States Control: New York

Inside the spy unit that NYPD says doesn’t exist

Working with the CIA, the New York Police Department maintained a list of “ancestries of interest” and dispatched undercover officers to monitor Muslim businesses and social groups, according to new documents that offer a rare glimpse inside an intelligence program the NYPD insists doesn’t exist.
The documents add new details to an Associated Press investigation that explained how undercover NYPD officers singled out Muslim communities for surveillance and infiltration.
Source: Deseret News (AP), August 31, 2011

Cops test surveillance system at tree lighting

Nassau cops deployed a new surveillance system Saturday night in Uniondale, videotaping the revelers gathered to see the annual lighting of RexCorp Plaza’s Christmas tree.
Source: Newsday (online), December 3, 2007

NY recognizes Canadian same-sex marriages

Justice Joan Lefkowitz of the New York Supreme Court ruled last week that same-sex marriages performed outside the country are valid, even though gay New Yorkers cannot be legally married in their home state.
Source: canada.com, August 2007

It’s a Female Dog, or Worse. Or Endearing. And Illegal?

The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.
Source: The New York Times (online), August 7, 2007

Surveillance Cameras Win Broad Support

A similar system [to London] is coming to New York City, which plans 100 new surveillance cameras in downtown Manhattan by year’s end and 3,000 — public and private — by 2010. Chicago and Baltimore plan expanded surveillance systems as well.
Source: ABC News (online), July 29, 2007

‘Ring of steel’ plan to protect New Yorkers

Officials say that 116 licence-plate reading cameras will have been installed in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year, the initial phase of a $90 million (£45 million) surveillance programme that will be the first in the United States.
Source: The Telegraph (online), July 10, 2007

City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.
Source: The New York Times (online), March 25, 2007

New York schoolgirls who said ‘vagina’ get suspensions lifted

The one-day suspensions imposed on three high school girls for including the word “vagina” in a reading from “The Vagina Monologues” have been rescinded, one girl’s mother said Tuesday.
Source: Newsday (online), March 13, 2007

N.Y. Planning Sex Offender Polygraphs

In New York, the parolees’ answers to a computer-based polygraph test about their whereabouts could be used to justify electronic monitoring, prohibit Internet use or restrict travel, said Division of Parole spokesman Scott Steinhardt.
Breitbart, December 11, 2006

NY rejects transgender birth certificate law

New York City’s health department on Tuesday rejected a proposal that would have allowed transgender people to switch the gender on their birth certificates without a sex-change operation.
Source: Reuters, December 5, 2006

Wild sex 101

While their parents shell out $33,246 a year in tuition, Columbia University students doff their clothes at naked parties, flock to sex toys workshops, broadcast porn on campus TV, bake anatomically correct pies for the “Erotic Cake-Baking Contest” and heat up the steps of the Low Library in a mass makeout session called the “Big Kiss.”
Source: Daily News (online), November 26, 2006

Change your sex without surgery

In a move some see as an end-run toward same-sex marriages, the New York City Board of Health, with the support of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is considering a policy that would permit people born in the city to change the sex recorded on their birth certificates.
Source: WorldNetDaily, November 7, 2006

Be careful, ladies – it’s his bathroom, too

If you happen to be passing through Grand Central Station and nature calls, you just might want to hold it until you get home, because, this week, officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided that transgendered people have the right to use the bathroom – men’s or women’s – of their choice on New York’s subway system.
Source: WorldNetDaily, October 28, 2006

New Yorkers rally for ‘illegal’ guns

Protesters carried giant-size cutouts of guns as they rallied yesterday in New York City in support of the constitutional right to bear arms, which, they say, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is trying to destroy.
Source: WorldNetDaily, September 26, 2006

Civil libertarians say DNA databank expansion would net innocent

Civil liberties groups argued Monday that New York state should not rush into expanding its criminal DNA database, citing concerns over human error and cases in which local authorities have kept genetic samples from people who have not been charged with crimes.
Source: Newsday (online), May 15, 2006

Restaurateur sues county health commissioner over smoking ban

A restaurant owner who said the state’s no-smoking law destroyed his business is suing the Erie county health commissioner over his enforcement of the ban.
Source: Newsday, October 17, 2005

New York transit signs $212 million security deal

New York’s subway and bus operator said on Tuesday it awarded a $212 million contract for surveillance cameras, motion detectors and other equipment to detect potential attacks against its stations, bridges and tunnels.
Source: Yahoo News, August 23, 2005

Prosecutor In New York City Leads Nation In Secret Wiretaps

New York prosecutor Richard Brown likes to bug criminal suspects.
In fact, he uses about as many wiretaps as other prosecutors in the rest of New York state put together. Only one other state — California — bugs as much as he does in a single county.
Source: WNBC (online), May 6, 2005

Nativity banned but Muslim, Jewish symbols allowed

In New York City, arguments will be presented Monday in a federal lawsuit challenging the city’s display of the Jewish Menorah during Hanukkah and the Islamic star and crescent during Ramadan in more than 1,200 public schools while barring Nativity scenes during Christmas.
In Florida, U.S. District Court Judge Cecilia Altonaga is expected to rule early next week on a request for a temporary restraining order that would require the town of Bay Harbor Islands to allow a Christian resident to display the Nativity alongside existing Jewish Menorahs.
Source: WorldNetDaily, December 10, 2004

Climate of hate rocks Columbia University

In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are “warmongers” and “Gestapo apparatchiks.”
The Jewish homeland is “nothing more than a military base for the
rising predatory empire of the United States.”
It’s a capital of “thuggery” – a “ghastly state of racism and apartheid” – and it “must be dismantled.”
A voice from America’s crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is
a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university.
Source: New York Daily News, ~November 21, 2004

Student sues district over policy on religious statements

A fourth-grader claims a school district violated her constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection by refusing to allow her to distribute “personal statement” fliers to other students because they carried a religious message.
Source: Newsday (online), October 28, 2004

Delinquent taxpayers lose homes; Suffolk profits

“It’s not moral… when the county makes significant gains from confiscating properties and selling them off,” Weber said. ” The county has made a $550,000 profit over and above what I owed,” he said.
Source: Newsday (online), August 9, 2004

Tapes Show Abuse of 9/11 Detainees

Hundreds of videotapes that federal prison officials had claimed were destroyed show that foreign nationals held at a New York detention facility after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were victims of physical and verbal abuse by guards, the Justice Department’s inspector general said yesterday.

An investigation by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that officials at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, improperly taped meetings between detainees and their lawyers, and used excessive strip searches and restraints to punish those in confinement.

Source: Washington Post (online), December 19, 2003

Next: No Cigs in your Car

Smoking even in the privacy of your own car could be banned under one of at least five state bills introduced in the past year to limit where a person can light up.
From public beaches to carnivals to a person’s private vehicle, the legislation would make it more difficult for smokers to take a drag.

Source: New York Post Online Edition, September 22, 2003

$50 fine for taking up 2 seats on train

New Yorkers beware: No minor infraction is too obscure to pass the detection of hungry police officers, reports the New York Daily News.
Citing anecdotal evidence from readers, the paper describes stepped up enforcement on things like feeding pigeons, keeping car-dealer frames around license plates and blocking your own driveway.

Source: WorldNetDaily, May 28, 2003