New York City

Another ratbag politician has been arrested in New York for bribes. Here in New Zealand the payments made by politicians are made to mistresses not for bribes.

For the second time in a week, a New York state politician was arrested in a bribery scandal, leading a prosecutor to say Thursday that political corruption in the state “is indeed rampant” and people should be angry about it.

Assemblyman Eric Stevenson, a Democrat, was arrested in a bribery investigation in which another state assemblyman, Nelson Castro, cooperated against him.

Stevenson and four businessmen were charged in part with conspiring to pass a bill in the state legislature to protect a new Bronx adult center from competitors for three years to give the center a monopoly against other facilities that might want to offer meals, social activities and supervision for the elderly and disabled.  Read more »

This has to be the political quote of the day:

“The complaint describes an unappetizing smorgasbord of graft and greed involving six officials who together built a corridor of corruption stretching from Queens and the Bronx to Rockland County and all the way up to Albany itself,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.

He was talking about the dodgy Democrat senator from New York who was trying to rot the system to stand as Mayor for the Republican party.

A New York state lawmaker was arrested Tuesday along with several other politicians in an alleged plot to bribe his way into the race for mayor of New York City.

Democratic state Sen. Malcolm Smith tried to pay off some of New York City’s Republican party bosses to get himself on the ballot as a GOP candidate, federal authorities said.  Read more »

Oliver Stone, it turns out, is a bludging ratbag:

When Oliver Stone made the 2010 sequel to “Wall Street,” in his mind there was only one place to shoot it: New York City. Nonetheless, the film, a scathing look at bankers’ greed, received $10 million in tax credits, according to 20th Century Fox.

In an interview, Mr. Stone criticized subsidies for industries like banking and agriculture but defended them for Hollywood, saying that many movies can be shot anywhere and that their actors and crew members pay state income taxes. “It’s good,” Mr. Stone said of the film subsidies. “Or like basically the way business is done. I don’t understand what the moral qualm is.”

The practical consequences can be easily seen. The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative group, found that the amount New York spends on film credits every year equals the cost of hiring 5,000 public-school teachers.

ᔥ Wall Street Journal

Pinkos don’t get stopping crime. They like to think that everyone is a victim, even the bad bastards. Don’t believe me just ask Chester Borrows who is as wet as a monsoon and thinks that violent offenders are victims too.

Now in New York the pinkos are on the move against the very tactics that have helped drive down crime rates:

New York’s previously unimaginable status as America’s safest big city is now in jeopardy thanks to a rising campaign against its proactive style of policing. In 1994 the New York Police Department, led then by Commissioner William Bratton, embraced the revolutionary concept that the police could actually prevent crime, not just respond to it after the fact.

The department began analyzing victim reports daily to target resources to where crime patterns were emerging. Top brass held commanders accountable for the safety of their precincts. And officers were expected to intervene when they observed someone acting suspiciously—maybe asking the person a few questions, perhaps frisking him if legally justified. In so doing, they sent the message in violence-plagued areas that law and order was still in effect.

Such proactive stops (or “stop-and-frisks”) have averted countless crimes. But a chorus of critics, led by the New York Times, charges that the NYPD’s policy is racist because the majority of those stopped are black and Hispanic. Every declared Democratic candidate for mayor in 2013 has vowed to eliminate stop-and-frisks or significantly reduce them. A federal judge overseeing a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD has already announced her conviction that the department’s stop practices are unconstitutional, the prelude to putting the department under judicial control.

Omitted from these critics’ complaints is any recognition of the demographics of crime. Blacks were 62% of the city’s murder victims in 2011, even though they are only 23% of the population. They also made up a disproportionate share of criminals, committing 80% of all shootings, nearly 70% of all robberies and 66% of all violent crime, according to crime reports filed with the NYPD by victims and witnesses, usually minorities themselves.

Whites, by contrast, committed a little over 1% of all shootings, less than 5% of all robberies, and 5% of all violent crime in 2011, even though they are 35% of New York City’s population. Given where crime is happening, the police cannot target their resources where they’re needed without producing racially disparate stops and arrests.

Critics also contend, among other charges, that the absolute number of stops—680,000—is too high and demonstrates illegality. But there were nearly 900,000 arrests and summons last year under the far more exacting standard of probable cause. It is not surprising that a police force of 35,000 witnessed 680,000 instances of reasonably suspicious behavior among New York’s 8.5 million residents. If 25,000 officers in enforcement commands made just one stop a week, there would be over a million stops a year.

ᔥ Oxford University Press Blog

Franklin Zimring explains how New York City successfully fought crime:

First of all, cops matter. For at least a generation, the conventional wisdom in American criminal justice doubted the ability of urban police to make a significant or sustained dent in urban crime. The details on cost-effectiveness and best tactics have yet to be established, but investments in policing apparently carry at least as much promise as investments in other branches of crime control in the U.S.

Two other important lessons are that reducing crime does not require reducing the use of drugs or sending massive numbers of people to jail. Incidentally, the difference between New York’s incarceration trends and those of the rest of the nation—and the money that the city and state governments avoided pouring into the correctional business—has more than paid for the city’s expanded police force.

There are costs…and other benefits that are the flip side of the same coin:

Unfortunately, New York’s successes in crime control have come at a cost, and that cost was spread unevenly over the city’s neighborhoods and ethnic populations. Police aggressiveness is a very regressive tax: the street stops, bullying and pretext-based arrests fall disproportionately on young men of color in their own neighborhoods, as well as in other parts of the city where they may venture. But the benefits of reduced crime also disproportionately favor the poor—ironically, the same largely dark-skinned young males who suffer most from police aggression now have lower death rates from violence and lower rates of going to prison than in other cities. We do not yet know whether or how much these benefits depend on extra police aggression.

Interesting that the benefits of reduced crime disproportionately favor the poor…then again when you think about it criminals are lazy and so prey mainly on their own.

Alec Baldwin has chickened out of standing for New York’s mayoralty:

Actor Alec Baldwin said in his weekly New York radio podcast that he no longer has the appetite to run for New York City mayor, criticising current candidates and expressing doubts the job was powerful enough to cause change.

“I’ve lost my appetite,” Baldwin, 53, said during his interview with “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” director Stephen Daldry on his WNYC radio podcast, “Here’s The Thing.”

“The people that are running for mayor, I know this is terrible, I look at them and I don’t see myself in that crowd,” said the actor.

A possible foray into politics by the “30 Rock” actor has often been speculated upon in the media, with the actor himself saying he was “very, very interested” in the politics “game” in an interview with CNN earlier this year.

More likely it is because he is worthress: