New York City’s jail population is close to reaching pre-pandemic levels. Advocates say dishonest fearmongering about bail reform—and the politicians who capitulated to it—have created a very real safety crisis.
Rates of reporting domestic violence are low in immigrant communities, where survivors of abuse often don’t want to involve the police. As an alternative, the de Blasio administration promised to fund community-based domestic violence programming—but those funds were delayed, and advocates fear programs with strong community ties may not meet the city’s requirements.
The advocates describe the reopening as unsafe and unnecessary amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reductions in budgets related to the novel coronavirus have slowed New York City’s plan to close Rikers by building new jails, and it’s becoming increasingly possible that the city will not meet its January 2027 deadline.
Essential workers say curfews put them at risk of police violence, even though they were exempt.
The country’s homeless population was already struggling to access services during the pandemic.
Lawmakers are targeting a statute that has been used as a cudgel to bat away almost any inquiries into police misconduct.
As COVID-19 spreads, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio are slashing budgets, but leaving funding for police and prisons largely untouched.
The city has created the structural conditions that have engendered disproportionately high rates of infection and death among its Black and Latinx residents.
As infections and deaths mount, state leaders and law enforcement are turning to tough-on-crime tactics in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The island’s Communicable Disease Unit is already overflowing with quarantined people.
As old audio clips of Bloomberg defending the controversial policing policy went viral, new data showed the practice isn’t fading away in New York city.
Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Last month, longtime public defender Chesa Boudin was elected San Francisco’s next district attorney. His victory was not merely an upset over an interim incumbent with establishment […]
Investing billions of government dollars into programs that embed police in Black communities will not reduce police violence, nor repair years of injustice.
Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. New Yorkers were supposed to be finished with all of this. Done with 12 years of Michael Bloomberg, a technocratic, out-of-touch billionaire mayor who oversaw the highly […]
Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. In a video posted on Twitter on Friday, a small woman with a pushcart full of churros is surrounded by four NYPD officers inside the Broadway Junction […]
Recent violent arrests in the city subways should make New Yorkers question the push by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the MTA to hire 500 new transit police.
The mayors of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco wrap themselves in the language of progressivism, but when it comes to the criminal legal system they’re Trumpian.
Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. While progressives and reformers wax poetic about reducing low-level arrests, one group is making it happen: the NYPD. Not out of some newfound understanding about the moral […]
What you’ll read today Spotlight: Bill de Blasio seems perplexed about circumstances that led to a trans woman’s death at Rikers Island. He shouldn’t be. How a D.C. Lawmaker is challenging the racist roots of prison voting restrictions Arrested for shoplifting and dead 2 days later New York lawmakers propose decriminalizing sex work Federal government withdraws […]
Instead of building ‘humane jails’ to replace Rikers Island, let’s push the NYPD to cut down on arrests.
Banishing people from the subway will only marginalize them without addressing the problem.
Darcel Clark’s approach to overdose deaths continue the criminalization of drug users and put her on the wrong side of history, advocates say.
The exceptions to the policy change could actually worsen the racial disparities in marijuana-related arrests, defense attorneys told The Appeal.
Daniel Pantaleo remains with the NYPD four years after Garner’s death.
Activists say a once-radical campaign has been co-opted.
Local activists are set to gather at New York’s City Hall today, urging Mayor Bill de Blasio to end his silence on the idea of the city opening a supervised injection facility, a medical setting for safely injecting drugs. Organized by VOCAL-NY, a nonprofit grassroots organization, the coalition of activists and drug users are calling out […]
In New York City, chants of “I can’t breathe” have given way to neatly run press conferences featuring Mayor Bill de Blasio’s boasts about how the NYPD’s “neighborhood policing” program, described as a collaborative crime-fighting strategy, brings the police and community together. Eric Garner’s killer still on the job and hasn’t faced justice? A horrifying story of rape involving cops from […]