More police in new budget

From the Daily News:

The mayor and the City Council are close to announcing a budget deal that will include funding for more cops, sources told the Daily News.

The final number will likely be smaller than the 1,000 that the council — over the objections of Mayor de Blasio — had been pushing for, said one source.

"It's not going to be the thousand, but we believe it's going to be a good number," the source said.

The issue of increasing headcount in the department, which the council believes is needed to combat a rise in shootings, was one of the major sticking points in tense budget talks, said the source.

Although the mayor had repeatedly said he was happy with the NYPD headcount as it is, the council wouldn’t budge on the issue in budget talks, said sources.

A separate source said the mayor's decision to add more cops came after negotiations with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who also wanted more officers.

Bratton agreed to cost-cutting measures the mayor had been calling for - like reducing overtime - in order to pay for more staff, the source said.

Kitty Genovese apathy story was pretty much made up

From the NY Post:

At 3:15 on the morning of March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old bar manager named Kitty Genovese drove her red Fiat into the parking lot of the LIRR station by her Kew Gardens home.

As she walked home — she was only about “a hundred paces away” from the apartment she shared with her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko — she heard a man’s footsteps close behind her. She ran, but the man, Winston Moseley, was too quick. He caught her, slammed her to the ground and stabbed her twice in the back. She screamed twice, once yelling, “Oh, God! I’ve been stabbed!”

Across the street, a man named Robert Mozer heard Genovese from his apartment. Looking out his seventh-floor window, he saw a man and a woman, sensed an ­altercation — he couldn’t see exactly what was happening — and yelled out his window, “Leave that girl alone!”

Moseley later testified that Mozer’s action “frightened” him, sending him back to his car. At this point, Genovese was still alive, her wounds nonfatal.

Fourteen-year-old Michael Hoffman, who lived in the same building as Mozer, also heard the commotion. He looked out his window and told his father, Samuel, what he saw. Samuel called the police, and after three or four minutes on hold, he reached a police dispatcher. He related that a woman “got beat up and was staggering around,” and gave them the location.

Other neighbors heard something as well, but it wasn’t always clear what. Some looked out the window to see Moseley scurrying away, or Genovese, having stood up, now walking slowly down the block, leaning against a building. From their vantage point, it wasn’t obvious that she was wounded. Others who looked didn’t see her at all, as Genovese walked around a corner, trying to make her way home at 82-70 Austin St.

But the police did not respond to Samuel Hoffman’s call, and Moseley, seeing no help was imminent, returned. He hunted down Genovese — who had made it to a vestibule in her building before collapsing — stabbed her several more times, then raped her.

Word of the attack spread though the building. A woman named Sophie Farrar, all of 4-foot-11, rushed to the vestibule, risking her life in the process. For all she knew, the attacker might have still been there. As luck would have it, he was not, and Farrar hugged and cradled the bloodied Genovese, who was struggling for breath.

Despite the attempts of various neighbors to help, Moseley’s final stab wounds proved fatal, and Farrar did her best to comfort Genovese in the nightmarish ­final minutes of her life.

The murder of Kitty Genovese shifted from crime to legend a few weeks later, when The New York Times erroneously reported that 38 of her neighbors had seen the attack and watched it unfold without calling for help.

The Times piece was followed by a story in Life magazine, and the narrative spread throughout the world, running in newspapers from Russia and Japan to the Middle East.

New York became internationally infamous as a city filled with thoughtless people who didn’t care about one another; where people could watch their neighbors get stabbed on the street without lifting a finger to help, leaving them to die ­instead in a pool of their own blood.

The people of Kew Gardens — before that, a relatively crime-free neighborhood where few bothered locking their doors — were referred to in the press as monsters.

But as journalist Kevin Cook details in his new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America” (W.W. Nor­ton), some of the real thoughtlessness came from a police commissioner who lazily passed a falsehood to a journalist, and a media that fell so deeply in love with a story that it couldn’t be bothered to determine whether it was true.

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.