Search Results for: nypd

My Family Saw a Police Car Hit a Kid on Halloween. Then I Learned How NYPD Impunity Works.

Longreads Pick

“I spoke to four witnesses, including my wife. All of them said they saw the same thing. When I called Baker back, he told me that my wife and the three others were mistaken. The car hadn’t hit the kid. The kid had hit the car.” After his family saw an NYPD car hit a Black teen, Eric Umansky tried to find out what happened.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Jun 23, 2020
Length: 12 minutes (3,158 words)

The NYPD Is Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven’t Committed a Crime

Longreads Pick

An investigation into the aggressive use of nuisance abatement actions by the NYPD in New York City.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Feb 4, 2016
Length: 27 minutes (6,956 words)

The NYPD Division of Un-American Activities

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Enemies Within, a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman on the NYPD’s secret spying unit:

“Police collected the phone numbers and e-mail addresses from the website. One was for Agnes Johnson, a longtime activist based in the Bronx. ‘We were women and mothers who said, “We’re going to hold our money in our pocketbooks,” ’ Johnson recalled years later. ‘That’s all we called for.’

“Confirmation that the activities of the Demographics Unit went far beyond what federal agencies were permitted to do was provided by the FBI itself. Once, Sanchez tried to peddle the Demographics reports to the FBI. But when Bureau lawyers in New York learned about the reports, they refused. The Demographics detectives, the FBI concluded, were effectively acting as undercover officers, targeting businesses without cause and collecting information related to politics and religion. Accepting the NYPD’s reports would violate FBI rules.”

Published: Aug 25, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,701 words)

What’s Eating the NYPD?

Longreads Pick

Life as a cop in 2012, from the officers’ perspective. How Commissioner Ray Kelly and the legendary CompStat system have changed New York’s police department, both for better (dropping crime rates) and worse (increasing pressure on officers to make the numbers):

“The disaffection from the public and anger at the department aren’t universal, but they are widespread, stretching across boroughs and ranks—and cops say that the acrimony is a by-product of the numbers-­obsessed systems that Kelly has perfected. The commissioner inherited CompStat, the innovative marriage of computer-analyzed crime stats and grilling of field commanders. But in the Kelly era, CompStat has filtered through every facet of the department, and making a good show at those meetings has become an obsession. Few cops talk openly about the NYPD’s troubles: Some are wary of the media, some fear punishment from the department. ‘The job is getting smaller all the time—more demands, less autonomy, less respect,’ a recently retired Bronx detective says mournfully. ‘The aggressive management culture has been really effective, but it’s also extremely aggravating.'”

Published: Apr 9, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,925 words)

The NYPD Tapes Confirmed

Longreads Pick

How officers in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn were “juking the stats” to improve crime statistics in their area. The NYPD called it an isolated incident, but critics point to a culture of data-obsession that leads police to ignore, discard or downgrade complaints from victims:

“These weren’t minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.

“‘When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index-crime classifications,’ investigators concluded. ‘This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct.’

Source: Village Voice
Published: Mar 10, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,244 words)

A New Leaf: A Post-Legalization Cannabis Reading List

neon marijuana symbol with the word "legal" below

By Peter Rubin

If you were a pot-smoking teenager in the ’90s, chances are you heard the same urban legend I did. Marlboro’s just waiting for weed to be legalized, man. They’ve got the tobacco fields ready to repurpose; they’ll even use their green menthol pack when they start selling joints. Someone’s sister knew a guy whose college professor had seen the mockups! What’s weird about this particular wish-fulfillment conversation isn’t how dumb it was; it’s that even a stoned 16-year-old could grok the conflict brewing in the fantasy. Sure, the idea of walking into a store to buy a spliff seemed so far-fetched that imagining it was akin to arguing about who would win a fight between Batman and Boba Fett. But if that day ever did come, we sensed, it would become a commercial battlefield.

Surprise: that’s exactly what happened. After California allowed medicinal use of marijuana in 1996 — and then truly after 2012, when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize cannabis for recreational use — a new industry sprouted. The “green rush,” as it immediately became known, wasn’t just a financial opportunity; it nurtured the best and worst that U.S. capitalism had to offer. For every underdog, a huckster; for every scrappy botanist, a shadowy billion-dollar concern; for every newly minted entrepreneur, a stinging reminder that even legal cannabis has a way of perpetuating inequities. Whether or not the devil’s lettuce ever becomes legalized at a federal level (and Marlboro finally gets involved), the journalism compiled below makes clear that the stories of post-legalization America are in many ways the stories of the nation itself.

1) The Great Pot Monopoly Mystery (Amanda Chicago Lewis, GQ, August 2017)

Few journalists have been covering the weed beat longer or better than Lewis; she’s knowledgeable, well-sourced, and has reported on everything from how Black entrepreneurs have been shut out of the cannabis boom to how the company Weedmaps has cultivated a booming business with a selective attention to legality. But my favorite work of hers might just be this feverish jaunt down the rabbit hole of BioTech Institute, a company that reportedly struck fear into the heart of the industry by trying to issue utility patents on the cannabis plant itself. Sounds dry? Not when it feels like the plot of a noir movie, with Lewis as the dogged detective:

Outside of these patents, BioTech Institute barely exists. The company has no website, manufactures no products, and owns no pot shops. Public records for BioTech Institute turned up two Los Angeles addresses—a leafy office park an hour northwest of downtown and a suite in a Westside skyscraper—both of which led to lawyers who didn’t want to talk.

A source familiar with BioTech Institute’s patenting process estimated that the company had spent at least $250,000 in research and legal fees on each of its patents. I knew that if I could figure out who was paying for the patents, I might learn who held the keys to the future of the marijuana industry. But I hardly knew where to start.

There’s no definitive aha twist in this movie — no moment that the camera skews to a Dutch angle and the violins screech in the score — but its shagginess is kind of the point. Watching a reporter follow bum leads, spool out her own thinking, and otherwise externalize her shoeleather fact-finding turns this from a Shadowy Conspiracy saga to something somehow far more satisfying: a process story.

2) Half Baked: How a Would-Be Cannabis Empire Went up in Smoke (Michael Rubino, Julia Spalding & Derek Robertson, Indianapolis Monthly, August 2021)

In November 2020, Indianapolis Monthly ran a small item on Rebecca Raffle, a woman who had moved to town and opened two CBD bakeries in the city. A few fact-checking bumps aside, the piece was uneventful, the kind of local-business profile that pops up in two dozen city magazines every month of the year. But as 2020 turned into 2021, those fact-checking bumps turned out to be the first in a long saga of upheaval and deception, exhaustively recounted here by a team of journalists that would expose Raffle’s business talk for what it truly was: talk. 

None of this seemed in line with the chill entrepreneur with the bubbly personality and perpetual ear-to-ear smile. A gay, Jewish, California-transplanted working mom, Raffle conveyed an endearing underdog quality and a compelling girl-boss backstory. A lot of people bought right into it.

We bought right into it.

Self-mythologizing is nothing new; people often believe what you tell them, and many a business owner has scraped through the lean times by acting as though their aspirations are already reality. But the meta-wrinkle in this particular story — the writers grappling throughout with the role they and their magazine played in elevating this particular mythologist — makes “Half Baked” much more than an exercise in grifter-gets-caught schadenfreude. Whether Raffle’s a Fyre Fest-level charlatan or just a woman whose ambitions outpaced her expertise, you won’t get to the end without a hefty sense of emotional conflict.

3) The Willy Wonka of Pot (Jason Fagone, Grantland, October 2013)

Once upon a time, weed strains were like broadcast TV networks: there weren’t many, and everyone knew all of them. But nothing Acapulco Gold can stay. These days, Maui Wowie and Panama Red have given way to Blueberry Kush, F-13, Azure Haze, and a seemingly infinite repository of other strains — and a great many of them, it turns out, originated with a press-shy breeder from Oregon named DJ Short. In this shining gem of a ridealong feature, Jason Fagone connects with Short at what might just be the apotheosis of his long and accomplished career: the first Seattle Hempfest held after Washington legalized recreational cannabis.

“DJ Short’s here!” said a large man in a tie-dyed tank top. He was sitting next to Short on the dais at Hempfest. His name card said STINKBUD. “I was growin’ his Blueberry back in the ’80s,” Stinkbud said. “One of the most famous guys in the entire world! DJ Short! This guy’s a legend.”

The panel’s moderator, a Canadian researcher, said, “I’ve been moderating this panel for seven or eight years. I’ve never seen Stinkbud so humbled.”

It’s not all stoner sycophancy, though. Fagone portrays Short as a man who knows how much he’s contributed to the current state of the cannabis world — and yet finds himself unable to stop that world from roaring by, leaving him behind in its rush to monetize his lifelong passion. Whimsical headline aside, there’s a real melancholy lurking here, even as Short accepts his laurels. A portrait of the artist as a forgotten craftsman.

4) Is Cannabis Equity Reparations for the War on Drugs? (Donnell Alexander, Capital & Main x Fast Company, April 2018)

A 2020 study by the ACLU found that in the U.S., Black Americans are 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession. That same year, 94% of those arrested for cannabis offenses in New York City were people of color. Clearly, legalization has not alleviated the disproportionate burden that low-level drug enforcement has historically placed on the Black community, nor has it prevented Black entrepreneurs from getting shut out of the space. That’s why, in California, a number of cities have attempted to enact cannabis equity, reserving up to half of their marijuana business permits for those living under the median income line or who have a previous cannabis conviction — and in this piece, Alexander chronicles how Oakland’s equity program can set a model for others.

No state has a relationship dynamic remotely like the one between California and marijuana. We officially consume 2.5 million pounds of the drug each year, more than any other state. California produces more than 13 million pounds annually. This means that, even before dipping its toes into the uncharted waters of restorative justice, the legal weed market must contend with vast market and political forces. 

Those forces culminated in a near-failure for Oakland’s program; while the city had set aside millions in no-interest funding for these startups, it was having a difficult time facilitating the necessary partnerships between white and Black applicants. The solutions — or people, as the best solutions tend to be — don’t provide much in the way of narrative tension, but they do offer a necessary perspective on what it’s really like trying to change the system in a fundamental way.

5)  Inside the Underground Weed Workforce (Lee Hawks, The Walrus, October 2018)

Legal or not, all the cannabis that enters the supply chain starts with the same thing: human labor. Trimmers, those who take scissors to plant to free the psychogenic flower, have long been the backbone of the industry. Yet, as the workforce swells and legalization drives prices down, the livelihood isn’t as dependable as it once was. A blend of reportage and the pseudonymous Hawks’ own experience — numerous trips from Canada to work California’s harvest season — makes his account of “scissor drifter” culture an urgent one. 

In 2017, when Willow last went to work in California, trimmers were expected to buy and cook all their own food. There was one outhouse and an outdoor shower, and she slept in a tent. She was paid $150 (US) per pound. When she checked around, she discovered this was the new status quo. In fact, there were rumours of trimmers being paid as low as $100 per pound. Some trimmers will work in exchange for weed and are just happy to have a place to stay and be fed. Every year, there’s a new crop of trimmigrants with lower and lower expectations. Unfortunately for Willow, the harvest was subpar, and she struggled to finish a pound per day. She left after two weeks, staying just long enough to recuperate her costs. A poor crop can make any situation intolerable.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

US Ricardo Pepi celebrates after scoring a goal during their Qatar 2022 FIFA Word Cup Concacaf qualifier match against Honduras at Olimpico Metropolitano stadium, in San Pedro Sula, on September 8, 2021. - (Photo by Orlando SIERRA / AFP) (Photo by ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP via Getty Images)

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

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1. White Riot

Laura Nahmias | New York Magazine | October 5, 2021 | 4,250 words

Did you know that in 1992, thousands of New York City cops rioted outside their own City Hall, shouting racist chants about the metropolis’ first-ever Black mayor, David Dinkins? Neither did I. This article refers to the riot as “forgotten” for good reason. But why did it slip from public memory? You could ask the same question about any number of events that have shaped the history of race and power in the United States, and find the same answers Laura Nahmias does in this fascinating story: entrenched power structures that bitterly resist change; a media apparatus that’s often complicit in maintaining the status quo; and a widespread inability among white Americans to view white violence as a real threat. “Somehow, police only identified 87 of the estimated 10,000 officers and their supporters who participated. Just 42 faced disciplinary charges. And only two officers were suspended,” Nahmias writes. In short, it’s easy to understand why today, “only some of what ailed the NYPD 30 years ago has been mended.” It’s also easy to understand why the same can be said about America. —SD

2. Weighing Big Tech’s Promise to Black America

Victor Luckerson | Wired | October 5, 2021 | 6,014 words

From the headline alone, you might expect a standard postmortem analyzing the various promises giant tech companies made to Black Americans last year. What you’ll find instead is a look into the hopeful, Herculean mission of Black-owned banks, as told through Mississippi-based Hope Credit Union. For more than a quarter-century, through hurricanes, pandemics, and recessions, Hope has been a lifeline for Black entrepreneurs and families alike. Yet, when Netflix last year pledged to invest 2% of its cash holdings in Black-owned institutions, its $10 million deposit in Hope represented the largest infusion of capital the institution had ever seen. The question: is it enough? As Luckerson points out, we’ve been here before, only to see corporate proclamations crumble into nothing. This is a story of numbers and finance, yes, but it’s also a story of unmet need — of underserved communities, of unvetted promises, of unimaginable resources that could so easily address an unjustifiable pattern of disparity. Credit to Luckerson for making it, above all, a human story. —PR

3. ‘Iran Was Our Hogwarts’: My Childhood Between Tehran and Essex

Arianne Shahvisi | The Guardian | September 23, 2021 | 4,310 words

I loved this piece by Arianne Shahvisi. Even though I have never been to Iran, as she describes her childhood holidays visiting her Iranian family, nostalgic images popped into my head like grainy photographs from a family album. Her writing is that expressive. I could picture her uncle’s villa in the dusty countryside beyond Tehran and feel the heat as a young Shahvisi stretched “against the rough, baking stucco of the back wall of the villa, the sun refracting through the droplets on my squinted lashes.” She views these family holidays through a lens of magic and light. They are, after all, an escape from growing up in dull, rainy England — a country painted in a monochrone that vividly contrasts with Iran. And there is another element to this piece: Harry Potter. To Shahvisi, Iran is Hogwarts, an escape from her normal world filled with “Dursleys,” who don’t understand her Iranian heritage and “to whom difference was always deficiency.” This metaphor could have been jarring, but it is threaded gracefully and adds to your understanding of what it was like to grow up in a world full of muggles, and only occasionally get to visit the place where you feel special. —CW

4. The Unstoppable Dreams of Ricardo Pepi

Roberto José Andrade Franco | ESPN | October 6, 2021 | 4,800 words

Ricardo Pepi is a promising young Mexican American soccer player who made his debut last month on the U.S. men’s national team, scoring a key goal in their match against Honduras. This ESPN story by Roberto José Andrade Franco is more than just a profile of a rising athlete from a poor, mostly Mexican town in El Paso County, Texas; Franco weaves a heartfelt and beautiful piece on belonging, identity, and the sacrifices and struggles of an immigrant family. He also explores the complex emotions felt by those, him included, who call the El Paso-Juárez borderland their home: “It sometimes feels like the most beautiful place in the world. Other times, it feels like living in the middle of the desert was always going to end with an escape. That same rugged beauty can inspire the wildest of dreams: a young boy playing soccer in Europe’s biggest leagues, a former construction worker writing this. But it’s also the type of place that can suffocate you.” —CLR

5. Ordinary People

Apoorva Tadepalli | Guernica Magazine | October 5, 2021 | 2,536 words

At Guernica, Apoorva Tadepalli contemplates the beauty of ordinary experiences in her response to Lauren Elkin’s book, “No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus.” (Elkin used her phone’s Notes app “to record observations and encounters from her daily commute on the 91 and 92 buses” to “observe the world through the screen of my phone, rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world.”) Elkin’s book is a response to the questions posed by Georges Perec’s book “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris,” in which he asks, “How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious?” Tadepalli’s thoughtful essay reminds me of the small pleasures that quiet observation can bring when we come to a moment in time with our full attention. —KS

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)

This week, we’re trying something new. In addition to our usual list of five great stories to read, we wanted to share a little insight into why we chose each one.

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1. Courtney’s Story*

Diana Moskovitz | Defector | September 13, 2021 | 13,800 words

Diana Moskovitz’s investigation of Ohio State’s handling of domestic violence allegations against one of its football coaches centers the survivor, a young wife and mother named Courtney Smith. It shows how some of the most powerful people in Ohio, and in college football, worked to protect themselves and their reputations, all at Smith’s expense. In the dictionary, “Courtney’s Story” should be found under the listing for “damning.” —Seyward Darby

*Subscription required.

2. A New Nurse Struggles to Save Patients in a New COVID Surge

Kathryn Ivey | Scientific American | September 16, 2021 | 1,757

Kathryn Ivey became a registered nurse on July 27th, 2020, and went straight into a COVID ward in Nashville, Tennessee. “I learned how to be a nurse with death constantly at my heels,” she says. Recounting the terror and dread of the ward, she remembers “every single 2 A.M. phone call to family members so they could hear the voice of the person they loved at least one more time.” Ivey’s first-person account is nearly surreal, it’s that terrifying. What’s worse is that so much of this suffering and death could have been prevented. Here in Canada, Alberta’s ICU is near capacity after a premature summer re-opening plan eliminated protections and restrictions. The provincial government only just admitted they were wrong. Now, Canadian nurses like Ivey will have to deal with the casualties of a government more concerned about freedom and economics than human lives. Ivey’s piece should be required reading for anyone who’s eligible, yet remains unvaccinated by choice. “We are haunted by failures now, starting with the failures of policy that allowed human lives to be sacrificed on the altar of the economy and ending with us telling a family that we can do no more. COVID has made martyrs of us all,” says Ivey. —Krista Stevens

3. Rain Boots, Turning Tides, and the Search for a Missing Boy

Katherine Laidlaw | Wired | September 9, 2021 | 6,900 words

I picked this essay because Laidlaw’s powerful, descriptive language pulls you in right from the start. This tragic story of a missing 3-year-old is also told with respect and sympathy toward the family — against the grain of an online community that has them marked as the prime suspects. —Carolyn Wells

4. Hawai’i Is Not Our Playground

Chris Colin | AFAR | September 2, 2021 | 2,943 words

Tourism has “tamed and reinvented [Hawaii] for the mainlander imagination,” writes Chris Colin in his latest story for AFAR. From countless sacred sites to Native Hawaiian traditions, the land and history of its Indigenous population have vanished and been forgotten over time. Colin’s view of Hawaii as a vacation destination unraveled as he toured Oahu in late 2019 with local activist Kyle Kajihiro. Kajihiro told him that even responsible, politically conscious visitors automatically slip into “vacation mode” as soon as they step foot outside of the airport, expecting no less than the idyllic “lei-draped, aloha-dispensing, honeymooner-welcoming” version of Hawaii. As visitors, what more should we be doing — and what does reciprocity in the context of travel look like? What does decolonizing tourism — and decentering the outsider — mean? And ultimately, how can we all support Native Hawaiians in their fight to reclaim their land? Colin’s piece is thought-provoking, pushing me rethink when and how to visit. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands

5. Revolt of the Delivery Workers

Josh Dzieza | New York Magazine | September 13, 2021 | 7,479 words

Convenience has always come at a cost; this we know. Yet for the class of delivery cyclists that has emerged in New York City over the past decade, ferrying Doordash and Seamless orders across bridges and boroughs, those costs grow ever steeper. If it’s not draconian apps like Relay pushing riders to the brink of danger, it’s bike thieves robbing riders of their transportation and livelihood — often inflicting injury in the process — and a police department that hasn’t exactly leapt to help. As Josh Dzieza chronicles in a vividly reported feature called Curbed, a patchwork of collective action has arisen from this fraught landscape. Riders band together to navigate attack-plagued routes en masse; they protest outside NYPD precincts and lobby for legislative protections from predatory employers; most jaw-droppingly, they track stolen bikes to their new homes and manage to get them back. “For Cesar [Solano] and many other delivery workers,” Dzieza writes of one organizer, “the thefts broke something loose.” His story doesn’t help put those pieces back together, but reading about these workers and the steps they’re taking ensures that you’ll think about what it really means to have a salad ferried crosstown. (And if you still can’t do without that Sweetgreen, then tip well — in cash, if possible.) —Peter Rubin

Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun

Henry Griffin / AP

Sean Howe | Longreads | May 2019 |  15 minutes (3,853 words)

In November 2018, after the Secret Service seized the security credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, the White House Press Secretary stated the reason for the revocation was that the administration would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Within hours, attorney Ted Boutrous responded on Twitter:
Read more…

United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan

Mike Rosiana / Getty

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | April 2019 | 17 minutes (4,461 words)

 

On March 13, 2019, a twenty-four year old construction worker named Anthony Comello drove to Staten Island and backed his pickup into a Cadillac owned by the head of the Gambino crime family, Frank Cali. When Cali came to the door, Comello shot him. Comello was arrested a few days later in Brick, New Jersey, and upon his appearance in court, it became clear that he was a believer in the confusing and ever-shifting conspiracy theory, QAnon — whose adherents believe President Trump is locked in a mortal battle with a “deep state,” which they contend is running child sex trafficking rings (among other things). A photo from the arraignment shows that Comello had written the letter “Q” on his hand, along with “MAGA FOREVER” and “United We Stand.”

A mob boss, a cadillac, a murder, a town called Brick, New Jersey — all of those things make sense when itemized and grouped together. In 2019 it’s not even that surprising that a member of QAnon was involved. But, barring new information, what is surprising is the simplicity of the actual motive — Comello wanted to date Cali’s niece and Cali disapproved.

“Life is so much more random than we would like it to be,” Anna Merlan told me over the phone, when we were talking about Cali’s murder. “Everything is so much weirder and less meaningful than we would like it to be and I constantly see people that I talk to grappling with that idea — that maybe there isn’t a grand narrative under the surface animating everything.” Read more…