Queensboro Bridge ramp claims another life

From DNA Info:

An NYPD officer and mom of two was killed when her car struck a metal railing at the base of the Queensboro Bridge near a "death trap" accident zone early Tuesday, catapulting the vehicle into a storefront that was destroyed in a fatal crash two years ago, officials said.

In a tragic twist, the driver, Elisa Toro, 36, of The Bronx a 10-year veteran who worked out of Manhattan's 17th Precinct, was ejected from her car when she hit a barrier that was designed to stop out-of-control cars from hitting the stores near the ramp, according to the officials.

Police say she had been driving east off the bridge, near Crescent Street, when she hit the railing about 1:50 a.m., sending her car careening out of control, the NYPD said.

The car then bounced into a cement barrier and flipped onto its side, skidding along until it struck a vacant store at 25-06 Queens Plaza South — the same shop that was destroyed in a crash two years ago, the NYPD said.

The officer — a mother of two sons — was thrown from the car and pronounced dead at the scene, Kelly said.

Ray Kelly taking security detail with him

From DNA Info:

The bill taxpayers will have to pay to protect Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly when he leaves office next month just got bigger.

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.

In six months, the NYPD will reassess Kelly’s security needs, the sources say.

If they could do it in Bay Ridge, why not Flushing?

From WPIX:

NYPD officers arrested 19 people in a prostitution crackdown on various “day spas” and “massage parlors” in Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, authorities announced Thursday.

“In this case, there were 19 massage parlors in a relatively small area,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. “Now we know that the people of Bay Ridge have back pain, but we don’t think it’s enough to sustain 19 massage parlors.”

The arrests come after a year-long investigation that began after neighbors complained of “suspicious and disruptive activities,” according to the D.A.’s office.

“I hope that these arrests will send a message not only to the communities of Dyker Heights and Bay Ridge, but throughout Brooklyn, that I share their concerns regarding these purported “day spas” and “massage therapists” and we will not tolerate illicit operations that exploit women and blight neighborhoods,” said D.A. Hynes.

The bust was the culmination of a joint investigation by the Kings County District Attorney Special Investigations Unit and the NYPD’s Brooklyn South Vice Unit. Using undercover detectives, surveillance and search warrants, the operation revealed “substantial evidence of prostitution” and a string of work-related and zoning law violations.

The arrests included both workers and owners at 12 different establishments.

Crowley forgets who slashed police force

From Elizabeth Crowley's Op-Ed in the NY Post:

More than 30 members of the City Council have co-sponsored the Community Safety Act, a set of bills designed to curb stop-and-frisks and alter NYPD policies. While it is indeed important to discuss ways of improving the NYPD, these bills neglect to examine a simple solution that will improve policing and keep us protected: Hire more cops.

...a larger force would make us safer — and greatly reduce the tensions that stops give rise to.

When Ray Kelly first served as police commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins, he promoted community policing that placed thousands more cops on the street — a policy continued by Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Community policing put officers in position to prevent crime and gave comfort to residents. The growth of the force that began under Dinkins put the NYPD’s ranks at nearly 41,000 under Guiliani — and brought a dramatic decrease in crime.

But since then Mayor Bloomberg has slashed more than 6,000 cops, including a 30 percent drop in detectives. We’re asking the NYPD to do more with less each year, even as it faces new responsibilities for counterterrorism and technology crime.

Mayor Bloomberg slashed 6,000 cops? I think Ms. Crowley has forgotten which branch of government is responsible for passing the budget every year. Just because the Mayor hands you a shit sandwich doesn't mean you have to eat it. But for the first time in NYC history, this Council, under the leadership of Christine Quinn, seems to think it does.

And if we're still debating whether or not stop-and-frisk works, then it probably doesn't. Not to mention that it's unconstitutional.

Also keep in mind that this Op-Ed was probably ghostwritten by Pat "Support it as a tool" Lynch, a "very close friend" of Liz Crowley.

NYPD plans to use drones

From NBC 4:

Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. are filing FAA applications to use drones for surveillance but civil rights groups are concerned about a lack of regulation.

In January, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said he would be interested in using drones for monitoring crowds and large demonstrations. But Kelly’s idea of a drone is not the Predator that most Americans picture. During a sit-down interview at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y, Kelly reportedly said he would consider using a small drone similar to a remote-controlled airplane equipped with a camera.

Small drones, even tiny ones – the size of hummingbirds – seem to be under consideration by dozens of other police agencies too.

The I-Team reviewed hundreds of pages from FAA drone applications filed by police departments, sheriff’s offices, the FBI, and educational institutions – most of the applicants are researching drones that can be launched right from a person’s hand. This interactive map plots which public and nonprofit entities have so far applied to used drones.

Police and civilian use of drones, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), was made possible last year when President Barack Obama signed a law opening the skies to UAVs by September 2015.

Several New York lawmakers, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, joined a “drone caucus” supporting the legislation.

Quinn makes deal with Kelly

From the NY Post:

The Kelly Dynasty will continue at the NYPD if Christine Quinn gets elected mayor, The Post has learned.

The police commissioner and council speaker have cut a private deal that will keep him as top cop for a fourth consecutive mayoral term with a Quinn victory in the November race to succeed Mike Bloomberg, sources said.

Confidants in both camps confirmed the secret pact — which will bolster Quinn’s anti-crime credentials while allowing Ray Kelly, 71, to keep the powerful post he loves.

“Ray is going to stay on if it’s Quinn,” said a source close to Kelly, adding that the commissioner decided months ago that he would agree to keep his job if the next mayor asks him.

A source close to Quinn said, “She has made her intentions clear” that she will retain Kelly if elected mayor.

Their deal does not specify how long Kelly would keep the job, the sources said.

Crime down, but arrests up...?

From the NY Times:

Even as the prison population across the country continues to grow, New York City officials said on Thursday that they had recorded a large drop in the city’s rate of incarceration.

“New York’s crime rate has gone down more quickly and more steeply than the rest of the country, and we are the model for low crime in this nation,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told reporters during a news conference in the Bronx. “But unlike the rest of the country, the number of people we are incarcerating has also gone down.”

From DNA Info:

Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg heralding a record-low number of inmates in city jails, the amount of people arrested during his administration is the highest in city history, DNAinfo.com New York has found.

In fact, the number of NYPD arrests in the Big Apple has jumped nearly 23 percent since Bloomberg took office — there were 338,788 collars in 2002 compared to 413,573 last year, police statistics show.

And the number of people caught in the criminal justice system started to climb virtually from the day he took office and appointed Raymond Kelly as his police commissioner.

There were 334,163 collars in 2003 — which was a scant decline from the previous year — but after that the number of arrests jumped to 351,435 in 2004 and continued to climb until it reached a peak of 422,982 arrests in 2010.

So if actual crime is down, are we arresting people for no reason?

Flooding destroyed criminal evidence

From the NY Times:

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Tuesday that facilities used for storing evidence in criminal cases suffered flooding during Hurricane Sandy.

“In some of our storage locations we have evidence that has been damaged,” Mr. Kelly told reporters Tuesday morning. “Significant flooding has taken place, no question about it.”

The damaged evidence may include DNA samples, he said.

Mr. Kelly said the property clerk facilities that experienced flooding were in Brooklyn, and at least one is in the Greenpoint neighborhood. It was not immediately clear whether the evidence at issue was being stored for use in pending prosecutions, or was in storage following convictions.

“We’re still trying to sort through this and assess the total damage,” he said.

Mr. Kelly said the damage to the evidence could potentially affect the outcome of individual criminal cases. “We’ll see,” he said.

Backpage operation busted

From Forest Hills Patch:

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced a big bust on Tuesday, saying an in-depth investigation had resulted in the breakup of a prostitution ring that stretched as far as the Philippines.

Christopher Fairbarn, a 24-year-old Forest Hills man, was one of 19 people arrested in the operation, which also caught residents from Flushing, Bayside, Pennsylvania and Southeast Asia.

According to Schneiderman, the Attorney General's office worked with the NYPD during a 16-month investigation to monitor the advertising agency Somad Enterprises, which created both online and print advertisements in publications like Backpage.com and the Village Voice to prostitute women.

All told, the agency took in more than $3 million for its role in facilitating meet-ups between often unwilling female victims and the men paying for their services, Schneiderman said.

Those arrested include employees of the advertising agency who accepted money to place the ads, pimps, drivers and more. During the course of making arrests, NYPD officers also took two human-trafficking victims into custody, both of whom are now in a safehouse.

NYPD still fudging stats

From the NY Times:

On a Friday night two years ago, a 17-year-old fired a pistol at a group of young men on the street near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; two were struck in the leg.

Nearby, Amanda Dominguez, 14, and her older half-sister, Jazmin Rodriguez, were chatting away when the shots rang out. Each suddenly felt a sharp sting.

Jazmin looked down at a hole in her cargo shorts and saw blood. She picked a sliver of metal from her wound, but dropped it, she would later recall. Her sister, Amanda, felt a burn along her shoulder, which a hospital nurse later told her was a graze wound, she said.

But the New York Police Department concluded that both women had merely received scrapes while fleeing the shooting, and did not count them as crime victims.

In recent years, the integrity of the Police Department’s crime statistics has been questioned as accounts emerge by officers who say they are being pressured by their bosses to reduce the number of felony incidents reported.

The issue is particularly sensitive for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who have overseen a significant decline in serious felony crimes throughout their tenure.

Vallone ordered to cough up correspondence

From Courthouse News Service:

On Aug. 10, 2010, Schoolcraft sued New York City, Marino, and several officers and doctors for nearly 20 claims, including false arrest, abuse of process, medical malpractice and negligence.

He sought $50 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

When discovery began in May 2011, Schoolcraft sought leave to add a free-speech violation to his complaint and to access correspondence between New York City Councilman Peter Vallone, D-Queens, and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Vallone, known for his vocal support of the NYPD, is not a party to the lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet turned down the new charge on June 13, but ordered Vallone to cough up the correspondence.

In the second half of the order, Sweet said Vallone could not quash the subpoena because he represented a different precinct than the one that Schoolcraft patrolled.

"With respect to Councilman Vallone's contention that the discovery requests are irrelevant because Councilman Vallone represents an area within the confines of the 114th Precinct rather than the 81st Precinct where plaintiff was stationed, it must be noted that the allegations in the complaint are not limited to the 81st Precinct," the order states. "Instead, plaintiff alleges that the policy about which he complained affected the entire NYPD, and Councilman Vallone's statements to the press concerning this policy suggest Councilman Vallone to be possession of information related to that citywide policy."

The end to cell phone theft?

From the Daily News:

Prodded by Sen. Charles Schumer and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the feds and phone carriers are cracking down on cell phone theft, the fastest-growing crime in New York City.

Schumer and Kelly joined other officials Tuesday to announce the creation of a landmark industry database of every cell phone’s unique ID number — making it easy to deactivate and render useless any purloined phone.

Schumer will also introduce legislation making it a federal crime to tamper with or alter a cell phone’s International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number in order to activate a stolen phone.

The new procedures, agreed to by the FCC and the industry, will make it virtually impossible for stolen phones to be resold on the black market, a huge criminal industry in urban areas.

Kelly tells cops to take reports

From the Daily News:

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly laid down the law to the NYPD: Make it easier for New Yorkers to report crimes and make each one of them count.

In a memo issued last week and obtained by the Daily News, Kelly provided a veritable ‘Policing 101’ refresher.

The operational order spells out in painstaking detail the steps cops are supposed to take when someone wants to report a crime. It also warns cops to eliminate excuses for not taking complaints from victims.

Police officers were told to take reports even if:

- The victim can’t identify the suspect.

- Someone can’t provide a receipt for stolen items.

- The victim refuses to view photographs.

- The complainant won’t speak with detectives.

- The victim doesn’t want to prosecute an offender.

The memo urges police officers not to refer crime victims to another precinct if the crimes didn’t happen in their command. And Kelly reminds cops not to tell people to return to crime scenes and call 911 after they’ve come to a police station to report a crime.

The operations order issued on Tuesday comes, as the NYPD and others are investigating claims that police officers — under pressure to make the city appear safer — are fudging stats or making it difficult for people to report crimes.

Crime actually is UP

From the NY Post:

Crime is poised to climb in New York City for the first time in nearly two decades.

The uptick is all but certain despite 11th-hour scrambling by police to keep their record-smashing crime-fighting streak intact.

That effort included New York Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly considering an unprecedented sit-down with trouble-spot precincts just days before New Year's and demanding updates from across the city as the final week of 2011 unfolded.

In the end, however, Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg pre-empted any countdown drama by proclaiming victory on Wednesday. Crime for the year was down 1.2 percent, the mayor announced -- or would be, if a change in the law in 2011 that made one type of strangulation a felony was factored out.

Still, the mayor's numbers left experts scratching their heads. If the city logged about 1,300 of these new strangulation cases, and the year continued on its pace for at least 1,300 more felonies, the year-end crime total would at best be flat, not down.

It's unbelievable because it's fake

From the NY Post:

And on the second day, Mayor Bloomberg proclaimed that New Yorkers are safer from crime and death by fire than they have been in all but two other years over the last five decades.

Bloomberg, yesterday, held his second press conference in as many days to tout his administration’s achievements in improving the health and safety of New Yorkers during a year-end rollout of upbeat statistics.

Just 502 homicides were on the books, overall serious crime was down once again and fire deaths were at a near-record bottom. Ambulances were responding to the most serious emergencies quicker than ever.

The spectacular results got the mayor and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly talking about their accomplishments over the last decade, with Kelly quoting a professor who proclaimed the crime decline worthy of the Guinness World Records and “not seen anywhere in the developed world.”

The mayor and commissioner firmly rejected the possibility that the reduction was caused by societal or economic factors.

The NY Times explains how this gets accomplished:

Crime victims in New York sometimes struggle to persuade the police to write down what happened on an official report. The reasons are varied. Police officers are often busy, and few relish paperwork. But in interviews, more than half a dozen police officers, detectives and commanders also cited departmental pressure to keep crime statistics low.

While it is difficult to say how often crime complaints are not officially recorded, the Police Department is conscious of the potential problem, trying to ferret out unreported crimes through audits of emergency calls and of any resulting paperwork.

As concerns grew about the integrity of the data, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, appointed a panel of former federal prosecutors in January to study the crime-reporting system. The move was unusual for Mr. Kelly, who is normally reluctant to invite outside scrutiny.

The panel, which has not yet released its findings, was expected to focus on the downgrading of crimes, in which officers improperly classify felonies as misdemeanors.

But of nearly as much concern to people in law enforcement are crimes that officers simply failed to record, which one high-ranking police commander in Manhattan suggested was “the newest evolution in this numbers game.”

P.S. They classify homicides as suicides and accidents all the time, too.

Major loansharking bust nets 37

From WCBS880:

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly announced a major takedown of organized crime activity today.

The long-term investigation focused on gambling and loan sharking rings — the real moneymakers for the Gambino crime family.

Kelly said that the 37 defendants were rounded up in a series of early morning raids.

Investigators had used wiretaps, video surveillance, GPS tracking, and bugs placed inside various locations to make their cases.

When the defendants conducted business on street corners, undercover cops were watching.

According to the charges, some of the gambling operations on professional sports and horse racing were run out of offshore wire rooms that generated millions of dollars in wagers.

The investigation was called “Operation Flat Rate.”

4 boroughs and NJ are represented!

Kelly for mayor?

From NY1:

While he has never publicly expressed an interest in running, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is a top choice to be the next mayor.

According to a new Quinnipiac University Poll, he has the support of 23 percent of city voters in an early look at the 2013 mayoral race.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn comes in second with 18 percent, followed by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and City Comptroller John Liu.

If Kelly was not in the race, 23-percent of voters say they would back Quinn.

The poll was conducted from July 19th to the 25th with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

"Gang of Apes" busted

From the NY Post:

Police announced the arrests of 140 individuals in a massive drug sweep throughout the city this week.

The largest takedown took place in Far Rockaway, Queens, where 56 people were busted including 18 violent members of the Gang of Apes, which has ties to the Bloods.

The NYPD and Queens prosecutors began the 14 month investigation that resulted in the seizure of $35,000, 12 handguns, six kilos of cocaine, heroin and marijuana, a kilo press, and a bullet proof vest, authorities said.

“Many of those arrested are gang members who plagued the Far Rockaway neighborhood,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at Police Headquarters. The gangbusters –which began terrorizing the area since investigators broke up the Flocc gang in 2010-- raked in more than $10,000 per week from peddling drugs.

Some of the perpetrators were slapped with attempted murder, robbery, weapons and drugs possession and face up to 25 years in jail, officials said.

Are we in for a long, hot summer?

From the Daily News:

A recent spate of murders in the city combined with a shrinking police force has some officials and residents fearing bloody months ahead.

And the summer hasn't even started yet.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has warned for some time that the reduction in the number of officers - from 41,000 in 2001 to 35,400 this year - would eventually have an impact on crime.

That warning stands a good chance of coming true beginning in July, when a Police Academy class typically hits the street, according to City Councilman Peter Vallone (D-Queens). Budget cuts forced the postponement of the class.

"We're not going to have new police officers the rest of the year," said Vallone, who heads the City Council's Public Safety Committee. "Right now, it's clear to the population we do not have the beat cops and bike cops we used to have. And if it's clear to the population, it's clear to the bad guys, as well."

Look at the pretty guns!

Haven't had a caption event for awhile. Be my guest. This one comes from the Queens Tribune.