Teen's Bad Grades Used As One Reason To Not Place Him On Heart Transplant List

This doesn't seem like a real story, but it is:

Doctors at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta estimate that without a heart transplant, 15-year-old Anthony Stokes will die within three to six months from heart failure. Yet despite his prognosis, they refuse to put Anthony on the transplant list, telling his family he doesn’t qualify due to “a history of non-compliance” characterized by “low grades and trouble with the law.”


“They said they don’t have any evidence that he would take his medicine or that he would go to his follow-ups,” Melencia Hamilton, Anthony’s mother, told WSBTV. Hamilton says that a transplant is the only option for her son’s enlarged heart.

In a recently issued statement, the hospital would not reveal any specifics about how they came to their decision, saying, “The well-being of our patients is always our first priority. We are continuing to work with this family and looking at all options regarding this patient’s health care. We follow very specific criteria in determining eligibility for a transplant of any kind.” The hospital wants to send him home with medication, presumably to die.

After a couple of days of horrendous press, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta now says they will put the teen on the list for a donor heart:

ATLANTA - A 15-year-old who needs a life-saving heart transplant is now on the waiting list.

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta had originally decided that Anthony Stokes, who suffers from an enlarged heart, was not a transplant candidate because of a "history of non-compliance", according to the family. Stokes' mother, Melencia Hamilton, insists that was never an issue. She said that Stokes had taken all the medicine administered to him.

The president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Rev. Samuel Mosteller, said that he and others met with the transplant committee. He said that the committee expressed concerns about Anthony's truancy from school and a previous stay at juvenile hall.

"They made a qualitative decision and we believe that there was some pre-judgment in there that caused them to do some things they shouldn't have done, we thought," said Mosteller.

The SCLC said that the hospital reversed course after Anthony's case hit the news and social media. Stokes' mother says the decision to place Anthony on the recipient list came from the very doctor who originally denied the teen the heart. Hamilton said that Stokes has now been placed on the 1-A list.

"His heart is critical where he'll be put on top of the list when a heart becomes available. If one is available now, he'll get it," said Hamilton. 

Incredible.

Just incredible.

Low grades, brushes with the law - no heart for you.

Go home and die.

Incredible.

Thank God the family and their supporters used the news and social media to get the story out.

Otherwise these people at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta would have kept Anthony off the list.

This is end game for the education reform movement.

Grades and test scores as the key to everything - including a needed heart transplant.

"Bloomberg's Baby Sucks!" -- 911 Operators On Bloomberg's New 911 System

 A disturbing piece in the NY Post on just how bad the 911 system that Bloomberg spent $2 billion on is.

Here is that piece in full:

The city’s new $88 million 911 computer system, part of a $2 billion overhaul of the emergency- response system, crashed at least nine times last week and has been plagued with problems since it launched in May. Operators had to record 911 calls with pen and paper, causing delays in getting crucial information to NYPD, FDNY and EMS dispatchers — and getting urgent help to citizens. One experienced 911 call-taker coping with the crisis and other on-the-job problems told her story to The Post’s Susan Edelman.

I’ve been a 911 operator for years. It’s never been as frustrating and stressful as now. If the public only knew what we’re going through.

Getty Images/PhotoAlto

CALL WAITING: Mayor Bloomberg’s $88 million 911 computer system is beset by catastrophic flaws that have operators at wits’ end. 

We’re your lifeline. We’re supposed to send help quickly if you’re having chest pains or getting mugged. With a billion dollars spent on this system, you would expect the top-notch, the best, the state-of-the-art.

It’s not.

“System down!” That’s what they yell when it crashes.

It’s chaos in the call center. Everybody comes running onto the floor, the bigwigs, the commanders, the people from Verizon and Intergraph [the Alabama company that designed the new system].

We stop typing caller information on our computer screens.

They throw slips of paper at you. You have to make sure the information goes in the right spot on the forms. It’s so time-consuming. You have to jot down what the caller tells you, the address verification, the cross streets, the nature of the call, the codes — cardiac, crime in progress, bomb threat.

It’s a lot of writing. There are more calls. People are waiting to get through to 911, but I’m stuck on this call.

Somebody’s dying, and I’m writing on paper.

“We’re holding!” a supervisor shouts. He’s breathing down my neck. “You still on the same call?” They pressure you to move on, but I need more time.

Once I finish, I raise my hand. “I’m ready! Here’s the card!” A runner, an operator on lunch break, picks it up and takes it across the room to the NYPD dispatchers, who send patrol cars over the radio

I take another call.

Each time the system crashes, the operators say, “Bloomberg’s baby sucks! This s--t went down again!”

Our call volume is too high for this system. It’s a very slow system, even when it’s working right. The old computer system was much faster. I wish we could go back.

Crazy things happen with this system. I’ve taken calls where the information disappears — everything you’ve typed is gone. You’re ready to send the call to the dispatcher, and the screen goes blank — everything is gone.

“Where’s the job number? I’m still waiting on the job number,” an EMS dispatcher asks me. All my information on a medical call will pop up once he gets the job number.

“You have the job number on the screen,” I tell him.

“I don’t see it; check your queue.”

“I don’t have it. If I had it, I’d give it to you.”

Then the job number pops up on my screen two to three minutes later. It just appears out of nowhere.

Intergraph keeps telling us, “Shut your computer down and reboot. It’ll just take a minute.”

How many lives can you lose in a minute?

Sometimes we get it wrong, too. Once the address an operator thought she heard was for the wrong borough. A baby wasn’t breathing. The baby died.

Every day I worry about making a terrible mistake like this.

The calls keep coming in. “My husband’s dying of a heart attack.” “My child can’t breathe.” “Someone got shot.”

My job is to get the address first, then verify the cross streets and the nature of the call: “What is your emergency?” I immediately send it over to the NYPD or FDNY. If medical attention is needed, I notify EMS. I have to stay on the line until the dispatcher verifies the address.

“Help is on the way.” That’s what we must tell all callers for priority jobs, like a rescue, cardiac, shooting or robbery in progress. “Help is on the way.” If we don’t use that slogan, we get reprimanded or lose vacation time.

They give rookie operators two months training, and after that just throw ’em in. They’re not ready. It’s a revolving door. The new ones come in, and some say it’s too much and leave.

Starting pay for a 911 operator is about $26,000. There is money to be made on overtime. I know a lady, known as “the queen of OT,” who made up to $80,000. She put her daughter through college.

Now we’re forced to do overtime because we don’t have enough people. Since Mother’s Day, we have to work mandatory double shifts three or four times a week. Some operators call in sick after two tours. We get two 15-minute breaks and an hour meal each shift.

The only way out of a second shift is to bring in a doctor’s note. After a regular shift, I’d have to find an emergency room to say I’m not well.

After 16 hours, it’s unsanitary. No family time. We need back-up babysitters for our babysitters. We’re too exhausted to do anything after work.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my job. I’m here to serve people and do my best. But the conditions are inhumane. We’re burned out.

We had better hope there's not another Sandy or Bloomberg Boxer Day Blizzard or, God forbid, terrorist attack in this city before somebody comes in and fixes this 911 system mess.

And since Bloomberg says it's working swimmingly, he's not going to be the guy who fixes this mess.

NYC 911 System In Shambles, Bloomberg Says All Is Well

A Daily News op-ed today:

After insisting the main flaw in the city’s new 911 emergency call system was with the people who dispatched responders, City Hall’s top man on the project admitted that there had been technical glitches.

But they had all been ironed out, Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway said on a July 9 visit to the Daily News.

It sure sounded good.

Among the issues that had been resolved, Holloway said, were freeze-ups in the computer link between call-takers and EMS dispatchers.

Those had begun soon after the city switched over on May 29 to a system that linked a single team of dispatchers to disparate police, fire and EMS operations.

First, several dozen dispatch screens froze at once. Not knowing what was happening and fearful that the entire 911 system could go offline, managers shut automated routers and took out pens and paper.
While technicians rebooted the computers, operators wrote information on slips of paper and runners raced the slips to dispatchers. It took 18 minutes to get the system working again.

A few days later, when about 50 screens froze, the managers shut down for a reboot and relied on runners and slips for 52 minutes. Combining both outages, the runners and slips sent out about 860 ambulance runs.

The technicians then did what technicians do, Holloway said, and all was well.

“It will be an anomaly indeed when you go to slips going forward,” he said.

Welcome to anomaly central.

On Monday, the system crashed multiple times and technicians took it offline several more times during the week for a total of 90 minutes. Dispatchers recorded almost 500 calls using runners and slips. Not to worry.

In a statement issued Thursday, the Fire Department reported that the techies had finally figured things out. The system had been “fully stabilized,” the statement said, adding, “The problem was caused by corrupted ‘disk arrays.’ ” Oh, that.

Enough of good-sounding assurances. This is deadly serious. The response system’s troubles have extended well beyond electronic errors.

Staffing is in such turmoil that the NYPD will add 150 civilian dispatchers and is considering assigning 300 uniformed cops to dispatch duty. Also, the Department of Investigation is studying the unexplained 4-minute delay in getting an ambulance to Ariel Russo, when the child lay fatally injured after being hit by an SUV.

Asked time and again, The News’ question remains: How safe are we?

Mayor Bloomberg yesterday:

New York City is lucky it got ripped off hundreds of millions of dollars in the CityTime scandal, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning.

Mr. Bloomberg’s argument was that because the fraudsters agreed to pay the city back $500 million after being hounded by federal prosecutors and the city’s Department of Investigation, the project of modernizing the municipal payroll system ended up being a bargain.

“That whole system cost us something like only a 100 million dollars and it should have been many times that,” he said. “We were lucky because of the fraud. And in the end it turned out, because of the recovery, we saved a lot of money.”

The mayor arrived at this topic after defending the city’s much-maligned 911 system, which has been barraged with reports of dysfunction and shutdowns. Mr. Bloomberg compared the two cases and maintained the system was working just fine.

“When was the last time you heard a complaint about the basic accounting system for the municipal workforce that has something like two thirds of all municipal workers on it? None one. Not one complaint,” he said, latter adding, “It certainly works and this 9/11 system certainly works as well. Will there be glitches? Computer systems all the time have glitches. Nothing’s perfect.”

 Feeling safe yet?

Bloomberg: We're Lucky The CityTime Crooks Ripped Us Off!

Yeah, he said it:

New York City is lucky it got ripped off hundreds of millions of dollars in the CityTime scandal, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning.

Mr. Bloomberg’s argument was that because the fraudsters agreed to pay the city back $500 million after being hounded by federal prosecutors and the city’s Department of Investigation, the project of modernizing the municipal payroll system ended up being a bargain.

“That whole system cost us something like only a 100 million dollars and it should have been many times that,” he said. “We were lucky because of the fraud. And in the end it turned out, because of the recovery, we saved a lot of money.”

The mayor arrived at this topic after defending the city’s much-maligned 911 system, which has been barraged with reports of dysfunction and shutdowns. Mr. Bloomberg compared the two cases and maintained the system was working just fine.

“When was the last time you heard a complaint about the basic accounting system for the municipal workforce that has something like two thirds of all municipal workers on it? None one. Not one complaint,” he said, latter adding, “It certainly works and this 9/11 system certainly works as well. Will there be glitches? Computer systems all the time have glitches. Nothing’s perfect.”

A little 4 year old girl died during one of those 911 system "glitches".

Bloomberg's response?

Oh, well - what can you do?  Nothing's perfect...shit happens...

I'm sure he believes his own b.s. here that the CityTime fraud was awesome because it ended up saving the city money and the new 911 system is working swimmingly despite the half dozen crashes a day it's been having and the dead 4 year old who just might have been saved had the system worked like it was supposed to work.

He's clearly delusional and divorced from reality at this point in his life and I wouldn't be surprised to see him diagnosed with some kind of disorder or dementia in the coming years.

More 911/EMT Problems Caused By A Bloomberg Technology Upgrade

Bloomberg loves upgrading technology, though many of his upgrades don't work - from the NYCHA computer system to CityTime to the 911 system.

Now here's another Bloomberg technology boondoogle

A move to modernize city ambulance records has become a technical nightmare for city EMTs, who told The Post the system is leading to delays and slower response times.

The new tablet-computer-based system for recording ambulance calls has been hampered because the devices often freeze up and can’t send information when a Wi-Fi signal is unavailable, sources said.
“It’s a very weak wireless system, but the city got what they paid for,” groused one technician. “They were too cheap to pay for a stronger system.”

Instead of recording vital information about each “aided” case on paper, EMS technicians are required to enter data on the tablet. A wireless router is attached to the EMS truck and provides the Wi-Fi signal.

But when a signal can’t be found, or is weak, the ambulance crews struggle to submit the data, which is mandatory before heading off for new emergency calls.

“It’s like a cellphone,” an EMS source said. “Sometimes you lose your signal, and when that happens, you lose your information.”

One EMT recalled how he and his partner ran into tablet trouble after taking a patient suffering chest pains to Jamaica Hospital this week.

They could not move to the next call before his information was in the tablet — but the gadget was not cooperating.

“My partner was working in the ER attempting to put the info into the tablet and he lost the signal. He had to go back and re- enter the info into the tablet.

“That’s why we were extended. It delayed us big time. It took us 40 minutes from the time we got there to the time we left,” he said.

EMTs are expected to have the patient-information process completed in 20 to 25 minutes, he said.

The switch to the rugged five-pound tablets — manufactured by DRS Technologies — was announced in March and introduced at different times around the city.

Queens EMS units began using the tablets on July 8, but they had been introduced earlier — and drew complaints — in Brooklyn and on Staten Island.

The Brooklyn EMS units said the tablets have no keypads, so information has to be entered with a stylus one letter at a time, causing further delays.

 We had better hope there's not another Sandy-type disaster in this city before Bloomberg goes, because the 911 system and the EMT system is not going to be able to handle it.

As I asked in an earlier piece, will this kind of Bloomberg tech boondoggle be showing up in any of the"Bloomberg legacy" pieces corporate suck up journalists like Bill Keller have been writing?

Firefighters Union To Sue City Over Bloomberg's Unworkable 911 System

From the NY Post:

The firefighters union plans to sue City Hall to get rid of the new centralized 911 call system, which it says has created dangerous delays, including in the response to a serious Bronx fire yesterday.

The Uniformed Firefighters Association is claiming that a 911 call for the five-alarm blaze came in at 2:40 a.m. and, because of human error, was not relayed to the FDNY until 2:48 a.m.

When units arrived at 2:52 a.m., the blaze at 1507 Commonwealth Ave. was already raging. The fire left 25 people homeless, injured 11 firefighters and left two kidsen suffering from smoke inhalation.
The reason that this fire got out of control is that when we got there, it was already out of control,” union President Steve Cassidy said.

“It was an eight-minute and 22- second delay in the 911 dispatchers handing this off to the Fire Department.”

Cassidy said the union will seek an injunction to go back to the pre-2009 system.

Currently, callers to 911 speak to an operator, who takes down the circumstances and their address before transferring them to an FDNY dispatcher. Under the old system, as soon as callers to 911 said their was a fire, they were transferred to an FDNY dispatcher before their name and address were taken.

Cassidy said the old system reduces the risk of computer error or having an operator misinterpret the caller’s information.

The Bloomberg administration said everything worked fine, there were no delays and the new 911 system is the bestest thing ever.

Let me know when Bill Keller adds this mess to his "Bloomberg's legacy" columns.

Rahm Emanuel's School Closings Put Children's Lives At Risk

From the Associated Press:

CHICAGO — Chicago children displaced by public school closings may be forced to step into the line of fire between warring street gangs as they walk to their new schools each day, a gang expert told a U.S. judge who will rule on a request that he stop planned closings in the nation's third largest school district. 

Taking the stand for lawyers opposed to Chicago Public Schools' recent decision to shutter about 50 public elementary schools, John Hagedorn also testified that rival gangs already are posting warnings on Facebook for the incoming children from other neighborhoods to stay off their turf. 

"It's already aggravating gang conflicts," he said about the pending closings. And if the closings ahead, added the University of Illinois at Chicago professor, "It is likely a child will be shot and killed." 

Gangs often are blamed for Chicago's high murder rate, which topped 500 in 2012 — the first time since 2008 it hit that mark. The murder rate has declined in 2013, with about 200 murders as of early July. 

But recurring Chicago violence has made national news this year, especially after the shooting death of 15-year-old honor student Hadiya Pendleton about a mile from President Barack Obama's Chicago home. 

Gang violence is more chaotic than ever as their hierarchies crumbled over the past decade, breaking down top-down control of 20 or 30 years ago, splintering gangs and leading to infighting within gangs, Hagedorn testified Wednesday. 

"The old times where one gang controlled one neighborhood are gone," he said. "Those changes are what make it especially dangerous to children." 

Closing so many schools at once was a bid to rescue an academically and financially failing system. Officials say the schools were underused and that closing them will save millions, improving schools overall. 

But displaced students, Hagedorn said, will have difficulty grasping boundaries in an increasingly confusing patchwork of gang territories and will struggle to pick up on cues indicating gang violence might be imminent. 

"When children have to cross gang borders, you are putting them in a situation where they are in the line of fire," he testified. "It creates a severe risk for children (going into) unfamiliar neighborhoods."

Rahm Emanuel doesn't really care about any of this.

He simply cares about closing schools, firing teachers, busting the union and helping his edu-entrepreneur buddies make millions from the privatization of the school system.

He doesn't care if children have to die in order for him to accomplish these goals.

Quite literally, he will have blood on his hands when a child or children are killed as a result of this policy.

But hey, this is the guy who helped run the Drone Bomb Administration for four years, wherein they dropped bombs on brown people who they think are terrorists, kill innocent men, women and children in the bargain, then shrug and say that's the cost to fight the War on Terror.

The point is, Rahmbo already has blood drenched hands, so what's a little more in Chicago?

NYCDOE Continues To Poison Students, Staff With PCB's In City Schools

Once again, it becomes apparent that the Children First. Always people care nothing about children:

Despite vowing to speed up the process of replacing light fixtures containing dangerous chemicals in city schools, the Education Department does not follow its own protocols to alert parents and quickly remove toxic PCBs, according to emails obtained by the Daily News.

The exchanges between staffers from the DOE and Environmental Protection Agency show that defective light fixtures are still leaking in city schools — and replacement of the faulty fixtures at some were not handled properly.

...

  

At Public School 253 in Brighton Beach, several fixtures did not work in the auditorium this year. School staff discovered one of the lights had leaked toxic liquid in the auditorium in August.

“The custodian did not follow procedures for reporting it or cleaning it,” EPA employee John Gorman wrote in March to his colleagues. “They are removing all of the fixtures in the auditorium tonight and will collect a wipe sample from the floor.”

At P.S. 186 in Bensonhurst, there were five smoking ballasts recorded from March to May, Gorman noted to his colleagues in another email.

In a letter sent to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott in February regarding more toxins at P.S. 50 in Staten Island, EPA regional administrator Judith Enck called out the DOE for taking 10 days to alert families of smoke emanating from fixtures.

“The students were not immediately removed from the classroom,” Enck wrote. “I am concerned about the DOE’s response to the situation.”

And what was the DOE's response?

 

Why, a jive-ass p.r. statement from Marge Feinberg, of course!

 

“The DOE continues to work with EPA on improving protocols and developing a citywide PCB management plan,” said spokeswoman Margie Feinberg. “As the lighting replacement project progresses, DOE is keeping EPA abreast of ongoing work.”

They don't care about the children in the public school system at all.

Seriously, not at all.

If they did, they would have sped up the removal of the PCB's from the light fixtures in all of the schools instead of fighting the case brought against them and trying to delay the removal as long as possible.

And if money was such a problem, then they could have dumped a few Common Core consultants or testing contracts and put that money to the PCB removal.

But Bloomberg would never do that because he doesn't care about these children (or the staff) at all.

 

Remember, they did this with mold testing and removal after Sandy too.

 

Bloomberg and his Tweedies love spending money on all kinds of testing except for environmental testing of schools to ensure their safety.

Isn't it time that we call him and his Tweedies on their Children First. Always jive once and for all?

Bloomberg Administration Knows 1/4 To 1/3 Of All 911 Calls Are Getting Lost In The System, But Continues To Deny The Problem Exists

In case you missed this very important Juan Gonzalez investigation on Bloomberg's faulty 911 system upgrade, here it is in full:

Less than 24 hours after the death of little Ariel Russo in a car accident on the upper West Side, EMS supervisors began an exchange of bombshell emails about repeated “lost calls” from the city’s new 911 system.

The emails obtained by the Daily News show for the first time that high-ranking officials knew the extent of the problems with the $88 million system very early on — just days after the system was launched and before 4-year-old Ariel died.

Lt. Carl Nunziata, an overnight shift boss, sent the first email on June 5. It was at 5:51 a.m. and addressed to Carla Murphy, the head of computer programming for EMS.

“Last night we had a couple of jobs I would like for you to look at,” the email began.

Nunziata said a call came from the NYPD to EMS as a “lost call.” Another call came in for an emotionally disturbed person and inexplicably had no address attached to it.

“Why are these jobs coming in this way?” a perplexed Nunziata asked. “And what are we suppose(sic) to do with these type jobs?”

The startling reply from Murphy came just after 10 a.m. on June 6. Some of the brass already knew.

“[Deputy Fire] Chief Napoli reported the problem to me several days ago and I provided a list of incidents where this had occurred over 3 days for Intergraph to resolve,” Murphy wrote.

A flurry of “lost calls” were “happening to about 1/4 [to] 1/3 of incidents transmitted from NYPD ICAD,” she said.

ICAD is the acronym for the new computer system built by Intergraph Corp. It is used by 911 operators to assign police and to transmit details of emergency calls to EMS and FDNY dispatch centers in downtown Brooklyn.

Given that 911 operators process an average of 3,000 ambulance calls a day, the Murphy email raises the possibility that the number of lost calls may have been in the hundreds or thousands.

A “lost” message, according to fire officials and Intergraph’s own manual, occurs when transmissions from NYPD to EMS fail to reach the intended recipient, usually because of a break in a computer link, or because of a garbled transmission.

  

“We get several of these a day . . . which may not have sufficient information for responding units to find the incident,” Murphy wrote, copying several top brass.

Whatever the number, it certainly points to a bigger problem with the new system than the minor “bugs” Mayor Bloomberg conceded on May 31.
 

Ariel was struck on June 4 at W. 97th St. and Amsterdam Ave., as she walked to school with her grandmother around 8:15 a.m. She was clinging to life, as police on the scene repeatedly asked for an ambulance.

The News revealed a few days later that there was a delay of more than four minutes in dispatching an ambulance. She later died, but it’s not clear if the delay contributed to her death. The girl’s family has filed a $40 million lawsuit against the city.

Fire officials, who blamed that delay on human error, said Monday that everything was fine with the new system.

“There has not been a single lost call with the new system,” Deputy Fire Commissioner Frank Gribbon insisted Monday.
 

They say an EMS worker failed to see the 911 ambulance request on her screen before going on a break, and admitted so afterward. Since then, she has contradicted that account. She denied seeing any new call on her screen before her replacement took over.

And the union for EMS paramedics has claimed the call for help was somehow lost in the system.
The EMS log of that incident lists several “PD-LOST” messages in the first few seconds of the transmission from 911.

Fire officials say no calls have been missed and the new system is faster and more reliable than its predecessor.

“The new ICAD system is so fast that the moment the NYPD call taker starts keying in information, the transmission starts to EMS,” Gribbon said. “There are instances when we receive partial data from ICAD. But we always get the full data within seconds.”

So a “lost” call is not really lost, according to Gribbon, just temporarily garbled or unavailable.

“It may not be the perfect term to use,” he conceded.

“That’s nonsense,” a veteran EMS dispatcher said. “He’s obviously never worked a dispatch terminal.”

“Since this new system started, our people get on the phone to 911 every day and ask, ‘where’s the information on that ambulance job you were supposed to send me?’ ” the dispatcher said. “The operator may tells us, ‘I sent it to you 20 minutes or an hour ago,’ but it’s still not our screen. If that isn’t lost, what is?”

Fire officials later acknowledged that dozens of paramedics and supervisors working at the EMS dispatch center the day of the accident should have been able to see the ambulance request on their individual computer monitors. Officials say the request would also have been visible on a huge screen in the EMS center that highlights in white any calls that have been delayed more than three minutes.

A public outcry ensued and officials have promised a full investigation. As of last week, at least 15 people had been interviewed under oath, including an EMS captain and a lieutenant. None has reported seeing the Ariel Russo ambulance request on EMS computer screens, say union leaders with knowledge of the interviews.

“Nobody saw the call for the little girl because it wasn’t there,” said Israel Miranda, president of the paramedics and emergency technicians union. “It was a lost call, and city doesn’t want to admit there’s a big problem with this new system.”

This is horrific but not a surprise.

The Bloomberg people never take responsibility for mistakes or problems, they always look to balme it on others - especially city workers.

We had better hope there is not some major disaster, either weather-related or otherwise, that brings in a ton of 911 calls before Bloomberg finally flies off to Bermuda and the next mayor comes in and (I hope) fixes this system.

Bloomberg Refuses Accountability For 911 System

It's always somebody else's fault and his beloved technology always works the way it was supposed to:

Mayor Bloomberg defended the city’s 911 system Thursday even as one of the candidates to succeed him blasted it as a failure and vowed to overhaul it.

Bloomberg said it was “very tragic” that little Ariel Russo was left waiting for an ambulance after she was fatally struck by an SUV, but blamed individual dispatchers.

“The software worked exactly the way it was supposed to be,” Bloomberg told reporters, including our Tina Moore. “There clearly was something wrong with somebody sitting in front of the screen, and maybe two people sitting in front of screens. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do and we’re looking at the procedures. It’s very tragic.

“But it was not a software thing. That’s just ginned up by unions who don’t like the fact that we have combined all of the call takers together, basically,” he insisted.

Juan Gonzalez has reported that the problem was with the software, not human error.

The Daily News editorial writers wrote the same.

Bloomberg once again refusing accountability for his tech messes - and this one perhaps resulted in a fatality.

Bloomberg Puts City At Risk By Refusing To Acknowledge 911 System Problems

A Daily News editorial today:

The evidence mounts that the city’s 911 emergency response system is plagued by potentially life-threatening miscommunications — with Mayor Bloomberg’s public safety credentials hanging in the balance.

The Daily News’ Juan Gonzalez reported last week on the case of Ariel Russo, the four-year-old Manhattan girl who was fatally struck by a careening SUV. He revealed that 4 minutes, 18 seconds has elapsed between the time police called for an ambulance and the time the Emergency Medical Services dispatched one.

Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano, whose department oversees EMS, responded vehemently, attributing the delay to human error rather than to any fault in a new $88 million computerized dispatching system that was supposed to speed and coordinate responses by police, fire and EMS.

Cassano stated that a dispatcher had missed the ambulance call on her computer screen:
“It wasn’t picked up by the person that should have been reading that screen. There were no technology glitches,” Cassano said. “(The worker) just failed to read the screen. We’ll deal with that. . . . Their screen should never be left unread, because these are lifesaving calls.”

Now, Gonzalez reports that, had the 911 system been operating properly, the police call for an ambulance — this was classified as a high-priority “relay” call — should have shown up on the computer screens in front of a couple dozen dispatchers, as well as on a large video monitor where supervisors track calls.

Further, all the computer screens highlight a relay call after three minutes if EMS fails to dispatch an ambulance. The highlighting is meant to place everyone in the call center on notice that an overdue relay call demands action.

There are two possibilities: The call failed to appear on any computer screen for those four-plus minutes, as the dispatcher has told associates; or everyone on duty failed to act on the police department’s repeated requests for an ambulance.

Cassano’s spokesman goes with the second explanation, which amounts to admitting massive personnel failures, although the spokesman insists that the delay falls squarely on the single dispatcher primarily responsible for the call.

None of this hangs convincingly together, with all the doubts compounded by Gonzalez’ previous reports on outages in the $88 million upgrade. They lead fairly to critical questions: Are technical failures preventing some 911 calls from moving seamlessly from the NYPD to EMS? And why would a roomful of dispatchers and supervisors let urgent calls to aid a semi-conscious child go unanswered for so long?

Follow them out and the ultimate question becomes: How safe are we?

Actually follow these questions out and the ultimate question becomes, why isn't Bloomberg being held accountable for this mess?

It's Boxer Day all over again, only this time the storm never ends and the next 911 call put into the system may take a couple of hours to make it to where it's supposed to go.

Bloomberg is very worried about his legacy and keeping his policies going long after he's gone.

Meanwhile we have this 911 system reminding us of his failures with so many other outside consultant contracts, like CityTime, only this time it's a matter of life and death.

He lives a charmed life, though.

Can't you see him failing to fix this system, indeed, even acknowledge the problems, then have some major catastrophe happen under the next mayor and pass the blame off on her/him?

Just the way they're trying to pass the blame off for the Ariel Russo tragedy onto the single dispatcher.

Come on, Mike, fix the system so that God forbid something bad happens, New Yorkers can get the emergency help they need when the need it.

Bloomberg Administration Lies About The 911 System Problems

From Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News:

An Emergency Medical Service worker whom city officials blame for missing a 911 call that led to a four-minute delay in getting an ambulance to a child hit by an SUV insists no such call ever came over her computer screen.

City officials say “human error” by that lone dispatcher, and not glitches in the new 911 dispatch system, slowed the ambulance response after Ariel Russo, 4, was fatally struck June 4 on the upper West Side by an unlicensed teen fleeing police.

But EMS sources and internal logs obtained by the Daily News tell a different story, raising more questions about the reliability of the two-week-old system. Some say New Yorkers could be in danger.

“Unless they fix this system soon, public safety is being risked,” said Israel Miranda, president of the EMS dispatchers union.

The worker at the center of the controversy, a 23-year EMS veteran, reported to work at 6:59 a.m. that day and was assigned to handle so-called relay calls. Those are direct computer transmissions from NYPD 911 operators, one of the most important jobs in the dispatch center. According to an EMS log obtained by The News, the call about the girl being struck at W. 97th St. and Amsterdam Ave. was transmitted by a 911 operator to EMS shortly after 8:15 a.m.

   

Ariel, who was walking to school with her grandmother, was semiconscious at the scene, according to cops who responded and were anxiously awaiting an ambulance. She died minutes later.

At 8:19 a.m., records show, the EMS veteran logged off her computer for her scheduled break and immediately handed her computer to a replacement dispatcher. The woman being faulted is adamant that she never left her computer unattended and handed her replacement a monitor with no jobs waiting, according to people who have talked with her directly.

Sources said she was given an “admonishment” a day after the fatal accident. In a written response to supervisors, she said there was never a call on her screen about a girl getting struck. She has no previous disciplinary history on the job and has been relied upon to train others in the emergency call center, sources said.

The FDNY, headed by Commissioner Salvatore Cassano, disputes her account.
“We have confirmed the call was on her screen and she did not act upon it,” FDNY spokesman Frank Gribbon said.

 But The News has learned that at least 40 EMS dispatchers and officers on duty that morning should have been able to spot the same overdue request for an ambulance. All such relay calls are posted and tracked on a giant, wall-mounted screen. They also appear on the individual computer terminals of all EMS dispatchers on duty, a veteran dispatcher said.

Once a call has gone unanswered for three minutes, the computer automatically highlights it in a bright, white light meant to be a warning.

“No way that everyone missed that job when it came over the system,” the dispatcher said.

Gribbon acknowledged a relay call “is on other dispatch screens,” but, he added, “The relay operator who failed to handle the call was assigned specifically to handle that — and all other — calls received via relay.”

That dispatcher has been “relieved of handling calls received via relay,” Gribbon said.
Miranda and other EMS dispatchers say they are being blamed for a computer system that has been nothing but trouble since it was launched. Computer messages between police, the EMS and the FDNY keep getting lost or delayed for minutes and even hours.

  

One dispatcher provided a cellphone photo from an EMS computer monitor over the weekend that showed two “relay” ambulance calls waiting to be answered — one for an hour and the other for 33 minutes.

“Do you think any of us would allow a call to remain on our screens for an hour without handling them?” the dispatcher asked. “These calls suddenly pop up from wherever they’ve been lost and they’re already showing a long wait time.”

The News has obtained police and EMS 911 logs for more than a dozen such calls that occurred Saturday and Sunday. All show  unusual gaps in the time from when an NYPD operator registered the call to when EMS received it.

On Sunday afternoon, for example, a driver ran a stop sign at 89th St. and 103rd Ave. in Queens and struck another vehicle that was carrying three people. A 911 operator recorded the first call about the accident at 4:52 p.m. The occupants reported no one was seriously injured. EMS was not notified until 7:20 p.m., 2 1/2 hours later.

“We waited nearly three hours for the ambulance,” said one of the passengers, Johnny Agromonte.

Agromonte said his neck “was hurting a little,” but he declined to go to a hospital. Even worse, he said, “no cops showed up until 11 p.m.” to take a report. “More than four police cars just passed us during that time but they wouldn’t stop.”

All that Gribbon, the FDNY spokesman, would say about the incident was that it was listed as an “RMA,” meaning a patient refused medical attention.

As this column reported last week, Alabama-based Intergraph Corp., the company that developed the new $88 million computer dispatch system, has had similar problems with computer glitches and crashes in dispatch systems it designed for emergency responders in Nassau County and in San Jose, Calif.

Since the NYPD system, known as ICAD, was launched two weeks ago, there have been four incidents where all or part of the system crashed, requiring police operators to resort to writing down caller information on slips of paper and ferrying them by runners to dispatchers.

After spending more than $2 billion on upgrading the city’s 911 system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg should start listening to the workers who operate it. The failure to listen could cost lives.

Emblematic of the little mayor's reign of error - spend billions on something that doesn't work, then blame the failures on government workers.

We had better hope there is no major catastrophe in this city before they get this system fixed because it is clear it cannot handle it.

And since Bloomberg thinks the system "works," it looks like we have to wait until the next mayor to get that fix.

Bloomberg's Vaunted New 911 System Turning Into A Nightmare

From the Daily News:

GLITCHES and repeated crashes in the city’s new 911 computer dispatch system appear to have delayed emergency responders during several life-and-death situations this week — possibly even in the crash that killed 4-year-old Ariel Russo.

Ariel died Tuesday when a 17-year-old unlicensed driver who was fleeing police rammed his parents’ SUV into the girl and her grandmother on an upper West Side street corner at about 8:15 a.m.

Logs of 911 calls obtained by the Daily News, as well as interviews with emergency responders, show that it took an unusually long 4 minutes and 18 seconds from the time of the first request for an ambulance from police at the scene to a 911 operator, until the time an ambulance was finally dispatched. Once FDNY and EMS dispatchers received and acknowledged the transmission, it took 3 minutes and 52 seconds to dispatch an ambulance and for it to arrive at the scene.

...

 

What is clear is that from the time of the crash until the ambulance’s arrival — roughly eight minutes — cops from the 24th Precinct, including a lieutenant at the scene, radioed 911 four different times in increasingly desperate attempts to get Ariel medical assistance.

In the lieutenant’s last call from the scene, at 8:21 a.m., the cop said Ariel was “semiconscious.”
“Rush EMS to location,” the lieutenant pleaded.

She was still alive, but no one knows if she could have been saved.

“I don’t know how this could happen,” Ariel’s grandmother, Ledy Russo, 61, said Thursday night. “People were saying, ‘Where was the ambulance?’ It took a long time.”

...

 

Insiders who work with the new computer system blamed the technology.

“Four minutes is a long time to take down a call,” conceded a 911 supervisor, “but the public doesn’t understand the problems we’re having with this new dispatch system.”

“When you’re trying to type in information, your computer begins buffering, and you then have to wait for 30 seconds or even a minute before you can use it again,” the supervisor explained. “That’s okay if it’s my computer at home, but not okay for a system this important.”

NYPD brass at the main 911 call center in downtown Brooklyn have taken to urging telephone operators to periodically reboot or refresh their computers to avoid the constant freezes — but that also delays the work of answering calls promptly.

According to several insiders, the new system, which NYPD brass deployed for the first time last week, has gone down several times already. The system crashes have forced operators to resort to writing down information about 911 calls on slips of paper, though police officials have said all calls were answered and no one has been endangered.

“It works,” Mayor Bloomberg said of the dispatch system on his radio show Friday, referring to the problems as “bugs” common to any new system.

...

“You wish you didn’t have bugs,” Bloomberg said, “but that’s the real world.”

Bugs don’t nearly explain the story, emergency officials say.

“This is serious stuff,” said one high ranking EMS official. “The police computers keep getting disconnected from our dispatchers. Sometimes they don’t send us any calls from entire busy precincts for hours at a time. Public safety is being jeopardized.”

That official pointed to other incidents of failed communication this week that have received no attention.

The same morning that Ariel was struck — allegedly by Franklin Reyes, who has been charged with manslaughter — a motorist on I-95 lost control of his car near Co-op City in the Bronx. The car hit a median and overturned. The injured driver managed to get out of the car and a highway police sergeant who arrived at the scene immediately radioed 911.

EMS logs show that the first notification to FDNY and EMS of the accident came in at 11:48 a.m. Within five minutes, an ambulance and fire company had arrived on the scene.

But according to the EMS official: “When our units got there, the sergeant said: ‘What took you guys so long? I’ve been waiting here for an hour and a half.’

“The sergeant kept radioing in the information, but we got it very late,” the EMS official said.
“Our ambulances keep sending messages to police radio and they just disappear in the system without police receiving them,” a veteran EMS dispatcher said. “Something’s very wrong here.”

The new $88 million computer-aided dispatch system, known as ICAD, was developed by Alabama-based Intergraph Corp. As The News reported last week, eerily similar problems emerged when Intergraph rolled out versions of its 911 systems in both Nassau County and San Jose, Calif.

The ICAD is part of a larger overhaul of the city’s 911 system, the first that’s been attempted in decades.

The Bloomberg administration launched the effort after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. But that effort was plagued by years of delays and the failure of several major contractors to deliver what they promised.

Meanwhile, the cost has skyrocketed from $1.3 billion to more than $2 billion.

All the energy they have spent on the stupid teacher evaluation system rolled out last week and here we have a 911 system that may be in part responsible for the death of a four year old.

God help us if there's a major problem in the city and lots of 911 calls come in.

This 911 system cannot handle anything like that.

Oh, but thank God we've got a new teacher evaluation system!

Juan Gonzalez: Years Of Lies And Delays From Bloomberg Over PCB's In Schools Laid Bare This Week

The Children First mayor has been saying it will take 10 years to get the light fixtures with the PCB's in them out of the schools:

A fluorescent light suddenly exploded Tuesday morning in Room 316 at Intermediate School 123 in Harlem.

Fumes from the failed classroom fixture laden with toxic PCB fluid spread so quickly the entire school had to be temporarily evacuated. Nine pupils and two teachers were treated at a nearby hospital for asthma attacks and severe coughing.

“We had the same thing happen a month ago in Room 216, though it wasn’t as bad as this one,” Hope Scott, president of the school’s Parents Association, said.

Then late Thursday, Department of Education spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said: “Today a smell was emitted from a fixture on the second floor. It will be removed tonight and the room will be ventilated.”

These three incidents in just one Harlem school have finally laid bare years of lies and delays from the Bloomberg administration over the huge problem of PCB-laden lights in our public schools.

Just six weeks ago, a Brooklyn federal judge blasted the Department of Education for flouting the City Council, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and previous court orders that have urged faster action in removing PCB ballasts from public schools.

Until this week, the city kept insisting it needed 10 years to replace more than half a million lighting fixtures that contain the dangerous substance.

But in response to a lawsuit filed by New York Communities for Change challenging that 10-year plan, U.S. District Judge Sterling Johnson labeled the city’s reasoning “spurious.”

Johnson’s decision virtually predicted the harrowing incidents at IS 123 and other schools .

Since the federal government banned the use of PCBs in 1979, any such fixtures in city schools are now more than 32 years old — twice their useful life.

“As they age, the failure rate . . . increases dramatically,” Johnson noted, and he ordered the city to stop “foot-dragging” and mediate a settlement with the plaintiffs.

Other leaders have offered concrete plans. City Controller John Liu has proposed a bond issue that would more than pay for itself through energy savings.

Meanwhile, Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan) has questioned why in some buildings a charter school’s lighting fixtures have been replaced but not those of the co-located public school.

Until this week, Mayor Bloomberg ignored everyone.

Then some students and teachers in Harlem ended up in the hospital. So Wednesday evening, only hours after Rosenthal called for a news conference outside IS 123, Bloomberg’s people suddenly announced the city is speeding up the removal of PCBs fixtures. But given their outrageous record on this issue, let’s see their plan.

These people in the Bloomberg administration are liars and criminals who do not care at all about the children in their care.

If they did, they would not send children to schools in these conditions.

Don't Weep For Him, Bloomberg

Two different gun deaths - one bad in Bloomberg's estimation, one that can and should be ignored.

First the one that makes Bloomberg sad:

Alphonza Bryant III could not, in the end, escape his father’s fate. At the age of 17, his life was extinguished by a hail of bullets on April 22 as he hung out with friends on a street corner in the South Bronx, just four blocks from where his father was murdered. Police officials believe that Mr. Bryant was a victim of mistaken identity in an act of retaliation by gang members.

“It wasn’t even curfew time,” his mother, Jenaii van Doten, said in an interview Wednesday at a laundry near their home. “You would think that all the violence happens after midnight, but they fooled me this time.” 

Mr. Bryant’s life and death came into the public spotlight on Tuesday when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg singled him out as a casualty of gun violence, using the teenager to illustrate the toll that illegal guns can have on New York, and the value of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics. Mr. Bloomberg criticized civil rights groups, saying they expressed no outrage about Mr. Bryant’s shooting, and suggested that The New York Times had failed to cover the killing because the teenager was black.

Now the one Bloomberg ignored:

NEW YORK -- A week after police shot to death an unarmed 18-year-old in his grandmother's Bronx apartment, questions continue to swirl around the aggressive police tactics that led to the fatal confrontation.

Ramarley Graham died last Thursday after Richard Haste, 30, a New York police officer, entered his grandmother's apartment and shot Graham in the chest while he attempted to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet. Graham was unarmed and police did not have a warrant to enter the home.

Graham's death has sparked street protests in Wakefield, a low-income neighborhood with a large African-American and Caribbean immigrant population. "They had no business kicking down the door. They went too far," said Tyrone Harris, 27. "They need to go to jail just like any other citizen."

Jeffrey Emdin, an attorney representing Graham's mother, called the police tactics unlawful. "They illegally entered the home," Emdin said. "They had no right to be inside. They had no right to use force."

Protesters linked the shooting to the NYPD's aggressive street policing program, called "stop-and-frisk," which predominantly targets low-income minority neighborhoods. In 2011, the program stopped and searched more than 500,000 New Yorkers, 85 percent of them black or Latino. The searches contributed to a record number of misdemeanor marijuana arrests last year.

"The public has every reason to question whether this shooting was the product of the NYPD marijuana arrest crusade, or whether it's the product of their hyper-aggressive stop-and-frisk program," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

Gee, where is Bloomberg's press conference to state publicly how stop-and-frisk saved Ramarley Graham's life?

Oh, right - the program actually caused his death.

And where is the mayor's hand-wringing over the senseless gun violence that killed Graham?

Oh right - his "own army" killed Garaham, so everything's cool.

What happened to Alphonza Bryant III is awful, but so is what happened to Ramarley Graham.

How come nobody in the news media points this out?

How come nobody in the news media points out the disconnect between the mayor's reaction in the tragic Bryant case to the mayor's reaction in the tragic Graham case? 

Judge Slams DOE For Making "Spurious Arguments" And "Illogical Claims" In Move To Have PCB Lawsuit Dismissed

The Children First people want to delay taking cancer-causing PCB's out of the school system for as long as possible.

You see, spending money to remove PCB's that are present inside classroom light fixtures takes away precious resources that could be used for standardized testing, data systems to track the scores from those tests, and computer and software consultants to run the tests and the data tracking systems.

Parents sued to get Bloomberg and the DOE to move the timeline on the PCB removal up.

The city wanted that lawsuit dismissed, but a judge ruled it will go forward - and slammed the city for making "spurious arguments" and "illogical" claims in his decision:

A judge has rejected the city's request to dismiss a lawsuit brought by parents trying to speed up the effort to get polychlorinated biphenyls removed from schools.

As many as 800 city schools have been found to have PCBs in lights or insulation installed before 1979.

The New York City Department of Education gave itself 10 years to remove them from schools, but parents and public interest lawyers sought to expedite the removal, saying the long timeline endangers children.

Parents protested last year about the toxins.

"There have been leaks at our school we have found little droplets under chairs," said Daniella Liebling, whose son attends the Brooklyn New School.

City lawyers tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, but Judge Sterling Johnson said their claims were "illogical" and accused them of dragging their feet.

“With the cognitive development of children at stake, it would have been refreshing to see humanitarian concerns trump the compulsion to delay litigation with quite so many spurious arguments," Johnson wrote in his decision. "But some dreams remain deferred."

"Judge Sterling Johnson actually quotes Langston Hughes," said Christina Giorgio of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. "He makes numerous references to the fact that parents really are entitled to have answers from the city, and that PCBs are toxic. Their impacts are well known, and what the city is doing with regard to insisting on this 10-year plan is simply irresponsible."

In response, New York City Corporate Council said it disagreed with the ruling, stressing that nothing is more important than the health of the city's children.

The Department of Education said that fixtures have been fixed in 92 buildings, with work planned for another 97 buildings this summer.

PCBs were banned in 1979, and exposure can affect the immune and nervous systems.

Liebling says the city told her that her son's school is on the fast track for repairs within five years but is hoping more will be done even sooner.

Indeed, it would be nice if the Children First people actually were true to their word and put the health of the children over the dither and delay, but that would be asking too much.

You see, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott do not care about your children at all.

They care about the politics around the schools, privatizing the system, busting the teachers union, firing unionized teachers and school choice.

But kids having safe schools to attend?

That they don't care about.

Judge Sterling Johnson called the Children First people out on this in his decision.

It's refreshing to see that kind of honesty from the judge, calling Bloomberg, Walcott and the DOE on their hypocrisy and their horsehockey.

Parents Accuse DOE Of Lying, Covering Up PCB Problems

From DNAinfo:

UPPER WEST SIDE — PCB leaked in another two Upper West Side schools in the past two months, education officials said — adding to a growing list of affected schools and concern among parents.

P.S. 242, the Young Diplomats Magnet Academy on West 120th Street, had leaks of the carcinogenic chemical polychlorinated biphenyl last month, according to the Department of Education.

P.S. 185, The Early Childhood Discovery and Design Magnet School on West 112th Street, had a leak in early March, the DOE said.

The reaction of parents?

The recent incidents add to a brewing distrust in the district, particularly at P.S. 242. 

Parent Angela Jenkins has taken her second grade daughter out of school for the remainder of the year and is homeschooling her after the PCB leak convinced her the school was unsafe, she said.

"I don’t trust the DOE with my daughter. There’s so much lying and cover-up," said Jenkins, adding the school was evasive about the leak and its remediation plan. "I have to really ask my self, 'Do I want to send my daughter there?'"

And why isn't the DOE doing more air testing, taking additional safety precautions?

Why cost, of course:

Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal is working on a bill that would force the DOE to speed up the remediation timeline.

“Once again, lighting ballasts leak PCBs in schools and the Department of Education recklessly dithers...The DOE must stop making parents choose between their children’s health and their education. I renew my demand that the City remove all toxic PCB lighting ballasts from classrooms immediately,” Rosenthal said.

The DOE does not conduct air quality testing after a PCB leak, which is one way to ensure chemicals aren't leaching into the air, said District 3 Superintendent Ilene Altschul. The United Federation of Teachers, however, performed air quality testing at P.S. 242, Altschul said.

Air testing is "incredibly expensive and it requires a space be completely shut down," said Community Education Council member Michelle Ciulla Lipkin of testing. "It’s a very cumbersome process.

"It’s absurd that we’re not doing more air testing," she added, "but it’s a much more expensive proposition." 

It seems Bloomberg, Walcott and the DOE are only in favor of standardized testing.

 

When it comes to testing the air in a school for safety, whether from PCB's or mold, Bloomberg, Walcott and the DOE are MIA.

You can bet the DOE has not divulged full information on these leaks even as they claim that they put "Children First".

At least the UFT has helped conducted some air testing to ensure safety.

But the UFT shouldn't have to conduct the testing.

That is Bloomberg's and Walcott's job.

How many children come down with cancer in the future because these two callous men refuse to make the schools safe for children, refuse to test schools when there have been leaks and other safety issues, have delayed as long as they could on fixing the leaking lights?

Daily News: Witness Reports 16 Year Old The Cops Shot Had No Gun

From The Daily News:

A Brooklyn woman who claims she had a “bird’s-eye view” of the fatal police shooting of 16-year-old Kimani (Kiki) Gray says the youth did not have a gun in his hand.

Tishana King is the only civilian eyewitness to come forward, and her account sharply differs from Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s assertion that Gray had pointed a .38-caliber revolver at the cops before they opened fire. “I’m certain he didn’t have anything in his hands,” King told the Daily News.

Moments after the Saturday shooting, one cop put both hands on his head and said, “ ‘Oh, God!’ ” King recalled. “His partner went over to him and put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Are you okay, buddy?’ ”

King, 39, a medical records clerk at Kings County Hospital, said she gave a tape-recorded interview to detectives several hours after the shooting. The detectives were aware her 14-year-old son dialed 911 from their apartment after the gunfire. But King, in her nearly eight-minute interview with NYPD investigators at 3 a.m. on Sunday, never said a word about whether Gray was carrying a gun.
“I couldn’t see what the kids were doing,” she said during the session. The News reviewed the tape of the Q&A conducted in her apartment after the fatal shooting.

Detectives and Internal Affairs Bureau investigators never asked directly if King saw Gray with a gun, and a police source said NYPD policy precludes asking such leading questions.

...

The NYPD has not released the names of the sergeant and cop who fired 11 shots. A police source said the pair initially reported to supervisors that the teen had pulled a gun — and a loaded weapon was recovered at the scene.

King told The News she was drawn to her third-floor East Flatbush window late Saturday night by the sound of loud laughing and talking outside on E. 52nd St.

She said she watched as a burgundy-colored sedan pulled up and a man jumped out of the passenger side, followed by the driver. King initially thought the duo intended to fight with the youths.
When the driver yelled, “Don’t move!” it clicked that they were cops, she said. “Kimani started backing up,” King said. “The cop took out his gun and started firing at Kimani.”

King said the area was illuminated by a streetlight and Gray appeared to be cornered by the cops. “His (Gray’s) hands were down,” she said. “I couldn’t believe he let off (fired) his gun. There was no reason. No false move.”

A police source said King never told detectives that Gray was backing up with his hands down.
Kelly said an “earwitness” heard a cop yell, “What do you have in your hands?” but a source said the man was too far away to see the confrontation. The shooting appeared to be within NYPD guidelines, he added.

Love that last line - the "shooting appeared to be within NYPD guidelines."

 

In Mayor Bloomberg's New York, "NYPD guidelines" means they can shoot you for any reason if you are a man of color.

Riot In Brooklyn Over NYPD Shooting Of 16 Year Old

From the Daily News:

Anger over the death of a Brooklyn teenager shot and killed by police fueled a riot on the streets of East Flatbush Monday — projectiles were hurled at cops, car windows were smashed and a pharmacy customer had a bottle bashed over his head.

The scenes of violence on blocks near the NYPD’s 67th Precinct stationhouse followed a protest march that grew out of a candlelight vigil for Kimani (Kiki) Gray, 16, killed by police bullets on Saturday.

In the aftermath of the riot, as police were trying to secure the area and assess damage to stores along streets strewn with broken glass, City Councilman Jumaane Williams called for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg to visit the community.

“There’s a lot of anger here,” said Williams, whose district includes the riot zone. “This isn’t just from one particular shooting. A whole community has not been heard for far too long.”

Kelly visited the precinct stationhouse about 12:30 a.m. Tuesday — more than four hours after the chaos began — but did not speak to reporters.

The details of the shooting are murky.  The NYPD says the teen pulled a gun on two plainclothes cops as they approached him for suspiciously fixing his wasteband.

The police fired 11 rounds at Gray, striking him several times and killing him.

The NY Times reports the following:

A woman who lives across the street from the shooting scene said that after the shots were fired, she saw two men, whom she believed to be plainclothes officers, standing over Mr. Gray, who was prone on the sidewalk, clutching his stomach. 

“He said, ‘Please don’t let me die,’ ” said the woman, 46, who gave her name only as Vanessa. One of the officers, she said, replied: “Stay down, or we’ll shoot you again.”

No wonder Commissioner Kelly didn't want to answer any questions from the press.

As Gray is dying on the street, the cops tell him to stay down or they'll shoot him again.

Maybe this kid did have a gun.

Maybe he did point it at the plainclothesmen.

There's no excuse for either of those things.

But remember, these cops didn't look like cops.

They looked like two guys approaching a group of men at night.

And there's always the possibility in Mayor Bloomberg's New York that this kid didn't have a gun at all until the cops planted it on him after they shot at him 11 times.

Add this fatal shooting to all the other fatal shootings of men of color (including one other shooting over the weekend) in this city by the NYPD and you can see where the anger is coming from.

I must say, I have been surprised that community anger at the NYPD hasn't erupted into violence before this.

There have been so many senseless shootings, so many deaths.

The mourners for Kimani Gray say they will return tonight for another vigil.

Hopefully that doesn't end in violence.

But I get the anger at Bloomberg, Kelly and the NYPD over these shootings.

And I think that ought to be demonstrated by people across this city.

Moscow On The Hudson - We Are All Pussy Riot Now (UPDATED)

Russian punkers Pussy Riot were convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, over a protest in a cathedral" today.

The judge said that Pussy Riot members had "crudely undermined social order" during their action in February.

Member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has said through her lawyer that "Our imprisonment serves as a clear and unambiguous sign that freedom is being taken away from the entire country."

Meanwhile, back in Moscow on the Hudson, Dear Leader Michael Bloomberg's army, the NYPD, arrested Harlem activist Joseph Jazz Hayden, 71, on felony weapons charges after they illegally searched his car and found a pen knife and commemorative mini-baseball bat.

Hayden runs Harlem/NYC Cop Watch, a site that documents police brutality and transgressions and has videotaped many instances of police aggression and racial profiling as part of Herr Bloomberg's Stop-And-Frisk policy.

How similar these two cases are - the arrest (and now conviction) of three Pussy Riot members for protesting the Orthodox Church's support of Putin and the arrest of Hayden for documenting NYPD transgressions and crimes.

One would hope that a judge here will throw the NYPD case against Hayden - ridiculous on its face - out.

But given how quickly this nation and in particular this city have transitioned into a police state after the 9/11 attacks, that is no longer a by-gone conclusion.

Today I want to publicly state my support for both Pussy Riot and Joseph Jazz Hayden.

The treatment of these three Pussy Riot members in Russia by Vladimir Putin and Joseph Jazz Hayden in the United States by Michael Bloomberg shows how we now live in one big world run by oligarchs and plutocrats.

Vladimir Putin and Michael Bloomberg are men made from the same cloth and they will have you stomped by their respective police forces if you step outside their established social orders.

UPDATE - 11:32 AM: The three members of Pussy Riot convicted on "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" charges have been sentenced to two years in a prison colony.

Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, were handed the sentence by a judge in Moscow amid a wave of protests around the world.

The three stared ahead defiantly from inside a glass cage, their wrists shackled in handcuffs, as the verdict was read. Supporters and opposition activists blamed the case against the women – and the tough sentence – on Vladimir Putin.

"Whatever Putin wants, Putin gets. That is the only thing to say," Tolokonnikova's husband, Pyotr Verzilov, said on leaving the court.

Russian police have been rounding up Pussy Riot supporters - including former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and leftist opposition group leader Sergei Udaltsov - in the wake of the judge's decision.

Here in Moscow on the Hudson, there is a rally in support of Pussy Rio at 46th and Broadway at 1 PM today.

No word on whether Mayor Bloomberg will have Pussy Riot supporters orange-netted and maced by Tony Bologna.

But bring wet cloth just in case.