Cuomo Fills His Audiences With Paid State Workers

Well, here's one way to assure a good turnout:

Gov. Cuomo wasn’t taking any chances that there might be empty seats at a speech he delivered last week on climate change — so state workers were summoned on the taxpayer dime to fill the audience, The Post has learned.

The workers said they left their jobs in the middle of the day Thursday and were paid their full salaries to hear Cuomo at Columbia University announce the state was joining a global effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

“I’d rather be at the park,” said one of the workers, who is employed by the state’s Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and who has no connection to climate issues.

He explained that he went because his boss “asked me to make some time available in my schedule.”

The worker confessed that he didn’t know what the event was about before he agreed to go.

He said attendance is not required, but is viewed favorably, and that the practice is common throughout state government to support Cuomo.

“They often ask,” he said, referring to supervisors. “We get e-mails, and they’ll ask us if we want to go.”

The worker said he would not have volunteered if he were not getting paid his regular salary. “It better be on the clock,” he said.

Gee, this story kinda reminds me of when the Cuomo campaign used employees from a real estate company linked to Cuomo to protest Zephyr Teachout.

That's Governor Cuomo for you.

He's not very popular, so he's gotta pay to get people to show up for him.

Silence From Cuomo Water Carrier Hakeem Jeffries On Clinton Correctional Facility Prison Abuse

Two days ago Cuomo ally (and de Blasio critic) Hakeem Jeffries gave Governor Cuomo an award from the Urban League:

.@RepJeffries on behalf of @NatUrbanLeague presents award to @NYGovCuomo for leadership in criminal justice reform. pic.twitter.com/WuOeMxsdYI

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) August 10, 2015

Yesterday the NY Times broke the news that 60+ prisoners who were housed at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora where two prisoners escaped in June have filed complaints that they were beaten, choked, and tortured by correction officers.

The governor himself helped inaugurate the "tough guy" interactions at Clinton Correctional with this exchange with a prisoner whose cell was next to one of the escaped prisoners:

It would be several hours before the first details of the escape were made public. Around 11 a.m., Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo toured the honor block and inspected the holes the inmates had cut in the backs of their cells with hacksaw blades.

Governor’s Stare

The governor then stopped to question Mr. Alexander.

“Must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” Mr. Cuomo asked, according to video of the exchange. Then, Mr. Alexander said, the governor “gave me his best tough-guy stare and walked off.”

Later, the governor said he would be “shocked” if any corrections officers had been involved.

That prisoner who Cuomo gave his "best tough-guy stare" to was taken into a broom closet a few hours after the governor left Clinton Correctional and beaten, choked and threatened with waterboarding by correctional officers:

Around 8 p.m., he was handcuffed and taken to a broom closet where, he said, three corrections officers whom he had never seen before interrogated him. An officer wearing a jacket with the initials C.I.U. — Crisis Intervention Unit — sat down and asked him, “Do you know the difference between this interview and those other interviews?” Mr. Alexander recalled.

This time, the officer warned, there were only uniformed guards in the room, Mr. Alexander said.

“The officer jumps up and grabs me by my throat, lifts me out of the chair, slams my head into the pipe along the wall,” he said. “Then he starts punching me in the face. The other two get up and start hitting me also in the ribs and stomach.”

With each punch, Mr. Alexander said, the officers shouted another question.

“The whole time he’s holding me up by my throat,” he added.

When Mr. Alexander repeatedly insisted that he had no information, one officer pointed to a plastic bag hanging on some pipes, asked if he knew what it was for and said, “You know what waterboarding is?” Mr. Alexander recalled.

The officer then put the bag over his head and started beating him again, Mr. Alexander said.

He said the interrogation lasted about 20 minutes, and he was then taken, bleeding, back to his cell.

Later, Mr. Alexander said, the same officer “began quietly taunting and threatening me, telling me, ‘Don’t worry, Fat Boy, we’ll be seeing you really soon.’ ”

There are serious allegations of systemic abuse by correctional officers and members of the Crisis Intervention Unit in the Times piece, but so far, other than outrage online in the form of social media tweets and comments left at the Times story, there has been silence from the "civil rights activists" who were allied with Cuomo in his push to give the Attorney General power to subsume power from local district attorneys in incidents of death caused by law enforcement authorities.

There is plenty of scorn to go around here, but I'm going straight at one of the more vocal Cuomo allies, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, a Cuomo ally who just gave Sheriff Andy an award from the Urban League two days ago for his "leadership" on criminal justice reform.

It would seem to me that this story in the NY Times that details how 60+ allegations of abuse, beatings and torture took place in Clinton Correctional after the June escape of two prisoners would be a perfect time for Andrew Cuomo to show some "leadership" in criminal justice reform and get to the bottom of the matter, but since Cuomo seems to have set off the whole mess with his tone of "by any means necessary" and tough guy show at Dannemora, he's nowhere to be found on this.

And it would seem that this story in the NY Times would at least precipitate a public statement from Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the man who has been quick to criticize Bill de Blasio for any real or alleged misstep on criminal justice reform issues.

I've left a few messages for Criminal Justice Reform Warrior Jeffries on twitter to see if he'd reply:

@RepJeffries Thoughts on systemic beating, torture of prisoners at Dannemora? http://t.co/updtPinnM5

— rbe (@perdidostschool) August 12, 2015

@RepJeffries One prisoner was beaten, choked by guards hours after Gov Cuomo "stared him down" http://t.co/updtPinnM5

— rbe (@perdidostschool) August 12, 2015

.@RepJeffries What award will you give Gov Cuomo for his leadership in the Dannemora prison beatings/torture mess?

— rbe (@perdidostschool) August 12, 2015

So far, silence from Jeffries, which isn't a surprise since these allegations involve his buddy, Andrew Cuomo, and not his rival, Bill de Blasio.

You can bet had the NY Times published a story about Rikers, Jeffries would have been on it quicker than you can say "National Urban League" award, but alas, this wasn't an opportunity for Jeffries to bash and weaken de Blasio or aggrandize Cuomo, so there has been no public statement about the issue so far from Jeffries.

I would assume Criminal Justice Reform Warrior Jeffries will eventually have to make some statement about the abuse allegations, that he won't be able to ignore them completely just because they seem to have been kicked off at the hands of his buddy, Sheriff Andy Cuomo, but who knows when that will be.

Jeffries has thrown his lot in with Andrew Cuomo and you can bet the Dark Lord in Albany (yes, that's a Cheney reference) will not suffer gladly any "friends" or "allies" who criticize the him over the prison abuse issue at Clinton Correctional.

Thus the "cricket sounds" out of Jeffries on the matter - and the same goes for many of Cuomo's other criminal justice reform allies.

Report Finds NYPD Crime Statistics Are Easily Manipulated

From the NY Times:

A long-awaited report ordered by the police commissioner in New York has found deficiencies in the Police Department’s efforts to detect whether its crime statistics are being manipulated.

 ...

The report was released on Tuesday, more than two years after Mr. Kelly empaneled a committee of former federal prosecutors to review the department’s internal crime-reporting system. 

The committee’s report did not directly address how often such manipulation occurred, but it identified vulnerabilities in the department’s system for auditing the integrity of its crime statistics.

Before each report of a crime is entered into the department’s computer system, relatively few controls exist to prevent officers on the street from refusing to fill out any paperwork or for supervisors to alter paperwork back in the station house, the review found. 

While praising the department on the considerable resources devoted to auditing crime statistics, the committee noted that most of those efforts were directed at identifying “human error” — that is, unintentional mistakes in a police officer’s paperwork. But for “an officer who wishes to manipulate crime reporting,” the report said there were “few other procedures in place that control the various avenues of potential manipulation.” 

...

The 60-page report describes several instances of manipulation in which felony crimes were marked down as misdemeanors. In one instance “a desk officer scratched out the item values in order to bring the total to below the $1,000 threshold for grand larceny,” which is a felony. 

In another instance, police paperwork for lost property “described a complainant who ‘lost property’ following an assault by multiple individuals,” according to the report, which added, “On its face the narrative appears to describe a robbery.” 

In the aggregate, the report found, the effect of such errors, intentional or otherwise, on crime statistics was not negligible. “A close review of the N.Y.P.D.’s statistics and analysis demonstrate that the misclassifications of reports may have an appreciable effect on certain reported crime rates,” the report said. 

The report noted, for instance, that Police Department auditors had already detected an error rate in 2009 suggesting that grand larcenies were undercounted that year by 2,312. The adjusted figures represent a 4.6 percent increase over the figures that the department issued that year. 

I've said this before, I'll say it again:

The NYPD crime statistics under Kelly are as phony as the test scores under Klein.

If there were an independent audit of the NYPD free from Kelly's or Bloomberg's manipulation and influence, they would find every crime category would go up - including homicides.

Sorry, Sandra, When You Date The Governor And You Get Involved In Politics, You Can't Duck

Sandra Lee was holding the "world's largest bake sale" at Grand Central Station to raise money for food banks to feed hungry people.

Her boyfriend, Little Andy Cuomo, has just gotten a budget deal that slashes aid to food banks and cuts services for old people and children.

Sandra was asked how she felt about that, but she would have none of it

She stonewalled:

Sandra Lee, the Food Network personality and best-selling author, was surrounded by butter-cream-frosted cupcakes and mini pecan pies, poised to kick off what she was billing as “the world’s largest bake sale” to raise $50,000 for the Food Bank for New York City.

Ms. Lee certainly proved a passionate advocate for ending childhood hunger, able to attract 30 New York restaurants and food shops to Vanderbilt Hall inside Grand Central Terminal on Tuesday morning, and rattle off facts and figures — “Every dollar that’s raised can turn into four dollars of food at the food bank,” she said.

But she became much less vocal when asked about the effect Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s new budget would have on food banks throughout the state. Ms. Lee is the longtime companion of Mr. Cuomo, and food banks and advocacy groups have asked the governor to increase state financing for hunger programs.

So far, they have been unsuccessful. Mr. Cuomo’s budget, which must be approved by the Legislature before Friday, provides $29.7 million in state funding for hunger programs, the same amount as last year. Officials at food banks say that allocation would effectively be a cut, given that demand is increasing and wholesale food prices have risen sharply over the past year.

“I am not here to talk about the governor’s budget,” Ms. Lee said, smiling, as she cut off a reporter’s question about the budget. “Thank you.”

But what about how Mr. Cuomo’s budget will affect food banks specifically?

“I am not here to talk about politics, but thank you for asking,” she replied, as polite as ever.

The food banks, however, have been far less reticent. The Hunger Action Network of New York State, an advocacy group, distributed thousands of postcards for people to send to Mr. Cuomo and legislative leaders asking them to increase funding for hunger programs.

“We had a lot of hope for him as governor, and he seems blind to the fact that we’re in a recession,” the group’s executive director, Mark Dunlea, said. “The demand at food pantries has skyrocketed, and he hasn’t really responded to that.”

The Cuomo administration did not immediately respond to the complaints about the financing.

...

Pressed one more time by a reporter, Ms. Lee wanted nothing of the issue.

“I’m not here to talk about politics,” she said, turning on the charm her fans have come to love. “But if you want a great recipe for cream cheese icing, I’ve got that for you.”

You can shove the cream cheese recipe up your ass, Sandra.

When you get involved in raising money for food banks in such a public way even as your consort HAMMERS poor people and old people around the state with his budget cuts and lowers taxes on millionaires at the same time, you've got to answer the questions about the budget.

And if you don't, well, then we're justified in telling you to your face that you are full of shit and you can keep your cupcake recipes...and your boyfriend.

Sandra Lee - today's worst Food Network personality.

And given the shit Ina Garten is in for refusing to meet with a child dying of cancer to cook one last meal, that's saying something.