Maura R. O'Connor

February 11, 2013 //

How does a plunging New York City murder rate look from a global perspective? We chart the numbers by neighborhood – from Libya to Poland to Vietnam.

The New York World

The NYPD closed out 2012 with some very good news for New Yorkers: with just 419 killings across the boroughs, the city’s murder rate has dropped to 3.8 per 100,000 residents, lower than it has been in 50 years.

But residents of East Harlem might as well be living in Brazil. In both places, the homicide rate is more than five times as high as New York City’s average. University Heights, the Bronx, has more in common with Russia than nearby Washington Heights: both had murders at a rate of more than 10 per 100,000 residents. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cops, Crime, International Affairs, New York City, The New York World

February 6, 2013 //

Sick and in solitary

Rikers Island is home to a surge of mentally ill inmates, hundreds of them assigned to live in isolation. Did the city miss a chance for better treatment?

The New York World

Last summer, a 25-year-old robbery suspect at Rikers Island took a ball of concentrated soap meant to clean his jail cell and swallowed it. Jason Echeverria had been held for two months inside the Department of Correction’s Mental Health Assessment Unit for Infracted Inmates, where the confined typically spend 23 hours a day on lockdown. By swallowing the soap, Echeverria hoped to spring himself from his confinement; instead, for 20 minutes a corrections supervisor ignored his condition as he became violently sick and eventually died from the poisoning. The city’s medical examiner has found that the lack of immediate medical treatment constituted a homicide. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cops, Courts, Crime, New York City, Prisons, The New York World

January 16, 2013 //

Subsidizing Starvation

How American tax dollars are keeping Arkansas rice growers fat on the farm and starving millions of Haitians.

Foreign Policy

In the wake of Haiti’s devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake exactly three years ago, former U.S. President Bill Clinton issued an unusual and now infamous apology. Calling his subsidies to American rice farmers in the 1990s a mistake because it undercut rice production in Haiti, Clinton said he had struck a “devil’s bargain” that ultimately resulted in greater poverty and food insecurity in Haiti.

“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked,” he said. “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.” Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Environment, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Haiti, International Affairs

November 1, 2012 //

Categories Hurricane Sandy, New York City, Photography

October 3, 2012 //

A tort time bomb

The New York World

Lawsuits against the city’s police soared to a record 2,004 cases entering the courts in the year that ended July 1.

That’s a 28 percent increase over the previous fiscal year, as recorded in the recently released Mayor’s Management Report. It indicates that the flood of cases brought against the New York City police — which have seen a 63 percent rise over the last decade — has not subsided.

Because cases against the NYPD can take at least two to three years to conclude, a spike now means that payouts for court judgments and settlements are likely to squeeze the city budget in coming years.

“It suggests the city has a ticking time bomb for making payouts for police conduct,” said Mark Taylor, an attorney who represents plaintiffs in police misconduct cases. “There is tremendous pressure on the police to make arrests and keep crime numbers low but if there is little legal basis, that costs them money years later.” Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cops, Courts, Human Rights, New York City, The New York World

September 5, 2012 //

The NYPD’s impobable cause

Is the NYPD violating New Yorkers civil rights one summons at a time? What the geography of 350,000 pink slips in New York City reveals.

The New York World

Lindsey Riddick of Flatbush estimates he’s been to 346 Broadway, one of the city’s half dozen summonses courts, at least six times to pay off pink slips police officers have handed to him. Trespassing, disorderly conduct, loitering — the charges kept coming. Three years ago, he spent two days in jail after a warrant was issued for his arrest when he failed to pay one of the tickets.

The 36-year-old’s experience is far from unusual. In 2011, the New York City Police Department issued more than 350,000 tickets sending recipients to court for minor infractions like these, and in the last 15 years cops have issued literally millions of these tickets.

Still, even Riddick, a substance abuse counselor in-training, was stunned on the August evening that he received a ticket for standing in front of his own home. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cops, Courts, Crime, Human Rights, New York City, The New York World

July 24, 2012 //

The Freedom Test

The New York World

On Tuesday morning, accused burglar Mary Thornton experienced an everyday blessing of the New York City courts: a judge released her without bail, on the expectation that she will come back for her trial in October.

The 48-year-old stands accused of taking a cable box from The Camden Hotel, a Upper West Side single-room occupancy residence where she lives, and putting it in her room. It’s a charge she denies, but on Tuesday the prosecutor asked for Thornton’s bail to be set at $15,000, in part because of a checkered rap sheet that included a felony charge from 25 years ago.

Instead, Judge Anthony Ferrara ordered her to be released on her own recognizance. “I would have been sitting in there forever,” said Thornton outside Manhattan’s Central Booking, explaining that she could not have afforded a bail bond if the judge’s decision had been different. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Courts, New York City, The New York World

July 17, 2012 //

Judge: City must pay for failure to produce documents

The New York World

Flickr Creative Commons

A federal judge has castigated New York City’s Law Department and imposed a $10,000 fine for failing to produce documents relevant to an ongoing lawsuit brought against the city by a former Rikers Island inmate, Kadeem John.

The sanction imposed last week is an unusual development in a legal battle that has drawn attention to ongoing inmate-on-inmate brutality at a Rikers Island detention facility for juveniles, and alleged collusion by Department of Corrections employees.

In June 2010, 18-year-old John was severely beaten by another inmate while serving time at the Robert N. Davoren Complex for a probation violation resulting from jumping a turnstile. He suffered bleeding in his brain and internal organs, including a laceration to a kidney. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories New York City, Prisons, The New York World

May 1, 2012 //

Protests Hit City Targets

Wall Street Journal

The demonstrations were largely peaceful and recalled some of the unpredictable events the movement staged while it was based in an open-air encampment for two months last year in Zuccotti Park. There were drum circles in Bryant Park, sidewalk protests that spilled into traffic and a march across the Williamsburg Bridge. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories New York City, Wall Street Journal

April 19, 2012 //

New Search in Etan Patz Case

Wall Street Journal

Rob Bennett for The Wall Street Journal

By Sean Gardiner, Maura R. O’Connor and Danny Gold

Dozens of investigators descended on a SoHo building Thursday in a renewed search for evidence in one of New York City’s most troubling mysteries: the unsolved 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz.

The scene at Wooster and Prince streets in Manhattan on Thursday after FBI agents and NYPD personnel descended on the area.

More than three-dozen Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and New York Police Department officers began what is expected to be a days-long search and excavation of an unoccupied basement less than two blocks from the missing boy’s home.

“We’re looking at what the warrant elaborates: human remains or clothing or effects of the young boy who disappeared after leaving his house in May 1979,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.

The search has not only rekindled an infamous case, it also shifted the focus of the investigation, at least temporarily, from a convicted child molester to a neighborhood handyman.

The trail had long grown cold in the decades since Etan went missing on the morning of May 25, 1979, while walking two blocks alone between his Prince Street apartment and his school bus stop. Although the boy was declared legally dead in 2001, a body was never found. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cops, Crime, New York City, Wall Street Journal

March 21, 2012 //

“The History Page: The Cold War Rag”

The Daily

Jazz icon Louis Armstrong goes to Africa–to fight the Soviets

In October 1960, the U.S. State Department dispatched the 59-year-old Louis Armstrong and his All Stars band as cultural ambassadors to counter Soviet influence in Africa. At the time, the continent was experiencing a wave of political independence movements that uprooted the colonial powers that had controlled African resources for decades and reorganized the political order. Between 1956 and 1961 alone, more than 20 African countries, including Morocco, Ghana, Nigeria and Congo became independent nations. But the U.S. government saw these political changes as a dangerous opportunity for its Cold War enemy to consolidate power in the region. So the State Department began an offensive that utilized a potent and distinctly American weapon on the world stage — American jazz.

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories International Affairs, The Daily

March 9, 2012 //

NYPD Stops Affect Young Minority Men

Wall Street Journal

—Maura R. O’Connor contributed to this article.

The New York Civil Liberties Union gave new ammunition to critics of the police tactic known as “stop and frisk,” charging Wednesday that city officers performed more stops of black males ages 14 to 24 years old than the total number of such men living in the five boroughs.

The NYCLU analysis represented one of the most detailed breakdowns of the New York Police Department’s effort to combat crime through stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking people suspected of street crimes. The data were drawn from the NYPD’s internal stop-and-frisk files, for which the NYCLU successfully sued. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cops, New York City, Wall Street Journal

March 5, 2012 //

“Homicide Watch”

Columbia Journalism Review

Reinventing the homicide beat for the digital age

homicide.watch.png

Mico Briscoe. Black. Male. 18. Shot on November 26, 2011.

Marcellus J. Darnaby, aka “Boom.” Black. Male. 32. Shot on June 15, 2011.

Lucki Nancy Pannell. Black. Female. 18. Shot on February 19, 2011.

These are just a few of the 152 homicides currently listed on HomicideWatchDC.org. In the coming months and years, that number is sure to increase. Since September 2010, Laura Amico, the site’s founder, has tracked every single homicide that has occurred in Washington, D.C., from the day that it occurred until the perpetrator’s arrest and conviction.

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Columbia Journalism Review, Media

January 12, 2012 //

“Two Years Later, Haitian Earthquake Death Toll in Dispute”

Columbia Journalism Review

Journalists can do a better job reporting controversial numbers in disaster zones

Fifteen miles north of the National Palace in Port au Prince, along Haiti’s azure coastline, is a place called Titanyen. From Kreyol, this name translates to something like “less than nothing.” Titanyen feels practically barren, mostly dusty hills with some farmers herding animals. On one of these hills looms a large cross with strips of black cloth tied to it. These rags flap in the breeze like a murder of crows, memorializing the victims of the 2010 earthquake who are buried at the spot in mass graves. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Aid, Haiti, Humanitarian, Media

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