Justin Clark was an endearingly strange and uncommonly brilliant human being who immersed himself in the study of psychedelic drugs. How did he develop an addiction to obscure dissociatives?
My story for New York Magazine:
Here is
@katie_honan
confronting
@NYPDDCPI
with evidence that the chain he wielded to imply that “outside agitators” barricaded Hamilton Hall is a common bike lock that
@Columbia
itself sold to their students
"I literally talk to people all day long who live in their Hamptons house, who used to live [in NYC]," Governor Cuomo says, in explaining why he cannot support a billionaire's or millionaire's tax
If you’re wondering why you’ve been stuck in a car on the Williamsburg Bridge for an hour: The NYPD is checking every vehicle coming into Manhattan for any possible infractions
>
@GovKathyHochul
just said she decided to kill congestion pricing because the owner of this Midtown diner said his New Jersey customers weren't going to....drive into his Midtown diner anymore?
The NYPD arrested and jailed a cyclist for fixing a driver's illegally obscured license plate.
"They're basically conspiring with drivers to obstruct their plates."
Just ~1.5% of all commuters into NYC's central business district were going to pay the congestion pricing toll.
By killing congestion pricing, this is who
@GovKathyHochul
is favoring
Here is
@NYPDDCPI
telling reporters it was a "joint decision" to not inform press than an officer accidentally fired his Glock handgun during the raid of
@Columbia
.
Did
@NYCMayor
weigh in?
"This is a police department incident, why are you bringing in the mayor?"
"I'm not here today to talk to you about numbers"
@GovKathyHochul
told New Yorkers when she announced a National Guard deployment into the subways.
Some relevant numbers:
Governor Cuomo unveiled a new line of NY-branded hand sanitizer, NYS Clean. It's made by Corcraft, a state company that uses prison labor, and pays prisoners an average of 65 cents an hour
"Since 2011, I've been monitoring protests. This is the first time they ever decided to go after me. So I was like, whoa, the game just changed right now."
"I already regret not intervening, and I'm not sure why I couldn't. Part of it was shock. Part of it was everyone being so focused on getting the police there. There just was not a lot of compassion for the person lying on the floor, not breathing."
Got laid off from
@Gothamist
/
@WNYC
today. Grateful for the work I was able to do, for my wonderful colleagues, and for my time as a
@SAGAFTRANY
shop steward. Please do send any work leads my way!
The BQE is flooded, neighborhoods are flooded, the MTA is literally telling people to not take the train, but New Yorkers have yet to hear from their mayor today
New Yorkers use OMNY to get on the bus.
MTA cops board, asking everyone for proof of payment.
MTA cops fail to verify OMNY payment using gadgets.
New Yorkers get kicked off bus.
@MaxRivlinNadler
has the story
(The MTA denies this is even happening)
"We have to push back on this narrative that the city is out of control,"
@NYCMayor
, who is one of the biggest purveyors of this narrative over the last two years, just told reporters
If you are sitting in NYC traffic honking your horn repeatedly, you should have to get out of your car, put on a diaper, and poop your pants because you are a little bitty baby who needs his diaper changed wah wah
Those gross viral videos on the subway literally exist to turn our brains into mush, so that we keep staring at the screens when actual ads appear. Whatta town.
"He essentially called us petulant children. Called us detached people. But we were protesting him because we're not detached, we're conscious of the things he's doing and how he's harming our city”
How badly does
@NYCMayor
want city office workers back in the office 5 days a week?
Workers with cancer and risk of severe COVID are having their hybrid schedule requests denied.
Two teenagers drowned on Rockaway Beach last night, along a stretch of beach that the city has elected not to staff lifeguards at this summer. One witness recalled talking to a victim’s friend, who was frantically searching for a lifeguard
@katie_honan
@NYPDDCPI
@Columbia
And here is
@NYPDDCPI
doing what I did not hear during the press conference, which is confirming that "outside agitators" were in fact arrested inside
@Columbia
's Hamilton Hall. No word on how many, or who, or what criteria for "outside agitator" is.
The MTA also loses hundreds of millions of dollars every year to drivers who evade tolls but for some reason the Post et al don't complain about them as much
@errollouis
@nypost
The MTA states its losing $119M per quarter due to fare evasion.
That's $1.32M per day.
@ $2.75/ride that's a minimum of 480,808 rides that are not paid for each day.
@ 320 summons per day, the chance of getting caught is .0666% for people evading the fare or 1/1503.
At maybe the biggest MTA board meeting in recent memory, while officials are talking about how the congestion pricing pause will hurt the agency, the camera suddenly pans to boardmember and congestion pricing foe David Mack, who appears to be...sleeping?
If the NYPD wanted to be transparent, they would release the body camera footage of the officers who raided Hamilton Hall.
Instead, they release this heavily edited footage they added background music to
Let’s take an inside look at how your
@NYPDnews
officers safely & professionally restored order at
@Columbia
&
@CityCollegeNY
yesterday, after school officials requested our assistance in dispersing unlawful encampments on their campuses & persons barricaded inside their
Eric Adams has made public safety the cornerstone of his mayoral campaign, yet his vehicle was cited 14 times in 2 years for speeding through school zones
FWIW: Late last fall, I asked all five NYC DAs if "organized retail crime" was a problem they've been encountering.
Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, said no.
(Queens and SI didn't respond)
Here is
@katie_honan
confronting
@NYPDDCPI
with evidence that the chain he wielded to imply that “outside agitators” barricaded Hamilton Hall is a common bike lock that
@Columbia
itself sold to their students
A group of NYC Democrats are sponsoring a landlord-backed bill in Albany that would be, in the words of one housing analyst, "a total disaster for rent-stabilized housing"
The NYPD's press office can tweet out a photo of a rag stuffed into a Topo Chico bottle but they can't be bothered to assemble any factual details on an SUV that flipped into Riverside Park on a busy spring Saturday
Lotta cars parked on City Hall grounds today for the Council’s stated meeting. Took a photo of one with a Blue Lives Matter flag before a member of the security detail told me I couldn’t be there & that “people don’t like it” when you photograph their cars…
>
@NYCMayor
calling for an "immediate investigation" of the Capitol Police's response to the Trump mob, criticizes leadership.
The investigation into his own police department for their treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters took 6 months and no leadership changes were made.
Riot cops just cleared Washington Square Park, arresting one person because he has a speaker playing Fuck The Police, and swinging batons at a teenager. Because the park closes at midnight
"What [Cuomo] should recognize is that this pandemic is not a typical business cycle downturn...If you designed a form of economic punishment to single out working class and poor people and absolve all responsibility of the rich people, this would be it"
Notably,
@GovKathyHochul
did not tell the Buffalo Bills that they needed to "live within their means" when they asked for $1 billion in public subsidies
"I'm not raising taxes in our budget this year," Hochul told reporters today. "Taxes are high enough in the state of New York, and we have to live within our means."
The driver was not given a summons for having an illegal plate.
When I asked the NYPD about why they did this, they responded with a basic narrative of what happened, only they referred to the driver as the "victim."
How will state lawmakers who oppose congestion pricing raise $1 BN for the MTA?
@DavidWeprin
: "You'll find out in a week"
So, lawmakers are scrapping a plan that had years of public review/debate & replacing it with one hashed out behind closed doors
Assemblyman David Weprin says legislature is working on implementing a payroll tax before the end of the week and that there are “other proposals” New Yorkers will “find out about”.
Lawmakers are trying to end session for the year by tomorrow…
"The governor should be sympathetic to that argument, and he should use that to make the case that the wealthy have an obligation to share in the burden that has been unfairly imposed on minorities and people of color and the poor and the working class."
The mountains of garbage bags waiting for collection that clog our curbs and sidewalks and serve as edible yurts for millions of rats are now as much of a NYC institution as the dollar slice and 24-hour subway service.
How did this happen?
An NYPD undercover accused Jawaun Fraser of stealing his wallet.
Fraser, 18, was sent to prison for 2 years.
Fraser and his attorneys later found out that his arresting offices had been sued dozens of times for false arrests.
@michaelhayes
reports:
In
@UFT
's lawsuit against congestion pricing, they claim that the cost of driving from Staten Island into Lower Manhattan "would increase to approximately $74 a day," including gas, parking, etc.
Which is a lot.
Except...this is what Staten Island drivers currently pay!
The NYPD Commissioner and the Mayor's Office didn't bother showing up to a City Council hearing on police oversight yesterday.
So New Yorkers spent hours testifying about their own experiences with the NYPD.
Absolutely scathing account from
@macfathom
None of the powerful leaders who helped block the Fordham Road busway in the Bronx live in the Bronx.
Most live in the suburbs.
Some have incomes that are 20x the average Bronx bus rider. One apparently has a personal driver.
The MTA Board cannot back away from Congestion Pricing now. It would violate the 2009 Public Authorities Reform Act that explicitly stated the MTA board is an independent body and should be making all decisions with the MTA's fiscal responsibility its primary concern.
Vice displaced some of the best music venues in NYC so five years later they could then move into a WeWork building that takes an hour to get to from Midtown
Incarcerated New Yorkers want to witness the historic solar eclipse on April 8.
The agency in charge of NY state prisons has ordered "three-hour system-wide lockdown" instead.
>
@MikeBloomberg
ordered the city's Law Department to fight the federal stop and frisk lawsuit until the day he left office. His press representatives argued it was the right thing to do. Now they're all working on his 2020 campaign
I have apologized for taking too long to understand the impact of stop and frisk on Black and Latino communities.
I inherited stop and frisk. In an effort to stop gun violence, it was overused. I cut it back by 95%.
I should have cut it back sooner.
Asked if NYC keeps any data to show that throttle e-bikes favored by immigrant delivery cyclists are more dangerous than pedal-assist used by Amazon and others,
@NYCMayor
says "I've got something better than data. Common sense."
#bikenyc
NY lawmakers, for 9 hours: Here's data showing that bail reform had no real impact on crime.
Lobbyist for prosecutors: "You cannot deny that the release of hundreds of car thieves, burglars, drug dealers...had an obvious impact on crime in New York."
This is a mayor who was elected on a platform of reforming the NYPD, making it more accountable and transparent, gaslighting the public about what is happening on the streets of his city
Brian Lehrer describes police violence this week, and asks
@NYCMayor
: Do you acknowledge that those things happened and say the NYPD acted wrongly?
"I don’t have information that tells me that."
De Blasio has this info because his press secretary witnessed it. He's lying, again
Nothing to see here, just the former chief of staff to
@NYCMayor
living part-time at a 5-star resort in Florida, eating caviar for breakfast, vibing with the mayor's criminal defense attorney at Cipriani
"One of the Crown Heights tenants, who asked that her name not be published, said she was recovering from emergency brain surgery when the landlord and maintenance worker barged into her room."
Joel Rivera, a Black trans organizer who has been leading these marches for weeks, was arrested last night and lost her shoes. She said the NYPD offered her manila envelopes.
Rivera was released early Friday with a ticket for possessing a bullhorn
"We're debasing ourselves as a legislative body to provide cover to a clueless governor," one source in the Assembly told Hell Gate. "Congestion pricing is a law and you can’t just ignore it because a poll made you nervous. What are we even doing here?"
"Asked whether the person had been charged, a police spokesperson responded: 'It's not a crime to open your car door.' The spokesperson later clarified they were 'joking around.'"
#VisionZero
#bikenyc
My story on today's press conference.
NYPD Did 'Amazing Job' Arresting Hundreds of College Students to Protect Them From 'Outside Agitators,' NYPD Says