Ioveno texted members of the unit, referring to Redmond. “Not even the other teams.”

“No one is to know,” he repeated.

Text messages obtained by The News reveal that Redmond frantically covered up the Aug. 22, 2015, car crash due to concerns about “optics.” The previously unreported crash offers insight into the powerful commanding officer’s critical role covering up embarrassing episodes involving the mayor. It also hints at why Redmond remains in his post despite turmoil in the unit. The News has previously reported on allegations that Redmond covered up the case of an executive protection unit lieutenant accused of roughing up a sergeant at Gracie Mansion.

No report on the crash is publicly available in state Department of Motor Vehicles records. Redmond allegedly ordered that the cop behind the wheel, Detective Edgar Robles, be officially listed as the driver of a backup SUV, text messages show. That way, the unit could more plausibly claim the mayor wasn’t in the vehicle involved in the collision, a source close to the executive protection unit said.

The crash was covered up in part because of de Blasio’s Vision Zero initiative, which seeks to reduce pedestrian and traffic deaths through stricter enforcement, according to multiple sources close to the executive protection unit. The Vision Zero site proclaims: “The City of New York must no longer regard traffic crashes as mere ‘accidents,’ but rather as preventable incidents that can be systematically addressed.”

State law requires all occupants of vehicles involved in accidents to stay at the scene. But a retired member of the executive protection unit said it wasn’t unusual for a VIP under the unit’s protection to be taken away as long as there was no serious injury.

The mayor's atypical buck-passing response?

“Everything about how an accident is handled is the responsibility of the NYPD. I don’t know enough about their protocols. That’s something to ask them,” de Blasio said.

The aloof mayor was also uninterested in the apparent cover-up of the collision. Texts showed EPU members telling each other “no one is to know.”

“I don’t accept the notion that anything was done one way or another because I’m not familiar with what was done," de Blasio said, apparently ignorant of The News’s front page story and coverage it received from other news outlets.

 

Mayor de Blasio is exploiting a city PAC fund to finance his farcical presidential exploration and for pay to play deals with greedy developers

CBS NY

  A new ethical firestorm is engulfing Mayor de Blasio as questions are being raised about where he’s getting all the money to fund his cross-country presidential campaign trips.

It’s deja vu all over again for “On The Road Bill,” the mail-it-in mayor of New York City who has been galloping all over the country to test the presidential waters with a suspicious campaign cash box that’s raising lots of eyebrows.

“To me, that’s a real no-no,” Betsy Gotbaum of the Citizens Union said.

Gotbaum is questioning how de Blasio is raising money for his “Fairness PAC” – the political action committee that is allowing the mayor to dream about running the country.

“Is it the appearance of something wrong?” CBS2’s Marcia Kramer asked the government watchdog’s executive.

“I think it is something wrong. I think you do not take money from people who are doing business with or who want to do business with the city. I’m shocked,” Gotbaum replied.

The mayor, who has already been the subject of an investigation into an earlier political action committee, is now being asked to explain two new issues.

 One is a fundraiser held in Boston on Friday by John Fish of Suffolk Construction.

The company is apparently so keen to expand into New York City that it hired disgraced former NYCHA chair Shola Olatoye, who de Blasio shockingly kept praising even after she was forced out in the agency’s lead paint scandal.


City Comptroller Scott Stringer subpoenaed the records because the buildings were first appraised at just $50 million – less than a third of the deal’s final price tag.

“When I feel that things are being done in secret, that we don’t get the data, when you have a huge purchase of $173 million… we use the power of subpoena to get the documents,” Stringer explained.

 This time, instead of obfuscating his spirit of the law breaking, this dumbass and his greedy benefactors are doing all this in plain sight.

Journalist banned from reporting on community meeting about Kew Gardens jail.

Kew Gardens Patch

 Reporters were banned from a heated meeting in Queens about a much-contested plan to build a new jail in Kew Gardens.


Dozens of Queens residents argued Thursday night with Mayor's Office representatives for more than two hours over the proposed jail, which is one of five possibilities to replace the detention center on Rikers Island, attendees later told Patch.

"They don't seem to get the message," Queens resident Sylvia Hack said. "This is the wrong project for the wrong community."

Patch planned to be one of those attendees, but a spokesperson from the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice refused to allow our reporter entry, saying it was closed to press. Patch reached out to that spokesperson on Monday for comment.

"They aren't public meetings," Eric Phillips, a spokesperson for the mayor, wrote on Twitter. "The general public isn't invited en masse




Several Queens locals expressed their anger that a journalist had been barred from reporting on the plans, which they argue would only worsen mounting congestion near the Queens Criminal Court, Queens Boulevard, the Van Wyck Expressway, Grand Central Parkway and Union Turnpike.

"How did they throw you out? It's a public space," Hack said. "They can't decide any such thing. It's our community center. They had no right to throw you out."

"Something of this scope needs to be a transparent process," added Andrea Crawford, a Kew Gardens resident and member of the jail project's neighborhood advisory committee.
Crawford argued Thursday's meeting, should have been open to the press because local community associations, such as the Community Preservation Committee, had invited others who don't sit on the advisory board.

"It's a demonstration of their trying to prevent light being shed on this very poorly constructed farce that they're engaging the neighborhood," Crawford added.

 "A meeting to gather 'input from Queens residents' certainly should be open to the local press," said Patch editor-in-chief Dennis Robaugh. "The only reason to exclude the press is to limit public debate and discussion on an important neighborhood and city issue."

This is basically government repression against the press (Well, the press they don't want or desire, because some reporters were allowed to come in). Also according to the mayor's spokesperson in a pathetic play on semantics, an attempt to repress the general public despite it's claim on the flyer above feigning to desire input from the community about the tower jail.

Then there is this that Maya Kaufman, the Patch reporter that was bounced out of this public meeting, told me about the "neighborhood" advisory committees that were assembled by the city for this and the three other tower jails planned for the other boroughs using the ruse about community participation and transparency:

"Theoretically the NAC meetings are just open to the chosen group, but in Queens we’re seeing community members try to open up the meetings to the community at large by sharing notices on social media. So, this specific meeting had many not on the NAC."

City Limits (from January 2018)


The city is pursuing a unique path to getting approval for the four new jails that will take over housing detainees and inmates when Rikers Island closes: There is one environmental review, and one Uniform Land-Use Review Procedure, for the four very disparate sites.
That could mean that the voices of each individual neighborhood are less audible than they would be if the city proceeded jail by jail. However, the city has created four Neighborhood Advisory Councils to create a forum for getting community input into the plans for each facility.

 City records are not crystal clear on whether people attending these meetings are NAC members or non-members there to observer or speaker.

These are the individuals selected to advise (or advocate) for the Kew Gardens tower jail:

Jane Stanicki	Hour Children	Queens
Mary Abbate	Queens Community House	Queens
Murray Berger	Kew Gardens Civic Association	Queens
Robin Spigner	District Leader	Queens
Rosemary Zins	Queensborough Community College	Queens
Seth Willens	Community Board #9 (sitting in for Andrea Crawford)	Queens
Sister Tesa	Fitzgerald Hour Children	Queens
Steve Bell	Kew Gardens Civic Association	Queens
Sylvia Hack	Community Board #9	Queens

You think after the Amazon HQ2 debacle, Mayor de Blasio would have learned a lesson about keeping citizens in the dark about their policies and plans for neighborhoods. But as with the bike lanes and homeless shelters that have been induced on eastern Queens, this has been standard operating procedure.