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Criminal Justice

City Hall and CCRB Negotiate Over Hiring Freeze


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The Civilian Complaint Review Board is negotiating with City Hall for an exception to the citywide hiring freeze. The Board wants to rehire an attorney for a program called the Administrative Prosecuting Unit (APU), which independently prosecutes police misconduct trials.

In the past, New York City Police Department attorneys handled all substantiated cases of police misconduct. With APU, the CCRB’s own lawyer is authorized to take on a portion of cases as a lead prosecutor.

In November 2011, the city extended funding for the program through fiscal year 2012, including funds for one attorney and one investigator. However, with the hiring freeze in effect, the Board is unable to hire an attorney who would be the centerpiece of the program. This may change as Daniel Chu, CCRB’s chairman, expressed optimism about his talks with City Hall.

“CCRB is beginning the search for highly qualified candidates for the APU attorney vacancy,” said Chu. “Recognizing the importance of this hire to the continued success of the APU, City Hall has agreed to review our final selection with a view to permitting the hire as a critical hire.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s press office did not comment on the negotiation, except to say “While a hiring freeze affects all City agencies, each case is reviewed individually. Once a candidate is identified, we will review right away.” CCRB has posted a job vacancy on its website.

Talks about a program like APU date back to 2001 when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik proposed giving CCRB the authority to prosecute cases. The state courts ruled that all cases that involve disciplinary actions against officers must be filed with the deputy commissioner for trials, instead of a new office proposed by Giuliani. However, CCRB and the police department began working more closely together.

In 2008, the CCRB and NYPD launched a pilot program where CCRB lawyers would participate in a “second seat” capacity during some police prosecutions. In 2010, Commissioner Kelly and the CCRB took this farther, to grant the Board lead prosecution authority on a random selection of cases.

In the years leading up to 2010, the city saw a rising number of complaints against the NYPD, especially over controversial stop-and-frisk practices where police were encouraged to stop and search large numbers of people for weapons. Many complaints dealt with alleged racial profiling by the police.

Christopher Dunn, an associate legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union said that the NYPD moved to accept the program “because of public embarrassment due to PD handling of cases” in 2009 and 2010, when NYPD allegedly threw out many substantiated complaints of police misconduct.

Only substantiated cases ever make it to trial and it may take the CCRB many months to determine whether a complaint has merit. About 5-6 percent of all complaints to the CCRB are substantiated.

Attorney Laura Edidin prosecuted and won her first solo case for the Board in May 2011 against two Bronx police officers. She served as solo lead prosecutor on seven total cases for the Board and has since moved on to work as deputy executive director for legal affairs at CCRB at the pilot’s conclusion in November.

The CCRB petitioned and won approval from the city to continue the program, citing its effectiveness in maintaining strong police accountability due to the Board being independent from the Police Department. According to a CCRB testimony, the practice also improves communications between the Board and the police and lessens the chance that the NYPD will drop substantiated cases for trial.

Additionally, attorneys who investigate misconduct are in a unique position to give crucial and correct details to a judge and prepare complainants for trial outside 1 Police Plaza.

However, despite City Hall’s authorization of funds for the program, the city’s hiring freeze prevented CCRB from hiring an attorney to replace Edidin and continue APU’s work. The allocated funds currently sit unused.

“This makes the program meaningless because there’s no one there to prosecute the case,” said Dunn.

The CCRB can hire someone from within city government but its director of communications, Linda Sachs, said that the Board would prefer to seek attorneys from the broadest possible pool of qualified candidates. Potential hires will be reviewed by City Hall, which may make a rare exception to the hiring freeze.

The Guns on Our Streets


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In 2002, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released a list of the 10 guns most commonly recovered from crime scenes across the country. At the top of the list: the Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver and the Ruger .9mm semiautomatic pistol.

Almost ten years later, NYPD Officer Peter Figoski was shot and killed while responding to an early morning Brooklyn home invasion. When Figoski's fellow officers arrived on the scene, they found two guns: a Smith and Wesson .38 and a Ruger 9mm.

The December shooting, the first in which an NYPD officer was killed in the line of duty in more than four years, once again puts the spotlight on two types of handguns that appear to not only be commonly accessible despite strict gun laws, but also the weapons of choice for many of the city's bad guys.

In a statement to the press shortly after the shooting, Mayor Bloomberg praised Officer Figoski and the entire NYPD for their efforts in helping to drastically reduce crime throughout the city in recent years. He also chided federal officials for failing to crackdown on the illegal gun trade.

"[A]s we look at what’s gotten better in New York City over the decades, there’s one thing unfortunately that hasn’t changed – hasn’t changed at all in Washington – our nation’s threat from the weapons that end up as illegal guns on the streets of our communities," the Mayor said.

Lamont Pride, a 27-year-old already wanted in connection with a shooting in North Carolina, fatally shot Officer Figoski with the Ruger .9mm as Pride attempted to flee a basement apartment in Brooklyn's Cypress Hills neighborhood. He stashed the gun under a car as he tried outrun Figoski's partner, Glenn Estrada. The .38, allegedly belonging to co-conspirator Kevin Santos, was later found in a microwave inside the apartment.

A Pattern

The Figoski murder isn't the first high profile shooting involving gunmen with these types of firearms. In 1993, Colin Ferguson opened fire with a Ruger 9mm on a crowded LIRR train, killing six passengers and wounding another 19. More recently, a gunman shot two men with a Ruger .9mm, killing one, while aboard a Q111 bus in Queens. A Smith and Wesson .38, meanwhile, was Bernhard Goetz's weapon of choice when the electronics technician turned vigilante infamously pumped rounds into four young men aboard a subway car in 1984.

Nor are these the only guns being used in shootings throughout the city. Yet, while much of the focus of the NYPD's gun buyback program (the department has recovered more than 7,000 guns since 2008, but declined to give a breakdown of the kinds of guns turned in) has been on exotic and high-powered firearms - a June event netted a Tec-9 loaded with hollow point bullets; previous buybacks have yielded AK-47 assault rifles and Uzi submachine guns - the weapons arguably doing the most damage on the street are smaller handguns like the .38 and 9mm.

In 2010, more than 75 percent of the 8,853 firearms traced after use in an NYC crime were either pistols or revolvers. Recent law enforcement statistics don't break down gun use, tracing and recovery by make and model. Four of the top five guns on the 2002 ATF list, however, were small handguns.

Many of the guns most commonly used in street crimes are what Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of law and police studies at John Jay College who previously served as both an NYPD officer and criminal prosecutor, and other cops call "Saturday night specials": small, cheap handguns that are generally easy for buyers to get their hands on. "Less sophisticated, cheap guns that are easy to use have been the coin of the realm," O'Donnell says.

But not too cheap, according to Charles Key, a gun expert who spent nearly 26 years with the Baltimore Police Department. "There is a myth about Saturday night specials. The old Saturday night special was some sort of cheap knock off, made of less than sturdy steel that you could buy on the street corner from some rat faced guy selling $2 pistols," says Key, who served as an expert witness in the civil case filed against New York City by the family of Amadou Diallo, the 23-year-old Guinean immigrant who was shot and killed by four NYPD officers in The Bronx in 1999.

"In actual point of fact, criminals don't want cheap knock offs." According to Key, there is no inherent quality - price or ease of use, for example - in Smith & Wesson and Ruger firearms that would make them more attractive to criminals than other handguns. "It really depends on the model," he says. "The easiest gun to use on the market is a double-action, semiautomatic pistol, which simply means that when you pull the trigger, the weapon fires."

The Ruger P95 model used in the Figoski shooting is a 27 oz. double action auto loading pistol - when fired, it automatically reloads and recocks itself, so that a user can fire again by simply pulling the trigger - designed to shoot .9mm caliber bullets. Ruger discontinued the P95 in 2005. The gun retails for roughly $400. Smith & Wesson currently offers more than 60 models of its .38-caliber revolvers, ranging in price from about $450 to more than $1,000. The company's Model 10 has been called " the most popular centerfire revolver of the 20th Century." Both companies declined to speak with the Gazette for this story.

These and other smaller handguns are not only attractive to criminals, but also law-abiding citizens who keep guns for self-defense. Smith & Wesson touts its Bodyguard line of firearms, which includes .38 revolver and .380 semi-automatic pistol, as accurate and easy to use as well as "lightweight, compact and concealable for personal protection."

While Key says that widespread criminal use of Smith & Wesson and Ruger handguns is likely an anomaly - there are plenty of less expensive, lightweight and relatively accurate guns on the market - their prevalence may be a simple matter of supply. Smith & Wesson made more than half of the .38s produced in the country last year, while Ruger produced the second most .9mm firearms.

Looking to Washington

In his tenure as Mayor, Bloomberg has repeatedly called for beefed up federal gun restrictions as well as further tightening of what are already some of the country's toughest gun control laws here in the city.

"It's virtually impossible to get a permit for a handgun in New York City" says criminal defense attorney Don Murray, who represents clients in criminal gun possession cases.

In addition to prohibiting persons who've been convicted of a felony from obtaining a gun license, city law also allows NYPD to deny an application by a person it deems to be lacking "good moral character" or where other "good cause" exists. Private individuals who successfully navigate the licensing process are most like to get a premises license, allowing the licensee to possess a handgun only at a specific residence or place of business.

Given the tough licensing rules, It's safe to say that the overwhelming majority of guns on the street are illegal; that is, the people carrying them don't have a license. Possession of a firearm without a license is a felony, punishable by anywhere from one to 15 years in prison.

"It's very, very strict in New York," Murray says. "Mayor Bloomberg has put a lot of pressure on the DA offices to come down hard on gun possession."

Out of State

The illegal weapons floating around the city are often purchased in southern states like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia along the so-called "Iron Pipeline." The Ruger .9mm used to shoot Officer Figoski was purchased at a Colonial Heights, Va. sporting goods store, by a man who claims that he lost the gun when he was evicted from his home in 2009, but never reported it lost or stolen.

Virginia is the largest out of state source of guns traced in New York crimes, according to a 2009 ATF report. For one Virginia police officer who has investigated illegal gun sales, it's the Old Dominion's gun expos - large gun shows at which private individuals who are not considered dealers can sell guns without conducting a background check and recording basic buyer information - that attract gun hungry criminals.

"We have some of the biggest gun expos in the country where buyers either don't have to fill out paperwork or get someone else to buy a gun and fill out the paperwork for them," the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says. "The expos are notorious. You'll see a lot of backdoor dealing there."

Guns are also making their way into the city via the internet. Just days after the Figoski shooting, Mayor Bloomberg announced the results of an NYPD investigation finding that 62 percent of online gun sellers contacted through websites like Craigslist and ArmsList agreed to sell guns to buyers who admitted they couldn't pass a background check, a felony offense.

For many firearm enthusiasts, the city's strict gun laws are not only ineffective, their also misguided. According to Charles Key, guns don't kill people. Criminals do. " You very seldom find police officers killed by priests, pastors or accountants," Key says. " It's folly to keep pointing fingers at a gun. You can ban one gun and criminals will find another one."

Indeed, while the city continues to enjoy nearly historic lows in violent crime, including homicides, its strict gun permitting process is nothing new. Bernie Goetz's application for a handgun license was reportedly denied back in the 80s, when the Big Apple was awash in crime. New York is certainly safer than it was in those days, but Officer Figoski's death is a reminder of the danger that criminals with illegal guns pose to both citizens and those who protect them.

Council Bills To Curb Street Vendor Fines Moving to Committee


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For Moustapha Cisse, 48, setting up shop each morning can be a nightmare.

Cisse is a general vendor; he typically sells handbags and scarves at 51st street and 7th avenue. His table or cart must be within 18 inches of the curb, ten feet from a crosswalk, 20 feet from a store entrance, and on a sidewalk that is at least 12 feet wide. His license must be worn, visibly, on their chest and not covered by scarves or outwear, and he can’t be on top of a subway grate or too close to a pay phone. Cisse’s found a regular spot to peddle his goods, but choosing that location can’t have been easy. In Manhattan, there are at least 160 blocks with restrictions on vendors — some ban vending entirely on certain stretches while others restrict the time of day vendors are allowed.

Deviations from these rules come at a high price. Fines can cost as much as $1000 for each violation; vendors say that fines can quickly put them in debt or completely out of business. Vendors typically make $15,000 - $20,000 a year, according to the Street Vendor Project, the advocacy group that has lead the charge to change these laws.

Two City Council bills are working to fight these hefty tickets and according to lead sponsor Councilman Stephen Levin, they will likely receive a Committee hearing within the next three months.

“We have a lot of support, this is a matter of months,” Councilman Levin said, calling the fines "outrageous."

The bills, Intro 434 and Intro 435were introduced in November 2010 and already have a majority support — 33 and 35 cosponsors, respectively.

“These are common sense, basic fairness bills,” Councilman Levin said. “[Vendors] are extremely hard-working. These people are trying to put food on the table for their families. For someone to get a $1000 fine for a minor infraction goes against a lot of what we believe in this city.”

The Fine Print

“It’s not doing the city any good to issue such outrageous fines because it just ensures that the people aren’t going to be able to pay them,” Levin said.

Indeed, in 2008 and 2009, the Independent Budget Office found that of the $15.8 million of issued tickets, only $900,000 was paid to the city.

The two Council Bills proposed by Councilman Levin already have a majority number of cosponsors. The first bill, Intro 434, has 33 cosponsors and would lower the minimum ticket to $25 and set the maximum fine cost at $250 and Intro 435, which as 35 cosponsors, would stop the ticket price for rising for unrelated violations, meaning that the fines only rise if the tickets are issued for the same violation.

The 2010 IBO study that investigated the issue also found that the regulation of vendors was costing the city money. In fiscal year 2009, street vendors cost the city approximately 7.4 million, though only $1.4 million was collected in revenues.

The “Easy Targets”

Mohammad Anu Miah, 50, emigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1998 has been selling hot dogs in SoHo since 2002, but this year he lost his license because he owes $4,513 dollars in fines but doesn’t have the money to pay it. Some of his fines are health code violations — something these bills wouldn’t affect — but one $1000 violation is for vending on a sidewalk less than 12 feet wide.

Miah says he can’t find other work and still owes the money to the city. Sometimes he can’t afford to eat and since losing his license, he’s been unable to send money back to his wife and six children in Bangladesh.

“They refuse to admit that there are ticket quotas, but I think it’s pretty publicly known that there are,” Shapiro said. “Vendors are easy targets – they’re out their on the street, a lot of them are immigrants and they don’t speak great English. It’s hard for them to protect themselves.”

Vendors report that arguing with the cops or trying to show that they are in fact abiding the law only leads to more tickets.

“The lesson I’ve learned is don’t talk,” said Cisse, who said he thinks he’s been targeted by cops. Cisse still has his license, but is in debt to a friend after he had to borrow money for a $750 ticket last year.

Vendors report wide disparities in enforcement. Street Vendor Project explains that the regulations for vendors are so elaborate that many cops can’t keep them straight.

Wanda Foster, 46, was fined for being less than 90 feet from a Subway while selling fruit. Even when she said she used a tape measure to show the cop that she was a full 90 feet from the subway entrance, she still received a ticket. But the law only says vendors have to be ten feet from the subway, according to Matt Shapiro, the staff attorney at the Street Vendor Project.

And while vendors can fight these tickets, Shapiro said that most don't know how to appeal the decisions and language barriers often hurt their attempts. The Street Vendor Project often appeals tickets, but they are rarely successful in getting the ticket reversed.



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