Results tagged “amadoudiallo”

The Bronx street where police fired 41 shots at an unarmed black man in 1999 has become an unlikely tourist attraction, according to the Daily News.

Ten years ago, outside a Bronx apartment building, the NYPD Street Crimes Unit fired 41 times at unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo. The 22-year-old street peddler died from the 19 shots that hit him, and the shooting raised questions about race relations in the city, police brutality and then Mayor Giuliani's defense of the NYPD. People took to the streets to protest; the Reverend Al Sharpton told NY1, "For 1,200 people for over 13 days, just come by the hundreds and submit nonviolently to jail hadn't happened anywhere in this country since the '60s....It was unprecedented to see former mayors, members of Congress, Academy Award winners like Susan Sarandon going to jail with housewives and regular people every day." (Bruce Springsteen wrote a song, American Skin [41 Shots]—and he was called a dirtbag by a police union.) Though the Street Crimes Unit was disbanded, the four officers involved were acquitted of charges. You can read about more the incident at Court TV and at the NY Times.

Given the large number of people that work for the City of New York, it's inevitable that some will be charged with crimes in any given year. The New York Post, however, is highlighting some of the more noteworthy crimes committed by city workers in today's paper. They range from the relatively benign (a schoolteacher getting busted for smoking weed before heading into a show at the Beacon Theater) to the more serious (a drunk driver who hit a fireman assisting a driver, and a man who murdered his ex-fianceé.)

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting at West 138th St. and Broadway in Manhattan, a triple shooting on Hunter Ave. in the Bronx, and a bomb threat at the intersection of Prospect and 5th Aves. in Brooklyn.
• Residents of Starrett City received a letter from the housing complex's owners that they intend to opt out of the state's subsidized housing program. One third of the 6,000 apartments at Starrett City are subsidized and the owners would have to pay the balance of a $234 million state-subsidized mortgage.
• The Gowanus Lounge wonders if another developer has struck oil on the Roebling oil field in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
• Forget the F train, judging from recent Craigslist "Missed Connections" items, the place to find love is on the commuter trains headed to and from the Hoboken train station.
• A rookie cop miraculously survived a four-story fall after crashing through a skylight yesterday. The officer had been searching for a prowler in Crown Heights, who got away.
• The Times Square subway station Record Mart is scheduled to re-open sometime in early October.
• Kenneth Boss, who was acquitted of charges in the killing of Amadou Diallo and reinstated as a police officer forbidden to carry a firearm, lost his legal bid to get his gun back.
• John Feal was originally going to donate his kidney to Paul Grossfeld, but a better match for his kidney was found. Now Feal is donating his kidney to another patient, whose spouse will donate a kidney to a third patient, whose spouse will donate a kidney to Paul Grossfeld. Doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center will perform the transplant chain.

Carolyn Goodman, a clinical psychologist and civil rights advocate, died at age 91 at her Upper West Side home yesterday. Goodman's son Andrew and two other men, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, were working to help blacks register to vote in the South in 1964 when they were killed by the KKK in Philadelphia, Missipppi. The murders later became the basis for the film Mississippi Burning, and the NY Times' obituary of Goodman explains the deaths also were "widely seen as helping inspire the historic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act the same year."

A look at some noteworthy television this week:

As if it were any question, the NY State GOP will endorse Rudy Giuliani for President. GOP chairman for NY State Joseph Mondello is endorsing Rudy today in Manhattan, and he'll go to Albany for an event with State Senate Majority leader Joseph Bruno. Last week, Governor Eliot Spitzer endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton, but how likely do you think it'll be an actual Hillary vs. Rudy matchup in 2008?

Long before people cried out against 50 shots in protest of Sean Bell's death at the hands of the police, they decried 41 shots. We were surprised to hear that Kenneth Boss is still an officer with the NYPD. Seven years ago he fired five of the 41 shots that killed unarmed Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He was acquitted of murder charges by an Albany jury, along with three other officers who subsequently left the job. Other cops now call Boss "Kenny No-Gun" because the department will no longer let him carry one. Disarmed, he fills his days fixing tools and playacting as a participant in police drills. Boss returned from a seven-month deployment to Iraq with the Marines last year, where he earned a Navy Achievement Medal. Earlier this year, he filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD asking that it fully reinstate him and give him his gun back. He tried this back in 2002, when he filed essentially the same suit in a State Supreme Court, which eventually decided that the Police Commissioner had the right to determine which officers on the force could be disarmed.

The NY Times reported that the city settled with a protester who was kicked in the head back by a high-ranking police officer in 2003. Apparently the city wanted to avoid trial, because activist Cynthia Greenberg had "planned to offer as evidence a videotape of the encounter." If you watch the video, via I-Witness Video, you can definitely see someone's knee hit Greenberg's head.

You've probably have thought that blacks are stopped many times more than whites, but now there are the numbers to back that up. The Police Department delivered four volumes of statistics to the City Council's Public Safety Committee that revealed some interesting statistics about police "stop-and-frisk" searches. five times more people were stopped in 2006 than in 2002. (Last year, 508,540 were stopped; in 2002, the police stopped a little under 100,000.) And of the half million stopped in 2006, 55% of the time, the "stop-and-frisks" involved blacks. Hispanics are stopped 30.5% and whites 11.1%.

Newsday reports that NYPD Assistant Chief Bruce Smolka is retiring. While many officers Newsday spoke to love Smolka, he leaves behind an interesting legacy. Let's paraphrase Aaron Naparstek's 2005 piece about Smolka for the NY Press' 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers issue:

...Smolka was the commanding officer of the NYPD’s infamous Street Crimes Unit. It was his officers who, in February 1999, pumped 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant guilty of nothing more than standing in the hallway of his own apartment building....

Continue reading "Controversial Police Chief Retires"

Here is part two of our semi-chronological look back at the top stories this past year (here is part one):

Last night, the family and friends of Sean Bell were joined by hundreds for Bell's funeral in Queens. Bell was killed during a chaotic confrontation with police officers last weekend. The Reverend Al Sharpton spoke during the service. From the Daily News:

"We must give Sean a legacy, a legacy of justice, a legacy of fairness, not a legacy against police. We don't hate cops. We don't hate race. We hate wrong. We dislike wickedness in high places."

Continue reading "Queens Shooting: Funeral for Sean Bell, Fourth Man, "50 Shots," and a Legacy of Mourning"

On what would have been his wedding day, Sean Bell's friends and family, as well as other activists, politicians, and members of the community, held a vigil/protest/rally for Bell, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield. Bell was killed during a confrontation with the police after his bachelor party at the Queens strip club Kalua Lounge on Saturday morning. Guzman and Benefield were injured and remain in the hospital. The police fired 50 shots in less than a half minute on the friends' car; the three men were unarmed. An undercurrent of the shooting is race: The three men were black and Hispanic, while there were two white, two black and one Hispanic police officers.

There are more questions than answers today as the police investigate an encounter three men had with the police in Queens early Saturday morning. The police ended up shooting at the men's car, killing a man on the day of his wedding and wounding his two friends. The men were not armed.

In May 2003, the NYPD were trying to raid a CD priacy ring at the Chelsea Mini-Storage. A cop, Brian Conroy, walking the dark labyrinth of the facility ended up fatally shooting Ousmane Zongo, an immigrant from Burkina Faso who had been working on African art in another storage unit. Yesterday, Zongo's family accepted a $3 million settlement from the city as an "apology" to end their wrongful death lawsuit. The city Law Department said, "The city shares its sympathy with the Zongo family and we hope this settlement helps bring closure to his family in this very tragic case." The NY Times describes the other trials against Conroy:

During [the past two years], the officer, Bryan A. Conroy, was tried twice for the killing, producing a mistrial on manslaughter charges, a conviction for criminally negligent homicide, and a sentence of five years’ probation and 500 hours of community service. He was also fired from the Police Department. He has appealed his conviction and sentence.

Continue reading "Family of Immigrant Killed by Cop Accepts City Settlement"

The documentary isn't coming out for a month, but there's speculation about the upcoming Giuliani Time and what it could mean for the former mayor/possible Republican presidential candidate. Director Kevin Keating is trying to show the other, non-September 11 Giuliani - you know, the Gooliani we all remember from such events as the Abner Louima beating, the Amadou Diallo shooting, and the Sensation show debacle. The Times points out the film is being distributed by Cinema Libre, which is "known for its slate of leftish films, like 'Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism' and 'Uncovered: The War on Iraq.'" And the Daily News cuts to the chase and says for New Yorkers, it'll "offer few revelations." But it'll be a trip down memory lane!

Fernando Ferrer might indeed have more than 40% of the primary vote, which means there won't be (most likely) a runoff next Tuesday. The Daily News cites sources "with direct knowledge of the count" as saying the revised primary count is now 40.15%, an increase of 0.20% over last week's count. This news not only gives the Ferrer campaign a moment of peace, but it also make primary runner-up Anthony Weiner's concession seem like a great idea. Yesterday, Ferrer welcomed an endorsement from Congressman Charles Rangel (Gothamist lives for TV coverage of Rangel because he has the coolest voice) at the African-American Day Parade in Harlem. However, an inquiring person put a damper on things asking why he made those remarks about Amadou Diallo's police shooters being possibly "overindicted." Ferrer tried to explain, but it was a messy clarification, as he had to admit he was wrong and thereby seems like someone who's not thinking when he speaks. Rangel accused the Mayor of trying to appeal to both Democratic and Republican votes. Rangel used "half-pregnant" as his theme: You can no longer raise money and support those people [the Republicans] in Washington and say you're not one of them. It's like being half-pregnant. Either you're in or you're out.Mayor Bloomberg, in the meantime, mentioned that he has worked well with Rangel in the past.

While the crime and murder rates are down, the numbers of shootings in the city is up versus last year. Newsday's article proposes a few theories: (1) Less police visibility on the street, perhaps due to the NYPD being more concerned with terrorist activity; (2) the disbandment of the Street Crime Unit, which was involved in the shooting of Amadou Diallo; (3) the heat wave of late; and (4) not "clamping down" on gun activity immediately. The NYPD has reportedly shifted some of its officers to focus on gun crimes in order to manage the situation, but looking at some of the statistics shows some areas experiencing 50-85% increases in shootings.

Joseph Mercurio (at right) after a series of unfortunate missteps involing a campaign flier. Mercurio spoke to The Politicker and said that Fields had approved the flier (Fields had claimed she never saw it and would never have let it be printed if she had), with the Photoshopped-in Asians. This comes after Field fired him, essentially blaming him for the fiasco, and put her campaign manager, Chung Seto, in charge, leading Mercurio to say that Seto wasn't capable of running the campaign. The Reverend Al Sharpton questioned the Mercurio's professionalism on his radio show yesterday, saying, "A professional ought to be a professional. And whatever disputes there are, they ought to remain that way [private]. They don't have a right to come back and try to slam-dunk you after stuffing their pockets."

After Los Angeles Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa beat incumbent James Hahn to become the first Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles, the NY Times looks at the how Fernando Ferrer's aides hope to replicate that kind of success come the city's mayoral election this November. Still reeling from his remarks about the Amadou Diallo shooting, Ferrer finds himself struggling, and the NY Times article suggests that the Latino support he would need to win the Mayoral election (let alone the primary) is not very strong. We don't know that much about Villaraigosa's platform, but Gothamist is curious whether he'll extend some cross-country support for any NYC Democrats...perhaps it's more likely after the primary.

Former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer's campaign suffered a blow as two top aides resigned yesterday, due to "strategic differences." That sounds like a death knell of a campaign to Gothamist! Earlier this week, a Marist poll revealed that Ferrer had slipped significantly, with Mayor Bloomberg now leading; plus, his lead over Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields was also much smaller. The two aides were the director of commucations and a senior media adviser, apparently frustrated that their "advice was being ignored," according to the NY Times. Political consultant Hank Sheinkopf also tells the Times Ferrer has to "change the discussion" from being just about his flip-flopping Amadou Diallo remarks. We can hear Fields', Miller's, and Weiner's own campaign operatives figuring out ways to stir up the discussion about that to neutralize Ferrer and make their own runs for the Democratic nod.

If you see a slight spring in Mayor Bloomberg's step, it might be due to the latest poll from Marist College which puts him, for the first time this year (we think), ahead of any Democratic candidates in a hypothetical Mayoral matchup. The Mayor had been trailing behind former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer earlier this year, but it seems like the tide has turned for now, with the Mayor leading Ferrer 51% to 38%, up from Bloomberg's 42% to Ferrer's 49% last month. It's unclear what exactly caused the Mayor's bump, but it could be the Mayor's seemingly endless supply of campaign money or Ferrer's Amadou Diallo remarks, which the press has helped keep front of mind. And Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields looks like she's gaining steam, with 30% of Democrats supporting her, 34% supporting Ferrer.

The big news rocking the world of Democratic mayoral hopefuls is that Reverend Al Sharpton won't endorse a candidate this year. In other words, the Reverend Al is just like Gothamist and many other voters: Wondering if there are any strong messages in the Democratic candidates. He noted that this will be the first time in 20 years he will not be involved in a Democratic primary, but, of course, Sharpton did leave himself an escape chute, he'd reconsider if a candidate seemed to shape up. Sharpton also noted that former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer's remarks about Amadou Diallo didn't help things. Gothamist is shocked that Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields or even City Council Speaker Gifford Miller didn't try even harder to rise to the challenge of getting Sharpton's endorsement, because his support could have really helped solidify them in the race.

- Mayor Bloomberg's reelection staff sought advice from a range of influencers and politicians on how to shed the mayor's billionaire image. It seems the number one thing to do is remind people he wasn't born a billionaire, he just worked his way to that. Both former Mayor Ed Koch and former Representative Herman Badillo say that the mayor needs to get out and meet people in the outer boroughs (Koch says, Bloomberg should be "out there on the streets 10 days a week, not 7" and Badillo notes, "If you walk up the South Bronx and see 1,000 people, then they will tell 10,000 people, 'I just saw the mayor; he was here with us.'"). Koch also had other colorful quotes for the Times article: Ferrer "slit his own throat" by his handling of his remarks about Amadou Diallo's death and Mayor Bloomberg's "problem is that he's shy." But yet not too shy to fill potholes!

A new poll from Quinnipiac shows that Democratic mayoral frontrunner Fernando Ferrer's remarks about the Amadou Diallo shooting (not being a tragedy to an NYPD-heavy audience) may have helped his neareast opponent, C. Virginia Fields, cut into his lead. Still, Ferrer leads 36% (slipping 4 point), to Fields' 21%, which is a healthy lead, BUT Ferrer needs 40% to avoid a runoff. Anthony Weiner and Gifford Miller had 11% and 10% respectively in the poll, which is pretty sad. Gothamist imagines that Miller will be a bigger force later on, given how much money he's raised; we're a little unsure about how long Weiner can hang on.

Gotta love the slew of political news, both state- and city-wide that's trickling in. First up, it seems that Governor Pataki won't run for reelection. While you may be thinking, "Thank God," Pataki is actually eyeing national office. NY1 announced this news, but Pataki's office denied this. At this point, Pataki would be pummeled in reelection, because he's seriously sucked the past few years, so Gothamist feels the report has some weight - reelection would be embarrassing.