Sanitation agents busted writing bad tickets

From CBS 2:

Local lawmakers are accusing some New York City sanitation agents of fraud and perjury.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind and Sen. Jeff Klein said three agents were caught on surveillance video in Brooklyn issuing homeowners tickets for violations they did not commit.

“If we know about these three false tickets, I can only imagine how many more cases of fraud there must be,” Hikind said.

Sadik-Kahn changes mind about Brooklyn traffic islands

From CBS:

The Borough Park traffic islands that CBS 2 first told you about six months ago, the ones that caused such chaos, are apparently going to be removed, Marcia Kramer reports exclusively.

When CBS 2 first aired this story last November you saw Ladder 114 having trouble rushing to a fire in Borough Park. It ran smack dab into cement traffic islands installed by the DOT.

A back-up caused by the traffic island forced an ambulance to pull into oncoming traffic to swerve around the barricade and the problems of ambulances trying to reach the Maimonides Hospital emergency room down the block continue to this very day.

But apparently not for very much longer.

In a rare change of heart, Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Khan has, sources say, agreed to remove the offending barricades. The move will head off a threatened suit by Assemblyman Hikind, who had gathered petitions from more than 1,000 constituents.

Hikind to introduce racial profiling bill

MYFOXNY.COM - A local member of the New York Assembly will be reintroducing legislation that would allow law enforcement officials to use ethnic profiling among other techniques to spot potential terrorism suspects.

"There is no question that the government has a compelling interest in protecting the lives and safety of its citizenry from terrorist attacks," says Assemblyman Dov Hikind , a Democrat of Brooklyn. "The history of modern terrorism has taught us that these attacks are repeatedly executed by young Muslim men of Arab or South Asian origin. This is not a time for political correctness."

He says that using ethnic profiling is not unconstitutional, because he says a "compelling governmental interest" in using it to save lives.

Hikind says that police officers should be allowed to consider a person's race and ethnicity among other factors when deciding who to stop, question and search, including "wearing heavy clothing in warm weather; carrying a briefcase, duffle bag or backpack with protrusions or visible wires; displaying nervousness and/or inappropriate sweating; an inability or unwillingness to make eye contact; and chemical burns on clothing or stains on hands."

He plans to reintroduce the legislation, which he first proposed in 2005, when the legislative session reconvenes in Albany in January.