Tag: new york

NYPD reportedly stood by, failed to help Chinatown woman as homeless man stabbed her to death in her own home

In a recently filed lawsuit by the family of 35-year-old Christina Yuna Lee, the Chinatown woman who was killed early in the morning on February 13, 2022 by a homeless man who followed her into her apartment, the victim’s family alleged that two NYPD officers heard her screams “for at least five minutes” and did nothing.

The New York Post reports that two unidentified cops dispatched out of the 5th Precinct responded to Lee’s 911 phone call, which she made while being attacked, and the cops responded within four minutes, “heard Ms. Lee screaming for help” but “failed to gain entry to Ms. Lee’s apartment until Ms. Lee had been stabbed more than 40 times by her attacker and succumbed to her injuries,” according to the lawsuit. 

According to the lawsuit, made against the city and the NYPD, the cops allegedly spoke to the killer “through the closed door of Ms. Lee’s apartment” and “Despite having reason to believe Ms. Lee’s life was in imminent danger, (the officers) failed to gain entry to Ms. Lee’s apartment or otherwise provide her with any potentially life-saving police or medical assistance at that time.”

The lawsuit, filed with the Manhattan Supreme Court, is seeking unspecified damages.

The victim’s aunt, Boksun Lee, said in the court filing that the cops did not enter her niece’s apartment until after she died.

Christina Yuna Lee, a digital producer originally from New Jersey, entered her Chrystie Street apartment around 4:20 am that morning and was allegedly followed by 25-year-old Assamad Nash, a homeless man out on bail for previous alleged violent crimes and who had been convicted of petty larceny and robbery. Nash has been charged with murder for Lee’s killing.

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Deja blue: Printer’s flub makes every Nassau County voter a Democrat

An upstate printer has once again screwed up downstate election materials, this time by mailing registration cards to Nassau County’s nearly 1 million voters — identifying them all as Democrats.

“It’s a terrible error. People are upset. People are angry. There is a lot of confusion,” GOP County Executive Bruce Blakeman seethed at a Tuesday press conference.

Democrats make up about 40 percent of the county’s 972,000 voters, according to state Board of Election records from February.

Blakeman ruled out partisanship as a likely cause of the mistake but said the county is investigating what did happen.

This week’s flub by the Rochester-based Phoenix Graphics comes two years after the company messed up absentee ballots for 100,000 Brooklynites shortly before the 2020 election, prompting outrage from voters concerned about whether their votes would count. The mistake extended into Nassau County as well, where nearly 800 people also received botched ballots.

Phoenix will now pay the roughly $300,000 needed to resend a correct registration card to every Nassau voter, Democratic County Election Commissioner Jim Scheuerman told The Post.

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New York to Track Residents’ Food Purchases and Place “Caps on Meat” Served by Public Institutions

New York City will begin tracking the carbon footprint of household food consumption and putting caps on how much red meat can be served in public institutions as part of a sweeping initiative to achieve a 33% reduction in carbon emissions from food by 2030.

Mayor Eric Adams and representatives from the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice announced the new programs last month at a Brooklyn culinary center run by NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s public healthcare system, just before Earth Day.

At the event, the Mayor’s Office -f Climate & Environmental Justice shared a new chart to be included in the city’s annual greenhouse gas inventory that publicly tracks the carbon footprint created by household food consumption, the Gothamist reported.

The city already produced emissions data from energy use, transportation and waste as part of the annual inventory. But the addition of household food consumption data is part of a partnership that London and New York launched with American Express, C40 Cities and EcoData lab, Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala from the NYC Department of Environmental Protection announced at the event.

Aggarwala — who founded Google smart city subsidiary Sidewalk Labs — celebrated the expanded data collection as forging “a new standard for what cities have to do” and a new way to shape policy.

He said the inventory also will measure greenhouse gas pollution from the production and consumption of other consumer goods like apparel, whether or not those items are made in New York City. It also tracks emissions tied to services like air travel and healthcare.

But Adams’ presentation at the event focused on food consumption, particularly meat and dairy.

“Food is the third-biggest source of cities’ emissions right after buildings and transportation,” Adams said. “But all food is not created equal. The vast majority of food that is contributing to our emission crises lies in meat and dairy products.”

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New York Town Declares State Of Emergency Banning Hotels, Facilities From Housing Immigrants

Riverhead in Suffolk County, New York, declared a state of emergency on May 16 in an effort to prevent an influx of illegal immigrants from being sent to the small town following the expiration of Title 42.

Riverhead Supervisor Yvette Aguiar signed the emergency declaration after reports emerged that officials from New York City were arranging to transport immigrants to a number of hotels and motels in the town.

According to a statement from Aguiar’s office, the order was signed “based on information received and in response to reports that the New York City Department of Homeless Services has, or will be arranging for the transportation and relocation of undocumented migrants and/or asylum seekers to hotels or motels within the Town of Riverhead.”

Aguiar told News 12 Long Island that New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, had recently sent out an advisory to all housing facilities in Suffolk County stating that the city would pay for the housing of immigrants for 12 months if the facilities agreed to accommodate them.

The advisory reportedly stated that the city would sign a contract with the facilities that agreed to house the immigrants.

Aguiar told the publication that three facilities in the small town of roughly 33,539 people had agreed to house immigrants and offered to sign the contract.

In response, Aguiar—who previously worked as a detective sergeant for the NYPD Counter Terrorism Division—declared a state of emergency to stave off what she anticipates would be thousands of immigrants heading to the small town, leaving it overburdened.

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Parents hit out at Waldorf school’s explicit sex ed curriculum featuring graphic pictures: ‘Nauseous’

Parents at the progressive Waldorf School of Garden City, Long Island, are angry and some are threatening to pull their kids out school because of new mandatory sex education for fifth graders that teaches, among other things, oral and anal sex and masturbation — with illustrations.

Part of the new sex ed curriculum, which originated with the Unitarian Universalist Church and is called Our Whole Lives (OWL), was just formally announced to Waldorf parents in March by the school.

It includes a controversial book called “It’s Perfectly Normal” that has been around since the early aughts but which parents say was originally meant for older kids but contains material too graphic for fifth graders.

“It made me physically nauseous,” one mother told The Post.

“There’s a whole page on contraception and vaginal and anal sex and more about how it’s perfectly normal. This is clearly agenda-pushing and it’s so outrageous.”

The Waldorf schools are based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the 19th century Austrian philosopher and teacher, who believed more in experiential and gentle teachings rather than disciplined pedagogy.

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Feds Mull Ban on Chocolate Milk in School Cafeterias

The feds are now mulling a ban on chocolate milk for school cafeterias.

The USDA is weighing a ban on chocolate and strawberry milk for elementary and middle school cafeterias because of the added sugar, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“From a public-health perspective, it makes a lot of sense to try to limit the servings of these flavored milks because they do have quite a lot of added sugar,” Erica Lauren Kenney, a public health professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told the Wall Street Journal.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the decision to ban the sugary milks will likely take effect for the 2025-2026 school year.

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New York City Calls The Cops On Unruly Elementary Schoolers Hundreds of Times Each Year

Each year, police are called thousands of times to New York City schools over incidents where children become emotionally distressed or disruptive. In 2022, according to a new investigation published jointly by ProPublica and THE CITY, schools called police 560 times to deal with children under 10 years old. Even when they don’t threaten themselves or others, these children are frequently restrained by police or sent to local hospitals. Some of these children have been as young as four years old.

According to THE CITY reporter Abigail Kramer, New York City public school employees called the police on emotionally distressed students 2,656 times in 2022. In five incidents, school employees called the police on four-year-olds. While black students only make up 25 percent of New York City schools’ population, they comprise 46 percent of “child in crisis” police calls and 59 percent of the students who are handcuffed at school.

While New York City schools policy dictates that a police call should only be used as a last resort, parents told Kramer that school officials used these calls to punish unruly students who were not posing a legitimate safety threat. Further, these parents claimed that police calls frequently ended with their children—many of whom have developmental disabilities—being taken to local hospitals despite no medical emergencies occurring, leading to expensive medical bills.

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New York’s Heavy Hand Keeps Illegal Marijuana and Tobacco Dealers in Business

While I have fond memories of life in New York, many of them involve defying some stupid rule or regulation. It’s a pleasure to now live in Arizona where government, while still idiotic, generally has a lighter touch. Unfortunately for friends and family I left behind, Empire State officialdom still hasn’t learned its lessons, as evidenced by the heavy regulatory hand stifling sort-of-legalized marijuana, and proposals to similarly reinforce the black market with an outright ban on cigarette sales.

“Governor Kathy Hochul today signed new legislation to increase civil and tax penalties for the unlicensed and illicit sale of cannabis in New York as part of the FY 2024 Budget,” the New York governor’s office announced this week. “The legislation, first proposed by the Governor in March, provides additional enforcement power to the Office of Cannabis Management and the Department of Taxation and Finance to enforce the new regulatory requirements and close stores engaged in the illegal sale of cannabis.”

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Video showed cop trying to stop his partner from killing a man. Police investigators never even asked about the footage.

In the spring of 2019, two New York City Police Department officers entered the Bronx apartment of Kawaski Trawick. The 32-year-old personal trainer and dancer had called 911 after locking himself out.

But 112 seconds after their arrival, footage showed, one of the officers shot and killed Trawick, despite the officer’s more-experienced partner repeatedly telling him not to use force.

When an internal investigation later cleared the officers — saying “no wrongdoing was found” — the NYPD offered no explanation for its reasoning. But records obtained by ProPublica can now reveal how the department came to that conclusion.

Investigators never explored key exchanges between the two officers in the run-up to the shooting. They also never followed up with the officers when their accounts contradicted the video evidence.

“Any conversation between you and your partner?” the head of the investigative unit asked Officer Herbert Davis hours after the shooting.

“No,” Davis answered.

That wasn’t true.

After arriving at Trawick’s apartment and finding him holding a stick and a bread knife, body-worn camera footage shows that Davis, who is Black, told his less-experienced white partner, Officer Brendan Thompson, not to use his Taser. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he said, motioning for Thompson to step back.

Thompson fired his Taser anyway, causing Trawick to become enraged, and Davis then tried to stop Thompson from shooting Trawick. “No, no, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Davis said, before briefly pushing Thompson’s gun down.

The investigators had access to all that footage. They never asked either officer about it.

ProPublica obtained the NYPD’s full internal investigation, including audio of interviews with both officers, via a Freedom of Information Law request.

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New York becomes first US state to ban gas in new buildings

New York has become the first US state to pass a law banning gas stoves and other fossil fuels in most new buildings, in a victory for environmental activists.

The legislation adopted by lawmakers in the Democratic-run state legislature late Tuesday will require newly built homes to be all-electric in three years’ time.

The move aims to tackle climate change by reducing New York’s dependence on natural gas.

“Changing the ways we make and use energy to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels will help ensure a healthier environment for us and our children,” said state assembly speaker Carl Heastie.

The law, which could face legal challenges from the gas industry, will require solely electric heating and cooking in new buildings under seven stories from 2026.

For taller skyscrapers, the deadline is 2029.

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