By now you’ve probably heard about or seen the consequences of Frankenstorm Sandy, especially along the Jersey Shore and in the five boroughs of the New York City metropolitan area. The evacuation of NYU Hospital. The flooding of the New York City subway system. The shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange on consecutive days [...]

Today, gun violence claimed the life of another American outside the Empire State Building. But the muddled and confusing aftermath offers a lesson as to why the preferred conservative response to mass shootings, i.e. arm more citizens, would be disastrous: A clothing designer who had been fired from a Midtown Manhattan company shot and killed [...]

This sounds like a right terrible idea: New York City, embracing an experimental mechanism for financing social services that has excited and worried government reformers around the world, will allow Goldman Sachs to invest nearly $10 million in a jail program, with the pledge that the financial services giant would profit if the program succeeded [...]

I should double back to what I’ve been told was an amazing silent march yesterday against the New York City Police Department’s stop and frisk policy. Several thousand took part. And perhaps fittingly, it ended with some police overreach. Two and a half hours after it began, the peaceful, disciplined march ended in mild disarray. [...]

This Op-Doc from the New York Times (which they don’t let you embed) pretty powerfully shows the effect of stop-and-frisk policies in New York City on young black men in the inner city, like Tyquan Brehon. Tyquan says he was stopped 60-70 times before his 18th birthday, and he’s not alone. Over 685,000 people were [...]

Occupy Wall Street protesters returned in force last night to Zuccotti Park, but they encountered new restrictions. In particular, they had to enter the park single file, and they couldn’t bring in tents, tarps or sleeping bags, or even lie down on the park grounds. Obviously law enforcement was applying the term “tents” broadly, because [...]

I’ve heard legal theories that the city of New York has the right to impose restrictions on the time, place and manner of the exercise of free speech. This will obviously play out in a court of law. I don’t know how anyone can reasonably look at the laws and say that the wholesale shutdown [...]

Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement said today on a conference call that the police action to evict protesters from Zuccotti Park will only amplify future efforts, starting on Thursday with a planned day of action that will occur at sites across the country. “We’re going to get in the streets by the tens [...]

If this is true (h/t), it represents one of the more cynical actions I’ve seen from law enforcement, whose job it it to serve and protect, in a long, long time. According to Harry Siegel, cops in New York City are re-routing aggressive, drunken individuals picked up in parks across the city down to the [...]

Last night, the Manhattan Community Board 1 held a Quality of Life Committee hearing about the Occupy Wall Street encampment, hearing the complaints of neighbors about incessant drumming and general inconvenience to the community. The hearing ended with a resolution asking Occupy Wall Street to “limit the use of drums, trumpets, tambourines, bugles, and air [...]

Michael Bloomberg is trying to pull off a pretty neat trick. The billionaire mayor of New York City can blame his own police department for the growth of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which surged after incidents of police brutality and illegal arrests and will only continue to grow as his police continue to use [...]