The video below shows a plainclothes NYPD officer cranking back his leg and driving the toe of his boot into another man's head. "So what?" you might be saying. "Cops beat the shit out of people all the time." In this case, however, the victim was another cop.
On Sunday morning, one of New York's carriage horses escaped from its reins and went for a leisurely stroll up Eleventh Avenue. Look at the horse, gaily trotting along, and you'd hardly know the police were in hot pursuit.
It's not often that a police officer will explain to you why what you're doing is perfectly legal just before he puts you in handcuffs, but that's exactly what happens to a New York City subway platform musician in the video above.
A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health draws a conclusion that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactic: If you can't leave your house and walk around outside without fear of police harassment, you're likely to have some adverse psychological effects.
When you're a stand-up comic, getting heckled during your set is just one of the hazards of doing business. But what if your verbal assailant is an on-duty officer of the law?
Just after midnight on September 16, several NYPD officers interrupted a group of friends celebrating Lamard Joye's 35th birthday near a basketball court in Coney Island. A video of the confrontation appears to show one NYPD officer removing more than $1,000 from Joye's pockets. When Joye objects, the officer sprays him with what witnesses claim was pepper spray. Later, the same officer sprays Joye's sister after she asks for his name and badge number.
The Port Authority Bus Terminal is the grubbiest, least hospitable public space in Manhattan, and its bathrooms are the worst of the worst—if you can ignore the ominous patch of grime on the ceiling and focus on the task at hand for long enough to squeeze out a few drops, you should consider yourself lucky. So cops: Let's afford these bus station pissers some dignity, shall we?
A prominent New York attorney is under investigation after he allegedly raped a woman he met at Rev. Al Sharpton's birthday party last week.
On Monday night, NYPD officers shot and killed two men, Francisco Carvajal and Rafael Laureano, in a Brooklyn apartment. Carvajal had broken into his ex-girlfriend's home and was threatening her and her children with a knife; Laureano was attempting to intervene and was accidentally hit with a police bullet.
Ray Kelly, the NYPD's longest-running commissioner ever and one of the people responsible for its current status as a violent law-enforcement behemoth, is still talking about stop-and-frisk. If Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn't appeal last year's federal lawsuit against the department's use of the tactic, he said yesterday, "people will suffer."
In a dance as old as time (or 2011), Occupy Wall Street types headed to New York's Financial District to protest corporate greed, and the NYPD responded by marinating some of them in pepper spray. Here's a video:
A peacekeeping meeting between New York's finest and a few of the city's most hardened criminals took place this week, not in a shadowy alley or the smoky back room of a bar, but out in the open, in Times Square. On one side: the police, trying to talk sense into the monsters. On the other: Spider-Man, Papa Smurf, and Captain America, looking bored as hell.
If your lock gets cut and your bike disappears in midtown Manhattan, you should call the cops. Not because you need to report the crime—because there's a good chance the cops stole the bike themselves.
