Colin W.
Times Square: crossroads of the world and battleground for different visions of public space.
Both conservative law-and-order and liberal-minded urban planning leave poor communities of color in the crosshairs. Public spaces, a theoretically shared space, become battlefields.
The huge gang raid last week made big headlines. But when the dust settles, it’ll do little to make residents safer while raising questions about how fair it is to connect dozens of teens to amorphous “crews.”
Ted Cruz’s Islamophobia is easy to reject. But New Yorkers should also be concerned about their city’s demand for more counter-terrorism funding from the federal government.
An activist argues that reforms—those recently passed or currently considered—will never really end the harm that Broken Windows policing does to communities of color. What would work is to make the NYPD smaller.
The program would handle gun cases to serve one basic underlying purpose: to speed up gun convictions. Many, however, might not equate “fast tracking” with justice or due process.
Op-ed: The rivalry between the current and former heads of the NYPD is well documented, but ultimately trivial to the real issues with policing.
NYCHA is bringing back the “Not Wanted” list, more cops are being assigned to address street homelessness and—in the wake of a cop’s death—the mayor is faulting criminal courts for leniency. This author wonders if this is a new Bill de Blasio, or just the real one.
Advocates contend that a high-profile killing and police raid at the Grant and Manhattanville Houses reflect a need for programming for kids, and wonder why a multimillion-dollar fund has not provided it.
The controversy involving a pioneering pedestrian plaza in a neighborhood famously transformed by quality-of-life policing is a clash between two dominant ideas in modern New York: One, that sanitized spaces represent the public square. The other, that policing can eradicate all annoyances.
Students who have protested against the lack of sports at small high schools have raised two important issues. One is about sports, the author argues. The other is about whether the city really wants its youth to be as politically engaged as it says it does.
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