[VIDEO] EXCLUSIVE: New York 2015 - FOUR THOUSAND sleeping on the streets, 80 homeless encampments in the city and beggars making $75 a day as arrests for panhandling and street drinking plunge

They are sleeping in front of the Empire State building, sprawled in front of the doors of Macy's, and panhandling outside Grand Central.

New York is in the grip of a homeless epidemic so bad that it has raised fears of the city slipping back into the disorder of the 1970s and 1980s.

The city's police chief this week said that as many as 4,000 people are now sleeping rough in the city, in a crisis which even the city's ultra-liberal mayor has finally acknowledged after months of denials.

Police officers have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, 20 of which are so entrenched that they have their own furniture, while its former mayor Rudolph Giuliani has spoken scathingly of how his successor is failing to keep order. 

This week New York governor Andrew Cuomo said bluntly that 'it's hard not to conclude that we have a major homeless problem in the city of New York' while the city's police chief Bill Bratton described the scale of it as 'a tipping point'.

And even Bill de Blasio, who has spent months refusing to acknowledge that the growing scale of rough sleeping was anything other than a 'perception problem' finally said there was 'a reality problem'.

Now Daily Mail Online can reveal how a toxic combination of cheap drugs and softly-softly policing are fueling the epidemic - and that beggars are making as much money as someone on the city's minimum wage in cash each day.

Homeless people spoken to by Daily Mail Online said that they were making $70 dollars every day from panhandling.

The amount is the same as working an eight-hour day in a minimum wage job in New York, where the state-mandated minimum wage is $8.75.

One homeless man - a former professional who had become a drug addict and ended up one the streets - said: 'People... are very kind and and give me food and on a good day I can get about 70-80 dollars which shows you the kindness of New Yorkers.'

And Patrick Kolher, who begs outside the Trump International Hotel at Central Park West, said he regularly saw donations of $70 a day into his collection tin.

If the amount of money they can make is encouraging people on to the streets there is little policing to drive them off.

Daily Mail Online has established figures which show how little police action has been taken against the problem.

Arrests for offenses normally associated with the homeless and street dwellers and assessed under the quality of life bracket, have dropped drastically since the election of Bill de Blasio as mayor.

The self-proclaimed champion of 'the progressive agenda' came into office after a campaign in which he was critical of the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk tactics.

He set himself as a reformer who would move away from the aggressive policing championed by former mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his successor Michael Bloomberg, which was credited with dramatically cutting crime in the city, which went from being one of the most dangerous in the US, to one of the safest.

But figures provided by the NYPD suggest that their 35,000 officers - of whom around 20,000 are on regular, uniformed patrol duties - are making far fewer arrests for the sort of quality of life crimes which blight streets.

The department provided figures for previous years, but only those for the first three months of this year. 

They show that in 2007, for the consumption of alcohol on streets, 129,073 people received criminal charges. Over the years the numbers went up or remained steady until de Blasio was elected.

This year, during the first three months, police summonsed only 12,477 which means at that rate, less than half of those arrested in Bloomberg's last year of 2013 will have faced charges.

In crimes such as littering, urinating, exposure, spitting and pan handling, the number of arrests have also dropped.

In 2013, there were 8372 charges for littering. In 2014 when de Blasio took office the number dropped to 7886. For the first three months of 2015, there were 1227 arrests.

People who were accused of urinating in public faced courts 29,579 times in 2013. This figure fell to 28,609 last year when the current mayor took power and the first three months of 2015 saw 4,547 summonsed.

Arrests for exposure in 2013 were 723. In 2014 the number stood at 619 and for the first quarter of this year, the figure was 108.

Police held for spitting numbered 2230 in 2013.Last year it was down to 1827 and until March of this year the figure stood at 324.

In 2013 there were 56,103 arrests for disorderly conduct. Yet between January 1 2015 and the end of March there were 7005, which is again heading for a 50 per cent reduction.

A New York Police Department spokesman told Daily Mail Online: 'If someone is stopped for aggressive panhandling and they have no ID they will be arrested.'

But only 50 people were arrested for the offense up until March this year, while in 2013 there were 310 and last year 201 in the same period.

A police spokesman declined to answer a question of whether police under de Blasio have been instructed to have a softer approach to street crime.

This week, however, Bratton said that his officers would be tackling the problem - with the department's chief of patrol describing how they would be asking the homeless 'why are you out here? Where are you from?', the New York Times reported.

Bratton provided the first official estimate of the scale of the problem, saying there were as many as 4,000 sleeping on the New York streets, compared to 56,000 in homeless shelters.

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'Chase them': Rudolph Giuliani has been severely critical of the response to the homelessness crisis, saying that police have to act to get people off the streets

The city's laws mean that anyone who is homeless is entitled to a place in a shelter.

Of the 3,000 to 4,000 on the streets, Bratton said: 'It's a number that's been growing over a period of time,

'It's reached a tipping point, however, I think, to use that term, that it did become more visible this summer.'

Officers are now moving through a total of 80 homeless 'encampments' which they have identified.

One was removed this week in Harlem, an increasingly trendy area which has seen complaints of aggressive beggars around its busiest stations.

But the action only goes some way towards meeting vocal criticism made by Giuliani of the current state of policing.

He revealed last month how he had complained at his local police precinct about a homeless man who was urinating near his Upper East Side home.

He told NBC 4 New York that his message was: 'You chase 'em and you chase 'em and you chase 'em and you chase 'em, and they either get the treatment that they need or you chase 'em out of the city.

'I had a rule. You don't get to live on the streets.'

That put him at odds with de Blasio's administration, who say that street homelessness is related to a growth in the number of homeless people overall - which they say is because of Giuliani and Bloomberg.

They claim that increasingly expensive rents are making it impossible for the poorest to live in New York, leading them to move into shelters.

However another factor appears to be leading to the increasing dysfunction on the streets - a wave of cheap drugs, especially heroin, which can be bought in New York for just $10 a fix.

A leading expert charged with treating heroin addicts in New York has described the drug problem as an 'epidemic'.

Monika Taylor, who runs drug treatment at a hospital in Syracuse, NY, and who has been tasked by New York state to look at the problem, told Daily Mail Online the crisis is being fueled by the cheap price of the drug on the streets.

Via: Daily Mail

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Bratton is done with this amateur administration

Is Bill Bratton eyeing an exit? If so, who can blame him.

Forty-five years a cop, a motive force in Rudy Giuliani’s reclamation of New York City’s streets 20 years ago and a public-safety intellectual with a stellar international reputation, Bratton has been swimming with the minnows for 18 months now — and the exasperation is peeking through.

“I will not be commissioner for [another] six-and-a-half years — that’s the reality,” announced Bratton last month. Clearly, departure is on his mind.

“You can’t arrest your way out of this problem. It requires coordinated effort,” the commissioner said a week ago of disruptive street vagrancy — an obvious fact that seems only recently to have dawned on the folks who inhabit City Hall.

“There are people in our society — criminals . . . bad people. We need to work very hard to put them in jail and keep them there for a long time,” he declared on Thursday — delivering an explicit rebuke to an administration that came to office preaching an unadorned anti-police gospel.

Frustrated much? So it would seem.

After all, murder is up, some city police precincts have become virtual free-fire zones for gang-bangers, aggressive vagrants plague city streets and parks — all of it combining to tarnish the reputation of one of America’s leading public-safety professionals.

Certainly none of Bratton’s thoughts can be endearing him to the Lilliputians now running government in New York City — most notably First Frequent Flier Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

They may not be saying much — but they wouldn’t be human if they weren’t seething inside.

But never mind them. It’s Bratton who matters.

What’s obvious — and critical — is that the past 18 months has frayed his tolerance for fools. And his exasperation at having to revisit a debate that he — and most New Yorkers — thought had been settled two-plus decades ago is palpable.

It’s all about the social contract.

Outside the administration, hardly anybody disputes that your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.

So, why is it so hard to understand that your right to an empty bladder gives you no claim on my front stoop?

Or that there is no proper space on public sidewalks and in the parks for the disruptive mentally ill — to say nothing of snake-bite-nasty panhandlers in the game only for the easy cash?

And that, yes indeed, criminals belong behind bars. Period.

So why must New York City even have this discussion? Because some people never learn.

It may be lost on de Blasio, Mark-Viverito and her clown-council colleagues, but New York City solved street disorder a generation ago — and Bratton was present at the creation.

“[We] involved the Health Department, the police, the [public] hospitals and a bunch of others. [We] had a plan to maintain [order],” says a ranking veteran of the era.

Or, again in Bratton’s words: “You can’t arrest your way out of this problem. It requires coordinated effort.”

De Blasio & Co. seem only recently to have tumbled to this, hyperbolically announcing on Thursday a $22 million plan to coordinate mental health services for street people.

“What we are talking about is unprecedented, a culture shift in the way we think about and treat people who suffer from serious mental illness, who are also violent,” said first lady Chirlane McCray — the poet, artist and former speech writer who has pretty much been put in charge of the administration’s mental-health policy.

Maybe that’ll work. Maybe it won’t.

But coordination of services definitely isn’t unprecedented — and success will demand attention to detail and perseverance of a sort that so far has eluded the de Blasio administration.

Amazingly, Mark-Viverito is pulling in the opposite direction, pushing to decriminalize the so-called quality-of-life offenses — public urination, aggressive panhandling, fare-beating — that gives cops the tenuous hold they now have on the streets.

The fact is that de Blasio paid no heed whatsoever to the reemergence of street disorder in the city until this newspaper rubbed his nose in it. And, even now, there is no reason to believe he can or will do anything about it.

But ordinary New Yorkers have noticed — and they have no confidence in the mayor. That much is evidenced by an extraordinary Quinnipiac University poll that last week awarded de Blasio the lowest approval numbers of his mayoralty.

The mayor’s numbers, to put it bluntly, recall the fall from electoral grace of David Dinkins — a one-term mayor who was damned by his perceived indifference to crime and street chaos.

Nobody’s suggesting that things are that bad, not by a long shot.

But New Yorkers are hypersensitive to the issue — and, clearly, they have no appetite for another oblivious mayor.

So far, Bratton’s reputation is more or less intact. Certainly he got a strong thumbs-up in that Q-poll.

But he never has been much of a team player — his departure from the Giuliani administration followed a titanic clash of egos — and there is no reason to believe he’ll willingly take the rap for a feckless Bill de Blasio. Nor should he be expected to.

Who knows whether the mayor understands any of this. But if Bratton does take a hike, nobody who’s been paying attention will be surprised.

Via: New York Post

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NYC Cop Throws Fists To Protect Female Partner From Knife-Wielding Suspect

A video surfaced Thursday of an NYPD officer using force to protect his female partner from a hostile-suspect resisting arrest.

Police officers had stopped Saykou George whom, according to the New York Post, they had seen carrying a blade in plain-sight. After having his ID checked by the officers, George — who had two outstanding warrants and a history of violence — began to grow increasingly belligerent, eventually lashing out at the female officer when she tried to place him in handcuffs.

According to police commissioner Bill Bratton, Internal Affairs is currently reviewing the video of the Wednesday arrest, but in his, “preliminary review of [the video], [he] saw nothing inappropriate with the officers’ behavior.”

George was slapped with a variety of charges, including resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer and criminal possession of a weapon.

Via: Daily Caller

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[Commentary] Let moronic flag burners have their say

Protestors who equated the American flag with the Confederate standard only made themselves look ridiculous. (Advance file photo)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – Well, the flag burners have had their moment of free speech.

Now allow us to have ours.

Equating the American flag with the Confederate flag is moronic.

Burning the American flag to protest racism and police brutality is idiotic.

A group calling itself Disarm NYPD held a flag-burning protest in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park on Wednesday night.

Bravo for them. They have a First Amendment right to free speech, including the burning of any flag they like. Even in the days leading up to the Fourth of July. I'll defend that right to the death.

Thankfully for them, the Constitutional protection extends to instances of ridiculous free speech as well. Supporting the group's First Amendment right doesn't mean we have to agree with it, after all.

The group burned a Confederate flag as well as Old Glory.

The Confederate flag has been in the news quite a bit these last two weeks, following the shooting massacre that took the lives of nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Anger and grief over the massacre morphed into a debate over the Confederate flag, which had flown on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse.

The flag is seen by many as a symbol of racism. Others say it represents Southern heritage and culture.

It's impossible to cleanse the flag of its association with slavery and secession and treason. But wherever you stand on the issue, the Confederate flag is not the same as the American flag to which we pledge allegiance.

That flag is a symbol of national unity. Never more so than when we celebrate our independence from tyranny. It's the flag that our soldiers have marched under for more than 200 years while helping secure freedom for people around the world.

Our allies in Europe were mighty glad to see that flag coming down the road after the carnage of two world wars, for instance.

And it was that flag that we mourned around, and rallied around, in the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks, as we buried our dead and looked to bring the terrorists responsible to justice.

How can we forget those days, when the whole world was on our side? When we as Americans were all on one side, when we really did see that there is so much that unites us, despite our differences?

Via: silive

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NYPD Commish: Hard to Hire Black Cops Because ‘So Many Have Spent Time in Jail’

According to New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, the reason black males are underrepresented by the city’s police force is because so many would-be recruits have served jail time.

In an interview with The Guardian, Bratton addressed the gap by saying: “We have a significant population gap among African American males because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them.”

Indeed, data updated by the New York Times earlier this year shows that the New York Police Department is 21 percentage points more white than its residents. Only 16% of the NYPD is black, while the city’s population is 23% black, suggesting a slight racial gap in the force. That being said, the NYPD is actually quite diverse compared to many other police departments, partially due to court-ordered mandates.

More from the Guardian write-up:

A complicating factor is what Bratton calls the “unfortunate consequences” of an explosion in “stop, question and frisk” stops in the last decade that caught many young men of color in a summons net.

Those summonses are not automatic disqualifications. However, after passing the exam, a candidate moves to the more subjective background investigation, which includes criminal records. A pot arrest without indications of gang activity might not disqualify a candidate, but a series of summonses could. As a result, Bratton is concerned that the “population pool is much smaller than it might ordinarily have been”.

One of the most common arguments against the drug war — especially in urban areas — is that by disproportionately arresting and punishing young men (mosty black males) for nonviolent drug-related crimes, local governments create a cycle of poverty, sealing off potential opportunities. It appears as though Bratton acknowledges that some of those opportunities could be… joining law enforcement.

Via: Mediaite.com

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Bloomberg Says Administration ‘Literally’ Saved 9,200 Lives

With just four days left before his 12-year tenure in City Hall comes to an end, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is celebrating what he views as one of his crowning achievements: the record-low homicide rate across the five boroughs.

Speaking at an NYPD graduation ceremony today, Mr. Bloomberg wasn’t bashful in making sure both his administration and police department get full credit for the drop in crime over the past decade.

“The crime reductions the NYPD has driven over the past 12 years have defied the odds and far outpaced the rest of the nation. Twelve years ago, no one thought New York City’s crime rate could go any lower. But then it did,” said Mr. Bloomberg, rattling off statistics to support his claim, including “the most important measure of public safety”: less than 340 murders logged so far this year.

“If you compare this decade to the previous eras’ murder rates, we can literally say that we have saved more than 9,200 lives in the last 12 years,” the mayor added.

Mr. Bloomberg’s policing policies have come under intense scrutiny throughout the year. A federal judge ruled against the controversial stop-and-frisk tactic’s current implementation and Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio–who will replace Mr. Bloomberg come January–emerged as one of the foremost stop-and-frisk critics during his winning campaign.

But it is not just Mr. Bloomberg who is in legacy mode in the face of potential skeptics. Outgoing Police Commissioner Ray Kelly also spoke today and touted both his record and Mr. Bloomberg’s accomplishments.

Via: Politicker

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New Jersey state troopers schooled in Muslim culture

If a police officer pulls over a female driver wearing a veil covering all but her eyes, can he demand that she lift the veil so he can identify her?

Before a classroom of state police recruits, Mohammad Ali Chaudry, a Muslim scholar, explained that there’s no religious reason for her to refuse. She has to obey the laws of her country “for everybody’s security,” he said.

Questions about the veil and other facets of Islamic faith and culture are at the heart of the one-hour class, now a requirement for every New Jersey state trooper, that emerged from anxiety and acrimony following news last year that New York City detectives were spying on New Jersey Muslims.

But is one hour of teaching, out of a solid week of police training, enough to markedly improve relations between police officers and wary Muslim communities across the state?

Chaudry, president of the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge and a Rutgers professor, said it’s a start.
One result of strong backlash to spying by the New York Police Department was the creation of the Muslim Outreach Committee, a group of about 20 Muslim leaders and top law-enforcement officials that began meeting a year ago. The training, which is included in classwork this week at the state criminal justice academy in Sea Girt, is one of several committee efforts aimed at building trust.

“When we first started, there was anger and hostility,” said Imam Mustafa El-Amin, who heads the Masjid Ibrahim mosque in Newark. “Now it has actually developed to achievements and goals as opposed to just talking and airing out who’s guilty and who’s not.”

Via: NewJersey.com

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NYPD Designates Mosques as Terrorism Organizations

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen "terrorism enterprise investigations" into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

The documents show in detail how, in its hunt for terrorists, the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files. As a tactic, opening an enterprise investigation on a mosque is so potentially invasive that while the NYPD conducted at least a dozen, the FBI never did one, according to interviews with federal law enforcement officials
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The strategy has allowed the NYPD to send undercover officers into mosques and attempt to plant informants on the boards of mosques and at least one prominent Arab-American group in Brooklyn, whose executive director has worked with city officials, including Bill de Blasio, a front-runner for mayor.

The revelations about the NYPD's massive spying operations are in documents recently obtained by The Associated Press and part of a new book, "Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America." The book by AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman is based on hundreds of previously unpublished police files and interviews with current and former NYPD, CIA and FBI officials.

Via: Newsmax

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NYPD cops say they won't go above and beyond the call of duty over 'stop-frisk' lawsuit risks

NYPD beat cops posted a police-union warning in every precinct yesterday instructing officers not to go above and beyond the call of duty — or risk losing their jobs because of the new stop-and-frisk laws, The Post has learned.

“All officers should take action if he or she sees a crime in progress, or if he or she sees that his or her life or the life of another person is in danger . . . [But] all officers should be careful not to initiate any law-enforcement action that could be construed as violating the new legislation and subject the officer to legal action,” read the memo by Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch.

Several rank-and-file cops said yesterday that they plan on following Lynch’s advice rather than risk their careers.

“We are being told not to look for perpetrators of crimes because then we are opening ourselves up to a lawsuit and the job isn’t going to represent us,” a police source said.

“Crime is about to skyrocket. We are going to show up and take reports. This was the safest city in the country . . . Now most crimes will go unsolved.”

Another source added: “These rookies are just getting on the job out of college. They’re not going to risk their pensions. Arrests are going to drop, and crime’s going to soar.

“It really puts a wrench into law enforcement. They’re going to be second-guessing everything they do.”

Another cop agreed that fear of being sued will hinder investigations — even in rape cases.

Via: NY Post

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SECOND 'OCCUPY' WAVE COULD BE MORE DESTRUCTIVE

When the “Occupy” movement began a year ago, many initially dismissed it as a gathering of harmless college students. But the late Andrew Breitbart saw in the movement professional left-wing anarchists and radicals who sought to use the “Occupy” protests to violently overthrow the United States government, then destroy its institutions and the free market system.

Breitbart’s friend, Stephen K. Bannon, was one of those who had initially not taken the “Occupy” movement seriously until he saw occupiers shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. He knew then Breitbart was right, and immediately started a project with Breitbart that would turn into “Occupy Unmasked,” a movie that opened nationwide in theaters this week that systematically dismantled the notion that the Occupy movement was good-natured and peaceful. 

The lessons from the movie “Occupy Unmasked” are important to keep in mind as liberal intellectuals again try to mainstream a radical and violent movement to breathe life into something that, for now, has faded. The movie documents all the violence, filth, rapes, and systemic coordination between left-wing radicals and labor unions like the SEIU that was the real story behind the "Occupy" movement. 

In glorifying the “Occupy” movement and looking ahead to the its future, liberals revealed that a potential second coming of “Occupy” could be even more dangerous and violent than the first. 

Last week, progressive journalist Zeeshan Aleem, writing in The Huffington Post, claimed the Occupy movement “rivaled the Arab Spring” when it started. Though he was being complimentary in his comparison, his analogy may have been more apt than he realized. 

The Arab Spring led to violent radicals like the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in countries like Egypt and heralded a wave of violence throughout North Africa and the Middle East -- attacking U.S. interests and murdering and ambassador in Libya -- as radical Islamists gain more of a foothold. Liberals celebrated these radicals and the “Arab Spring,” which ended up becoming more of an awakening for violent Islamists. 

Similarly, the second phase of Occupy has the same potential for more widespread destruction, chaos, and violence. 

Aleem conceded that for now the second phase of Occupy has not been as successful as the first. He admitted that a recent “Occupy”-style protest attempt on Wall Street “could not be called a success,” mainly because the NYPD was better prepared this time around.

But Aleem disturbingly asks, “What if instead of being fragmented into dozens of free-forming groups, all the Occupiers targeted one bank or one intersection simultaneously?”

These flash mobs, often violent, have popped up throughout the country, with crowds beating up random strangers or stealing merchandise from stores. 

Could these focused, violent flash mobs be in Occupy’s future? 

Via Breitbart

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