Mayor Bloomberg's "Legacy"

Along with the CityTime fraud (which Bloomberg said yesterday was the swellest thing that ever happened to NYC) and the 911 system mess and the Bloomberg Boxer Day Blizzard Disaster (9 dead - Go see a play!) and phonied up test scores, graduation rates, crime stats and emergency response stats is a New York City police department completely out of control:

A college-bound  Brooklyn teen says a vengeful cop handcuffed him and dragged him off to jail for leaving his bicycle on the sidewalk — eight days after he slapped the officer with a lawsuit alleging false arrest.

Officer Daniel Berardi and Rayquan Callahan, 19, first crossed paths on Feb. 24 in Brownsville. Callahan, then a senior at Brooklyn Collegiate High School and working seven days a week at McDonald’s, was walking out of the Rockaway Ave. subway station with two friends.

The trio stopped to talk to a 16-year-old acquaintance, according to court papers, when Berardi and several plainclothes cops started frisking the young men. The 16-year-old bolted.

The cops chased him down and recovered a gun he had tossed under a car — then inexplicably put a call over the police radio for officers to be on the lookout for Callahan and his two friends, who had already been searched and were found not to be carrying anything illegal.

They were arrested and spent 15 hours in custody before the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office declined to press charges. Callahan filed suit and a related complaint was served on June 26 at the 73rd Precinct stationhouse where Berardi was assigned.

Just over a week later — on July 4 — Callahan and Berardi, 25, crossed paths again. The cop, sued twice in three years, immediately recognized the teen on Pitkin Ave.

“This is the guy who’s suing us,” Berardi told his fellow cops, according to the complaint. “I don’t care, the money isn’t coming out of my pocket.”

Callahan, who has been accepted to Ohio State University, had left his bicycle on the sidewalk while he was inside a check-cashing business. Berardi handcuffed the teen on a fabricated charge of riding on the sidewalk, according to court papers filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

Callahan denies he ever rode his bike on the sidewalk.

The teen should have been issued a summons for the alleged bike violation, but was instead taken to central booking. He spent 30 hours in custody before a judge dismissed the charges. Before the encounters with Berardi, Callahan had a clean record. “I have nothing to say to you,” Berardi told the Daily News in a brief telephone interview.

Callahan’s lawyer, Joel Berger, was livid. “Never in 45 years of practicing civil rights law have I encountered such a brazen retaliation against a plaintiff by the very officer he has just sued,” Berger said.

Berardi is also being sued by eight plaintiffs who were allegedly rounded up by Berardi on March 9 because they were in the vicinity of a shooting near Dumont Ave., their lawyer David Zelman said. Six were released after 12 hours without seeing a judge; two spent the night at Rikers Island and were also cut loose without being charged, court papers state.

A spokeswoman for the city Law Department said Callahan’s allegations were being reviewed.

An NYPD spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Now Bill Keller and the rest of the suck of journalists busy lapping at Bloomberg's ass with their "legacy" pieces don't care about this sort of thing because they're white and they're kids are white and they're not subject to the abuse.

But you can bet if Keller's kid or grand kid was the kid in this story, Keller would see Bloomberg's "legacy" differently.

NYPD Goons At It Again

How dare a photographer take photos of the NYPD arresting somebody - that's a beatable offense in Bloomberg's NYC:

The New York Times has complained to the city's police department after one of its photographers said he was assaulted by officers who arrested him on Saturday.

Robert Stolarik, a freelance photographer, claimed a New York Police Department (NYPD) officer "slammed" his camera into his face before he was dragged to the ground, kicked and arrested.

Stolarik was on assignment with two other reporters in the Bronx when he was stopped by police on Saturday evening.

Police ordered Stolarik to stop taking pictures of a teenage girl being arrested. When he refused, an officer reputedly grabbed Stolarik's camera and dragged him to the ground.

Stolarik claimed he was then kicked in the back and received scrapes and bruises on his face, legs and arms as a result of the arrest. He was charged with obstructing government administration and of resisting arrest.

The New York Times reported that a video of the arrest taken by another journalist showed Stolarik face down on the pavement beneath a huddle of about six police officers.

Two words here - sue them.

NYU, Fordham Report: NYPD Out Of Control, Above Law In Occupy Protests

No surprise here:

The first systematic look at the New York police department's response to Occupy Wall Street protests paints a damning picture of an out-of-control and aggressive organization that routinely acted beyond its powers.

In a report that followed an eight-month study (pdf), researchers at the law schools of NYU and Fordham accuse the NYPD of deploying unnecessarily aggressive force, routinely obstructing press freedoms and making arbitrary and baseless arrests.

The study, published on Tuesday, found evidence that police made violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments, obstructed independent legal monitors and was opaque about its policies.

The NYPD report is the first of a series to look at how police authorities in five US cities, including Oakland and Boston, have treated the Occupy movement since it began in September 2011. The research concludes that there now is a systematic effort by authorities to suppress protests, even when these are lawful and pose no threat to the public.

Sarah Knuckey, a professor of law at NYU, said: "All the case studies we collected show the police are violating basic rights consistently, and the level of impunity is shocking".

The report says the NYPD was by far the worst offender of all the police departments involved in suppressing Occupy protests:

The NYPD appears to be the worst offender, in large part because it has made little attempt – unlike Oakland, for example – to reassess its practices or open itself up to dialogue or review. The NYPD practices documented in the report include:

• Aggressive, unnecessary and excessive police force against peaceful protesters, bystanders, legal observers, and journalists. This included the use of batons, pepper spray, metal barricades, scooters, and horses.

• Obstruction of press freedoms and independent legal monitoring, including arrests of at least 10 journalists, and multiple cases of preventing journalists from reporting on protests or barring and evicting them from specific sites.

• Pervasive surveillance of peaceful political activity.

• Violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments.

• Unjustified closure of public spaces, dispersal of peaceful assemblies, and trapping of protesters.

• Arbitrary and selective rule enforcement and baseless arrests.

• Failures to ensure transparency about government policies.

• Failures to ensure accountability for those allegedly responsible for abuses.

The report argues that the lack of transparency and accountability is especially troubling because the public does not know whether police actions are guided by specific written policies, or whether they are random or ad hoc.

The NYPD turned down multiple requests to meet the researchers, who say they were keen include the police's point of view in the report. The other four police departments examined for the project all sent representatives to meet researchers. The NYPD did not provide a comment to the Guardian by the time of publication of this article.

As I wrote earlier - this Bloomberg's city.

You're lucky he lets you live.

Not "live in it."

"Live."

NYPD Forces Grandmother Of Teen Murdered By Cops To Give Statement Against Her Will

OK, so the NYPD chases a kid with dope on him into his apartment and shoots and kills him as he's trying to flush the shit down the toilet.

The kid's grandmother and six year old brother are both home and witness the murder.

You would think Ray Kelly and the NYPD would apologize for this outrage and look to rectify it.

But you would be wrong.

Instead they took the grandmother into custody and held her for seven hours until she gave a forced statement about the incident:

After a police officer fatally shot an 18-year-old man in his Bronx apartment on Thursday, the man’s grandmother, a witness to the shooting, was taken into custody and held against her will for several hours, a friend of the family said on Saturday.

An officer confronted the man, Ramarley Graham, who was in the bathroom possibly trying to flush some marijuana down the toilet. A moment later, a shot rang out, killing the teenager.

While officers had trailed Mr. Graham to the apartment thinking he was armed, no gun was found, making the grandmother, Patricia Hartley, 58, a critical witness. The shooting is drawing the kind of close scrutiny reminiscent of the killing of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets in Queens in November 2006.

At this juncture little is known of precisely what Ms. Hartley saw and what of that she has told detectives.

But her treatment by the police in the hours after her grandson was killed could become a sticking point in an investigation that Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said would be presented to a grand jury.

After Mr. Graham was killed, Ms. Hartley was taken to the 47th Precinct station house on Laconia Avenue and held for seven hours, according to Carlton Berkley, a friend of Ms. Hartley’s who said he had retired from the police force as a detective in the 30th Precinct in upper Manhattan. Mr. Berkley added that Ms. Hartley was forced to give a statement about what happened.

“She gave it against her will,” Mr. Berkley said. “She didn’t want to speak to the police.”

Mr. Berkley, speaking on Saturday outside the Graham family home on East 229th Street in Wakefield, said: “We’re going to fight that statement.”

This is just the latest outrage committed by Commissioner Ray Kelly and his NYPD goons, as the NY Times pointed out today:

Over the past year, two officers charged with raping a woman were fired after being acquitted of rape but found guilty of official misconduct. A broad ticket-fixing scandal flared in the Bronx; when the accused officers were arraigned, hundreds of officers massed in protest, some denouncing Mr. Kelly. Eight current and former officers were charged with smuggling illegal guns. Narcotics detectives were accused of planting drugs on innocent civilians. An inspector needlessly pepper-sprayed four Occupy Wall Street protesters, invoking memories of the scrutiny and mass arrests of protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention, and giving the nascent movement its first real prime-time moment.

Civil rights advocates have assailed the department’s expanded stops of minorities on the streets. Several officers denigrated West Indians on Facebook. Muslims have denounced the monitoring of their lives, as Mr. Kelly has dispatched undercover officers and informants to find radicalized youth.

Let's not forget Kelly's voluntary appearance in a film that smears Muslims as terrorists, a film that was shown to cops as part of their training, and Kelly's bragging that he could shoot down a plane over New York City if he wanted to, he's just that powerful.

And let's also not forget that his son is currently under investigation for rape and the NYPD has been working overtime to discredit the alleged victim in the tabloids with anonymous quotes.

But this latest outrage, the murdered teen and the cops holding the grandmother until she gave the statement they wanted her to give, that goes beyond the pale.

It's time for this autocratic commissioner to go.

Frankly after the OWS crackdown, he belongs in jail sharing a cell with Bernie Kerik.

That won't happen, of course, which is a shame.

But even the cops who work for this creep want him gone.

The outrages are building, week after week.

It's time for Kelly to be gone.

Hackers Target Cop Who Pepper-Sprayed Protesters

I bet Lt. Pike didn't envision this when he calmly and methodically pepper-sprayed a bunch of peaceful protesters sitting on the ground last Friday:

The UC Davis police officer filmed casually pepper-spraying passive student protesters is the latest target of the computer hacking collective Anonymous.

A new 10-minute video attributed to the shadowy "hacktivist" group threatens the officer directly and makes public his personal contact information - including his cell phone number and an alleged home address.

The voicemail on the working cell number for Lt. John Pike was full Tuesday.

"Dear Officer John Pike, we are Anonymous. Your information is now public domain," a computer-generated voice narrating the Anonymous video states.

"Expect our full wrath," the voice continues as viral video of the Friday incident plays in the background. "Anonymous seeks to avenge all protesters…We are going to make you squeal like a pig."

The ominous message, which ends with a photo of Pike and the sounds of shrieking pigs, makes no excuse for exposing Pike to potential reprisals.

"We have no problem targeting police and releasing their information even if it puts them at risk because we want them to experience just a taste of the brutality and misery they serve us on an everyday basis," it says.

The message I would send to Lt. Pike is this:

Lt. Pike, your methodical, cold-blooded pepper spraying of peaceful, non-violent protesters seated on the ground who posed no threat to you or your colleagues clearly shows that you are a sociopath who is unfit for police duty.

You need to be stripped of your badge and your gun immediately and fired from your job.

You should be arrested for your violent behavior.

In addition, the protesters you harmed should sue you personally in order to hold you accountable for your actions.

You need to defend yourself in court before a judge and jury.

It is only by holding violent cops who engage in acts of brutality accountable for their crimes that we will stop additional acts of police brutality from occurring.

Police Defend Use Of Pepper Spray Against UC Davis Protesters

The Associated Press finds a retired policeman from Baltimore who wrote the city's book on use of force who defends the use of pepper spray on seated, passive protesters at UC Davis as Standard Operation Police Procedure:

SAN FRANCISCO — As video spread of an officer in riot gear blasting pepper spray into the faces of seated protesters at a northern California university, outrage came quickly — followed almost as quickly by defense from police and calls for the chancellor’s resignation.

University of California Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi said in a statement Saturday she was forming a task force to investigate the police action and the video images she said were “chilling.”

However, a law enforcement official who watched the clip called the use of force “fairly standard police procedure.”

In the video, an officer dispassionately pepper-sprays a line of several sitting protesters who flinch and cover their faces but remain passive with their arms interlocked as onlookers shriek and scream out for the officer to stop.

...

The protest was held in support of the overall Occupy Wall Street movement and in solidarity with protesters at the University of California, Berkeley who were jabbed by police with batons on Nov. 9.

Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department’s use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a “compliance tool” that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.

“When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them,” Kelly said. “Bodies don’t have handles on them.”

After reviewing the video, Kelly said he observed at least two cases of “active resistance” from protesters. In one instance, a woman pulls her arm back from an officer. In the second instance, a protester curls into a ball. Each of those actions could have warranted more force, including baton strikes and pressure-point techniques.

“What I’m looking at is fairly standard police procedure,” Kelly said.

Lt. Kelly is absolutely correct - this is standard police procedure.

And that is the problem.

How anybody could say that a person pulling their arm away from a policeman or covering their face from pepper spray is engaged in an "active resistance" is beyond me.

But Lt. Kelly does.

And you can bet a lot of other officers in both blue and white shirts think the exact same thing all across this country.

These guys have seen the enemy and it is every American who does not meekly comply with the orders of the establishment - WORK, SHOP, OBEY.

As I wrote earlier, it is only a matter of time before they start shooting real bullets.

And they'll defend that too.

Ducking police bullets while peacefully rallying against Wall Street is, after all, an "act of resistance."

This Is What Fascism Looks Like