Peter Liang, the rookie NYPD officer who fatally shot an unarmed man in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project last year, has been indicted for the killing, according to sources who spoke with the New York Daily News and Pix11.
Last month, in a dispatch for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, "The police are representatives of a state that derives its powers from the people." The gravity of Coates's words are not lost on me, and I have considered the sentence's trueness many times in the preceding weeks. "We, the people," our founding…
According to a report from DNAinfo's Murray Weiss, the NYPD is investigating social media death threats against cops from alleged gang members who are apparently promising to turn tonight's New Year's Eve celebrations into "Kill a Pig Night." But who are these violent tweeters? Do they exist at all?
A ceremony at Madison Square Garden yesterday morning marked the graduation of 884 new officers into the New York Police Department. When Mayor Bill de Blasio took the podium to address the graduating class, praising them for their courage and determination, he was greeted like an unpopular high school principal: with…
It's been over a month since 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers, Jr. was killed by a St. Louis police officer. Details offered of the moments that led up to his death are today still sparse and sometimes conflicting. An investigation is underway, but there are already a few aspects of the incident that should raise…
It's been ten months under Bill de Blasio's leadership and little change has come to New York City. With his first year in office nearing an end, the everyday reality for many of the city's residents remains inescapable: police harassment and brutality have become a constant, and conditions only seem to be worsening.…
According to documents published yesterday by investigative news site MuckRock, the NYPD has paid almost half a billion dollars in settlements in the last five years.
What is our responsibility to the homeless? That might seem too big a question, but it is something I wrestle with occasionally. It's impossible to avoid the less fortunate men and women who populate our streets—the father forced to seek charity from strangers on subway cars so he can feed his family or the woman…
Amid the police terror that has swept the nation these last few months, there has been a missing facet from the conversation: the fact that women are brutalized by cops just as severely as men. For every John Crawford and Ezell Ford there is an Ersula Ore or a Marlene Pinnock (you can view the footage of Pinnock's…
In July, a man was assaulted by police offers for allegedly falling asleep on the train on his way home from work. "For what?!" the man yells repeatedly, as officers attempt to cuff him. "I ain't do shit...I just wanna go home." The pain and distress in his voice are audibly clear, and the reasons for which he is…
Given the substantial media attention surrounding the recent killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner by law enforcement, it can be hard to remember that not all police officers are bad. But the opposite proves just as true, however unpleasant the reality: not all police officers are good. In fact, a recent study…
Turnstile jumping is on the rise in New York City subways. Today, the New York Daily News published an analysis of data that detailed the increase in arrests for fare-beating busts made by officers. In the last five years, turnstile jumping apprehensions have ballooned by 69 percent—24,747 arrests were made last year…
It's been a bloody, bloody summer here in New York City. The death of Staten Island resident Eric Garner at the hands of NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in July—Pantaleo used a chokehold to restrain an asthmatic Garner, which resulted in death—may be the most public and widespread incident of police brutality this year,…
"This isn't a race issue." That's the most common response I've gotten in the past three weeks when talking about police brutality. And while that is partially true —this isn't just a racial issue—blacks and Latinos do face a greater threat from the police force here in New York City. That the most recent…
