Tag: new york

New York Police to Use Drones to Monitor Backyard Labor Day Parties

New York police will use drones to monitor backyard Labor Day parties this weekend.

Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner made the announcement during a security briefing on J’ouvert, an annual Caribbean festival.

Daughtry’s plan to use police drones to monitor backyard barbecues got immediate backlash from civil liberties groups.

Why a Veteran-Owned Freeze-Dried Beef Company Unabashedly Embraces an America First Worldview

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics, according to AP. “Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

Keep reading

Is There a Serial Killer Stalking the Brooklyn Mirage?

Or maybe this EDM club is just too big and messy.

Before I set off for a Saturday night at the Brooklyn Mirage, the teeming oasis of dance-till-sunrise, every-night’s-an-EDM-festival culture that sprang up a few years back on the site of a former lumberyard on Stewart Avenue in East Williamsburg, all my friends cautioned me to “stay safe.” They didn’t just mean “Hydrate” or “Don’t take drugs from strangers.” They were warning of something more sinister that those who go out late in Brooklyn have become absolutely convinced is happening: that a killer is on the loose, preying on zonked-out party boys. If you listen to alarmed reports confidently circulating on TikTok, X, and Reddit, something terrifying is definitely afoot in this admittedly end-of-days landscape of empty streets, chain-link-fenced-off lots, and graffitied warehouses of the industrial neighborhood the Mirage sits in. After all, it already looks like the set for a true-crime documentary or a zombie movie. So just maybe…

This goes back to June 16, when the police found the first body. Karl Clemente, 27, went missing shortly after he failed to get into a party at the Mirage. Five days later, his body was found a few blocks away in Newtown Creek, “unconscious and unresponsive floating in the water,” according to the cops. His wallet was located nearby, and security footage from the night shows him running down the street.

Amateur social-media sleuths wanted to know: But from what? Or whom? 

Then, on July 29, John Castic, also 27, and a Goldman Sachs analyst, disappeared after leaving the Mirage. His friends said he hadn’t been “feeling well,” and he left alone around 3 a.m. Security footage shows him walking calmly down the street, past a pizza cart in front of the club. Three days later, his shirtless body was found floating a short distance from where Clemente’s was found.

Online, people wanted to know: how could this really be just a coincidence?

Then things got even weirder. A story began circulating on social media about a partygoer who claims they were almost “strangled” by a man near the Mirage, before an Uber driver stopped and its passengers saved them. But it never was substantiated by a legit news source or the cops. Then the tabloids dug up an actual police report from a Connecticut doctor who claimed to have been kidnapped by a man pretending to operate a taxi in front of the Mirage on July 21. (The Mirage, which is outside the patrol-range of most yellow cabs, attracts throngs of unofficial people offering rides for money at the end of the night.) According to the New York Post, the doctor told the police that his captor told him he had “put people in body bags,” before taking him on a $6,000 spending spree and returning him to the hospital he worked for in Norwalk.

Keep reading

Fleeing Bronx drug suspect dies when cop knocks him off scooter with cooler; sergeant suspended by NYPD

A scooter-riding suspect fleeing a Bronx buy-and-bust drug sting was killed when an NYPD sergeant smacked him with a cooler grabbed from a local family’s outing, sending the victim tumbling to his death, an eyewitness and police sources said Thursday.

NYPD Sgt. Erik Duran, an NYPD Bronx narcotics veteran who joined the force in 2010, was suspended without pay just hours after the lethal encounter, police said.

An eyewitness, a 25-year local resident, was with relatives when the clash began on Aqueduct Ave. near W. 190th St. about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in Kingsbridge Heights.

The 30-year-old suspect, Eric Duprey, “was on the bike, moving north when the cops started chasing him,” said the 42-year-old witness, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Then he took a U-turn and was riding on the sidewalk… The cop then took my cooler, which was filled with soda cans, water bottles, and hit him.”

The victim’s wife Orlyanis Velez said police were providing her with no details of the deadly encounter.

Keep reading

New York Judge Halts Marijuana Business License Approvals Following Military Veteran-Led Lawsuit

A New York judge has halted new cannabis licenses under a program that favors people with previous drug conviction charges following a legal challenge by a group of veterans.

The ruling by Supreme Court Justice Kevin Bryant blocks the Office of Cannabis Management from granting new conditional adult-use recreational dispensary licenses, or processing existing ones, while the legal challenge plays out.

It comes in response to a lawsuit filed by a group of disabled military veterans who argue the system of awarding and issuing licenses to certain social equity applicants violates the state Constitution.

Under the state’s cannabis licensing program, entrepreneurs with past cannabis convictions or immediate family members with past convictions are prioritized for the first dispensary licenses. Nonprofit groups that work with former prisoners are also eligible to apply for cannabis licenses.

But the veterans argue in court filings that regulators are usurping the state legislature’s authority by changing the rules that required “the initial adult-use cannabis retail dispensary license application period shall be opened for all applicants at the same time.”

They say regulators failed to adhere to New York’s Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act by not issuing licenses to disabled service veterans and other minority groups, whom they argue should qualify.

“Individuals like service-disabled veterans, who are also social equity applicants, who should be prioritized under the MRTA—the marijuana regulation taxation act—the plaintiffs are arguing that they’ve been harmed by being left out of this first mover’s advantage,” said Fatima Afia, an attorney at Rudick Law Group.

The lawsuit is the latest blow to the state’s rollout of a recreational cannabis market, which has been delayed, in part, by a lawsuit alleging that state regulations illegally gave preference to New York residents for pot licenses.

A ruling by the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in May allowed New York to begin issuing operating licenses to qualifying pot businesses in most regions of the state.

Keep reading

Mystery as Goldman Sachs analyst John Castic, 27, vanishes after ‘Zeds Dead’ concert at iconic NYC venue Brooklyn Mirage – weeks after another man was found dead after being turned away from site for ‘drinking alcohol’

A frantic search is underway for a missing Goldman Sachs analyst who was last seen in the early hours of Sunday leaving a Brooklyn nightclub.

John Castic, 27, from Chicago, told friends at the Brooklyn Mirage club he was getting an Uber home to his apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

It remains unclear whether he ever called or took an Uber, but he never arrived home, and his friends raised the alarm on Sunday.

Castic graduated from DePaul University and begun working as a senior analyst at Goldman Sachs in August 2022.

Castic and his friends had been to see the Canadian electronic duo Zeds Dead.

His final photo, shared by a friend, shows him arriving at their front door at 9pm, before heading to the gig on the edge of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick.

His friends say he left the venue at 2:30am.

One person on Reddit claimed that there had been crowds of unlicensed cab drivers hovering around the area, and speculated Castic could have got in one of their vehicles to try and get home.

Police initially refused to raise the alarm, they said, because he did not have any known mental health issues, but by Monday evening had assigned a detective to the case.

On Tuesday a group of his friends plan on meeting outside the club and scouring the area.

Keep reading

Anarchy in Central Park

Politicians have big plans for us.

President Joe Biden repeatedly says, “I have a plan for that.”

“I alone can fix it,” shouted President Donald Trump.

But most of life, and the best of life, happens when politicians butt out and let us make our own choices.

Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou called that “spontaneous order.” Thousands of years later, economist F. A. Hayek added that order comes “not from design, but spontaneously.”

Did you eat a banana this morning? No central planner calculates how many bananas should be grown, who will pick them, when they’ll be harvested, how they’ll be shipped, or how many to ship. We get bananas and most everything in life through billions of individuals, planning, cooperating, and reacting on their own.

“Think about spontaneous order on a road,” says The Atlas Network’s Tom Palmer.

Right. Millions of people, some of them morons, propel 4,000-pound vehicles at 60 miles per hour, right next to each other. We rarely smash into each other.

There are rules, like “pass on the left,” but for the most part, people navigate highways on their own.

Likewise, no one invented language, but the world has thousands. “Experts” tried to invent better ones, like Volapuk and Esperanto, which supposedly would let us communicate better.

“No one speaks these languages,” says Palmer, because language evolves spontaneously. “That is always superior to top-down systems that rely on the information in one brain.”

Amazingly, my town, New York City, has twice now allowed spontaneous order that makes my life much better.

City government once managed Central Park. When it did, trash was everywhere, and most of the grass was dead.

The city then agreed to let a private nonprofit, the Central Park Conservancy, manage most of the park. Without a government plan, people came together, giving money and time to turn the park around. (Disclosure: I was one of them, and now I’m a conservancy director.)

Now Central Park is beautiful. Forty million people spend time there every year. Despite the crowds, the park works well without strict government rules.

Keep reading

Tough on crime Republican busted for having fraudulent license plate on sports car

New York City Council member Vickie Paladino has been outspoken against unregistered vehicles, the need for bicycle license plates and other city requirements, making her knows as a stickler for “law and order.” But according to a report from StreetsBlog NYC, a luxury sports car parked in the Republican’s driveway bears an Arizona temporary license plate that the Arizona Department of Transportation has deemed a fraud.

“The 90-day paper tag — the kind that drivers get when buying a car — lists the same plate number as a real temporary tag that was issued in September 2022, according to Arizona DOT spokesman Bill Lamoreaux. But that real tag expired in December, meaning the one in Paladino’s driveway, which lists an August expiration date, is ‘fraudulent,’ Lamoreaux said,” StreetsBlog reported.

“Paladino said the car belongs to her son, Thomas Paladino Jr., but did not otherwise respond to a request to comment.”

Paladino Jr. denied knowledge of the fraudulent tag.

“I don’t know anything about a fraudulent temporary license plate,” he told StreetsBlog. “I have more than one car, all of which are properly licensed.”

Keep reading

New York Republicans want to ban cannabis use in public

Republicans in the state Legislature are calling for a ban on smoking and consuming cannabis in public places in New York as the legal marketplace is taking hold. 

The measure, backed by state Sen. George Borrello and Assemblyman Michael Novakhov, would allow local governments to put local laws in place to ban the public consuming of marijuana. 

“State residents, including children, are now regularly assailed with the pungent odor of marijuana on public sidewalks, in parking lots and other public spaces,” Borrello said. “Many New Yorkers don’t want to be exposed to either the effects of marijuana smoke or its smell and don’t want their children subjected to it.”

New York first legalized cannabis in 2021, though the marketplace for legal retail sales has been slow to build. Lawmakers who supported legalization have framed it around the need to reverse the enforcement of previously harsh marijuana laws that were previously in place. 

State lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul earlier this year moved to address the sale of cannabis without a license through civil fines and the potential closure of businesses. 

Regulators are also trying to encourage further legal cannabis sales, including allowing sales at public events.

Republicans want fines of up to $125 for consuming marijuana in a public space. The Clean Air Act, as well as local bans on smoking, already place limits on marijuana smoking in public. 

Keep reading

New York’s ‘Symbolic’ Failure In Cannabis Regulation

With cannabis legalization sweeping across the United States, state regulatory bodies face pressure and scrutiny in their efforts to build a legal industry from the ground up. When formulating regulations, they balance the needs of public health, public safety and social justice.

Fortunately, industry standards and recommendations from time-tested consensus standard organizations make some of their choices easy. Unfortunately, even when handed a “no-brainer” standard on a silver rolling tray, New York’s Cannabis Control Board (CCB) made an unforced error that will potentially harm children, patients, small business owners and the general public—groups that cannabis regulation is explicitly intended to protect.

CCB has faced extensive criticism for its “bungled rollout” of the adult-use cannabis industry and its failure to deliver on social equity commitments. One founding CCB member recently resigned amidst the controversy.

Regrettably, CCB has now mandated that all regulated cannabis packages bear a perplexing and intricate product symbol, serving as a persistent and highly visible reminder of its unwavering resistance to the unanimous advice of the cannabis policy community.

In March, CCB took less than two minutes to approve a set of labeling regulations, without any mention of a letter from dozens of stakeholder organizations urging them to reject their homemade symbol in favor of a straightforward industry standard. Marijuana Moment and other outlets publicized the letter in advance of the March CCB meeting.

Looking like a parody of “design by committee,” the New York symbol was designed by the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) and features three separate elements enclosed within a black rectangle.

Keep reading

Everything we know about family of ‘quiet’ Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect Rex Heuermann

The suspect busted for the Gilgo Beach murders is a twice-married architect quietly raising two children — including a son with special needs — in the ramshackle Long Island home he grew up in.

Rex Heuermann’s stunned neighbors in Massapequa Park were nearly united Friday in calling him a quiet businessman and “regular family man.”

Among them was actor Billy Baldwin, 60, who tweeted his shock at waking to “learn that the Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect was my high school classmate” from Berner High School’s class of 1981.

“Married, two kids, architect. ‘Average guy… quiet, family man.’ Mind-boggling,” the local-born actor wrote.

“Massapequa is in shock.”

The 59-year-old architect was raised with his brother, Craig, in the unkempt 1956 home on 1st Avenue that is directly across the bay from where 11 bodies have been found strewn since 2010.

Keep reading