This was a few days ago, but only catching up with it now. This is another case of the city screwing our first responders, with Bloomberg being among the most eager to screw them, and few people from the City Council or Public Advocates office stands up for them...again. And it is another example of Norman Siegel, candidate for Public Advocate, already advocating for New Yorkers. This is Norman Siegel's comment at a press conference and rally on behalf of 9/11 Heroes:

We are here today to be supportive of those New Yorkers – firefighters, NYPD, Port Authority police officers, and emergency medical technicians – who heroically assisted in the rescue and recovery effort after that horrific morning of September 11, 2001.

We are here today to speak out in defense of those New Yorkers – whose injuries and illnesses, in some cases life-threatening, were sustained from their exposure to toxic materials during the rescue and recovery effort after the WTC terrorist attacks.  read more »

Surprised no one else has written about this one. Awhile back I wrote about a case where the NYPD arbitrarily denied three bloggers press credentials. Those three bloggers were Rafael Martínez Alequin, a long-time critic of Tsar Bloomberg's, who publishes the New York City Free Press, Ralph E. Smith, who publishes The Guardian Chronicle, and David Wallis is founder and CEO of Featurewell.com. Gary Tilzer also had an excellent analysis of this situation.

Norman Siegel, the attorney representing the three bloggers, has won their case and they have been issued press credentials. From Your Free Press:  read more »

In a city in which it is not a crime to shoot Sean Bell fifty times or Amadou Diallo 41 times, where black and Hispanic young men are stopped and frisked vastly in excess of their proportion of the population, it should not be a surprise that blacks & Hispanics are arrested for marijuana possession vastly more than whites (even though marijuana use is equal across ethnic groups). The surprise, as I see it, is that decent people don’t spit at Mayor Bloomberg and his police Commissioner. How often will NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Misinformation, Paul Browne, say things like the NYPD doesn’t engage in racial profiling without his nose growing from Police Plaza to City Hall? (I hate it when Mayor Bloomberg’s race policies make me write as though I were Al Sharpton.)

Rocco Parascandola of Newsday reports on a study released by the New York Civil Liberties Union:

The NYPD arrested more than 350,000 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession over the past decade -- a tenfold increase achieved by systematically targeting young black and Hispanic men and stopping them without cause, a report released Tuesday charges NYCLU,

The NYCLU press release, is here  read more »

NYPD, it turns out, is not color blind. Sunday’s New York Daily News I-Team has wonderfully researched, well written article by Tina Moore, Benjamin Lesser and Greg B. Smith in which they show (definitively, in my opinion) that NYPD’s practice of Stop & Frisk on NYC subways is aimed at Hispanics and Blacks and unrelated to law enforcement purposes.

Because NYPD practices here are so outrageous, Mayor Bloomberg and his Police Commissioner must be held accountable for their vastly disproportionate racial impacts. As you may recall, NYPD has made every effort to hide the racial data generated by their stop and frisk program. Some of it has leaked out, (See, my earlier report with links here if you want further background).  read more »