Tag: New York City

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News

To the horizon

I gazed at the horizon on Saturday for the first time all summer. It was aboard the ferry to Manhattan from Rockaway Beach. My mother and I had taken the ferry to the beach in the late afternoon. 

I sat portside, atop a box filled with preservers, in the forward section of the upper deck. A guy with a surfboard in a bag at his side sipped from a 16-ounce can of Coors. A young woman across from me read a paperback. She looked up occasionally to photograph the bay with her phone. Some people wore hoodies to ward off the late-afternoon chill.

A steel-gray sky blanketed the horizon. As we made our way north, a sailboat bobbed passed us heading east.

The ferry slipped past the tip of the peninsula and the horizon emerged. Because of the clouds I could barely make out New Jersey on the mainland. It was like staring into a Rothko field of bands of blue. A boat headed north provided a pinpoint of white. 

“Inlanders,” wrote Melville in “Moby Dick,” “must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling.” For a few hours on Saturday, I was on the water and loved it.

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New York City

Pandemic homecoming

“Welcome back to America, do you recognize it?” a friend emailed recently, a day after I landed back in the U.S. from a seven-month stay with my partner in South Africa.

Though I can’t speak about America, I can say that the neighborhood where I live here in New York City has changed in some by-now familiar ways. Most people wear masks when they go out. Stores have made face coverings a condition of entry.

The state is encouraging everyone to download an app that sends you COVID-19 exposure alerts. Signs posted on windows and fences remind you to stand six feet apart.

KEEP THIS FAR APART

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For the past week, I’ve kept apart, mostly in my apartment, where I wait to see whether I experience any symptoms of the coronavirus. I go out for solo strolls. So far, I feel fine.

Maybe it’s me but the ambient noise — the low-level hum that courses through the city – seems a tick lower than when I left in February. Trash trucks make their rounds, though the streets seem less tidy.

The world has come some way in its understanding of the coronavirus. “I struggle to tell from the news reports how terrible contracting COVID-19 may be,” I wrote on April 1, six days into a 21-day nationwide lockdown in South Africa. “Some people seem to experience mild symptoms, others no symptoms; some people die. I hope never to find out.”

We know more now about how to stay safe. Unlike the U.S., countries that instituted strict lockdowns have bent the curve of new infections. On April 15, I wrote: “So far more than 2 million people around the world have become infected with the coronavirus. Nearly 129,000 have died.”

By now more than 34 million people around the world have become infected and more than a million have died. The virus is projected to take many more lives.

On a whim the other day, I reached for the book “Kitchen Confidential,” which I’ve owned but until now not read. Even before the pandemic, I didn’t frequent restaurants. And I don’t cook, really. Still, the book feels like a discovery.

The vibrancy of the writing aside, Anthony Bourdain’s account of kitchens – their intensity and banging (as in people kicking closed oven doors) and heat – how working in one might be the closest thing to being part of the crew of a pirate ship – makes me yearn to stand shoulder-to-shoulder (safely) with others. I rarely thought this before the pandemic, but I look forward to one day buying a beer in a crowded bar.

That’s how home feels different now. We’re socially distant.

It’s autumn in New York. The days are mild and sunny and dry. The nights clear and cool for sleeping. The nearby ocean lends its warmth. I always like the season. But this year especially, it hints at a future when the pandemic is far away.

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Law

New York and 33 other cities oppose Trump travel ban

On Oct. 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson and several hundred guests, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Robert Kennedy, traveled by boat to Liberty Island, where the president signed into law an act that prohibits discrimination in the issuance of visas.

“Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers,” Johnson said in remarks at the bill signing. “From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.”

We are reminded of that day in a 24-page brief filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn by New York and 33 other cities that together oppose an executive order by President Trump that would block entry to the U.S. by people from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

The court, which will hear arguments in the case at the end of this month, was the first to block the administration from enforcing the travel ban. The Ninth Circuit later blocked its enforcement nationwide.

The cities charge that the ban would damage their social fabric, disregard the constitutional requirement of due process, undermine attempts to combat hate crimes, and upend security and counterterrorism.

New York City, they note, is home to an estimated 27,000 people born in the seven countries covered by the travel ban and another 46,000 people whose ancestry traces to those nations. The city also is home to one of the country’s largest Muslim populations, including nearly 1,000 Muslim police officers, they add.

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Law New York City

DOJ shifts gears in Eric Garner investigation

Two years ago this December, then Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would proceed with a federal civil rights investigation into the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed resident of Staten Island who died five months earlier after an NYPD officer put him in a chokehold while trying to arrest Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes.

DOJ’s investigation would be handled by prosecutors in Brooklyn and Washington, Holder said. In civil rights cases, U.S. attorneys’ offices such as the one in Brooklyn and their counterparts at the Civil Rights Division in Washington work as partners. But last Monday, the department shifted the investigation to D.C. exclusively, taking the Brooklyn prosecutors off the case.

Though federal investigators convened a grand jury in Brooklyn, the  investigation has dragged on, reportedly because of a disagreement among prosecutors there and in D.C, with the group in Brooklyn doubting whether they can prove in court that force used by Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who applied the chokehold to Garner, was unreasonable based on the circumstances. Their colleagues in Washington reportedly think they have enough evidence to proceed.

“It is taking quite a bit of time,” William Yeomans, a former acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, told the Times. “I’d almost say it’s been longer than expected, especially since a video exists.”

The video, of course, is the footage that shows Garner’s death after being subdued by Pantaleo. The city’s medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.

Holder convened the investigation within hours of a decision by a Staten Island grand jury not to charge Pantaleo. (The Staten Island grand jury considered whether Pantaleo’s conduct violated state law.)

The grand jury’s failure to charge Pantaleo sparked sparked protests world-wide. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” which he repeated 11 times, have become a rallying cry against mistreatment of Black people by the state.

“This is a small step forward,” Erica Garner, the victim’s daughter, said in a statement following the decision by DOJ to move the investigation to headquarters. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who succeeded Holder, is a former head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

The city agreed last year to pay Garner’s family $5.9 million to settle a claim of wrongful death in connection with his killing. The state’s highest court declined to order the release of transcripts from the grand jury that might have shed light on its deliberations. Pantaleo remains on desk duty and is likely to be disciplined by the department following the federal probe.

The NYPD in 1993 banned the use of chokeholds after the maneuver was implicated in a series of deaths. For his part, Pantaleo told the grand jury that he meant merely to tip Garner so that Garner would fall to the ground. Upon hearing Garner say he could not breathe, Pantaleo testified that he sought to separate himself from Garner as quickly as possible. But in the video, Pantaleo seems to continue to restrain Garner by the neck.

Now it falls to prosecutors in Washington to determine whether the NYPD violated Garner’s civil rights. What Garner says, as much as what the video shows, commands our attention.

“I can’t breathe,” he told the officers who pinned him to the pavement. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

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Law

School officials erred in terminating teacher whose wrongful behavior did not violate a law or regulation and who hadn’t been warned, court rules

Terminating a public school teacher who has tenure is too severe a measure for behavior that is improper but does not violate any law or regulation, an appeals court in New York City has ruled in a case that shows the significance of due process in the context of public education.

Though evidence presented at a hearing established that the teacher, who teaches eighth-grade phys ed in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, asked at least two of his female students if they had older sisters and accepted a phone number of one of them, his behavior did not warrant his firing, the Appellate Division’s first department determined in a decision published Sept. 27.

In 13 years of service, the teacher had not been accused previously of any misconduct, nor had he been warned or reprimanded regarding the conduct at issue, the court noted. Nor was there any evidence that the teacher made sexual comments to his students. An arbitrator who sided with the city concluded that termination might be “too severe” but was the only penalty that could “jolt” the teacher into knowing the seriousness of his misconduct, But that, by itself, could not justify termination, according to the majority.

Writing in dissent, Justice Peter Tom said the teacher “irreversibly abused his position… by transforming the high school where he teaches into a dating forum using his young female students to search out candidates for his illicit romantic escapades. This behavior harmed his students, even if they did not fully realize it.”

Reaction to the ruling in the neighborhood was mixed. “He shouldn’t be allowed back,” one mother  told the Post. “You shouldn’t ask students if they have attractive moms.”

But a colleague of the teacher’s told the paper he welcomed the decision, saying the incidents were “blown out of proportion.”

The ruling shines a light on the procedures that school districts must follow when dismissing a teacher who has attained tenure, which in New York safeguards educators who have earned the protection (after three or four years, depending on when the teacher was hired) from being fired arbitrarily.

Teachers in New York City have had tenure protections for nearly a century. As Dana Goldstein, a journalist who has chronicled the history of the teacher profession, has written, tenure protects educators from political interference and assaults on their civil liberties.

“This ‘due process’ was the bedrock principle of teacher unionism,” notes Goldstein, “the protection that could help prevent teachers from being fired because of their political leanings, gender, race, religious beliefs, pregnancy or opposition to administrative policies – all once-common practices.”

Among other stipulations, a tenured teacher charged with misconduct is entitled to have the charges detailed in writing, to review the evidence, to confront witnesses and to a hearing before an impartial arbitrator.

That’s not to suggest that school officials can’t discipline or remove a tenured teacher for incompetence or misconduct. Tenure simply means that the officials must have a legitimate basis for doing so and adhere to procedures provided by law.

As the justices noted, teachers can and have been removed for, among other reasons, sexually harassing and forcibly kissing a colleague, verbally abusing students, engaging in a relationship with a minor female student, and for discussing bestiality, necrophilia and his own ejaculations with students. But even in the latter case, school officials warned the teacher at least three times to stop such conduct before firing him.

The court cautioned the teacher from Park Slope that while the ruling orders a less serious punishment it does not excuse his behavior. “Should [the conduct] continue,” the justices wrote, “termination may well be in order in the future.”

Categories
Sports

New York set to ban smokeless tobacco from ballparks

It may be time for the Mets and Yankees to buy more Bazooka.

The New York City Council this week is expected to vote on a bill that would ban smokeless tobacco from sports arenas throughout the five boros. The bill, which would take effect upon being signed into law by Mayor de Blasio, would make both Citi Field and Yankee Stadium tobacco-free.

The measure also would make New York the fifth major league city to prohibit use of smokeless tobacco at ballparks. In the past year, Chicago, San Franciso, Los Angeles and Boston have enacted similar bans, which are backed by Major League Baseball, as well as by both the Yankees and Mets.

The main sponsor of the measure says distinguishing tobacco based on how players consume it reflects stereotypes about snuff that no longer hold sway.

“I couldn’t imagine us being OK as a city or society as a whole with a baseball player standing in left field smoking a cigarette while the game was going on, on national television,” Councilman Corey Johnson, a Manhattan Democrat who chair’s the council’s health committee, told the Daily News in February. “But… just because of culturally what has existed for a long time, it’s OK for professional athletes to stand in left field or in the dugout and chew wads of smokeless tobacco.”

Though the sight of players dipping has marked baseball for decades, the habit takes a toll. Two years ago, Tony Gwynn, a Hall of Fame outfielder, died from cancer of the salivary glands that he attributed to chewing tobacco.

Curt Schilling, the retired pitcher for the Red Sox, blames smokeless tobacco that he chewed for three decades for cancer of the mouth that he has battled since 2014.

“You will develop sores, you will lose your sense of taste and smell,” Schilling wrote last year in a letter to his younger self that was published in The Players’ Tribune. “You will develop lesions. You will lose your gums — they will rot. You will have problems with your teeth for the rest of your life.”

Smokeless tobacco contains nitrosamines, which form during the curing of tobacco and can cause cancer and heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as one-third of major leaguers use smokeless tobacco despite the dangers.

Efforts to ban smokeless tobacco have met with pushback from the players’ union, which asserts that baseball cannot ban snuff so long as it remains legal. As the union sees it, smokeless tobacco presents no danger to others from second-hand smoke.

Still, the union supports efforts to persuade players to quit the habit. “It’s definitely an addiction and it’s a tough addiction to get away from, because you’re always around it and there’s certain triggers,” an unnamed player for the Mets told the New York Post. “But I think if they apply a rule, we should abide by it.”

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New York City

Memorial Day

Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, Riverside Park, New York City (Photo by Beesquared)
Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Riverside Park, New York City

Categories
Law

Court accelerates review of Garner grand jury case

A state appeals court will accelerate review of a trial judge’s decision not to unseal grand jury records in the case of Eric Garner.

Briefs by the New York City Public Advocate, The Legal Aid Society of New York, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Staten Island branch of the NAACP and The New York Post will be due May 5, the Appellate Division, Second Department, said in an order released Monday.

The reply brief from the Staten Island District Attorney will be due by May 26, with any responses due June 5.

“Very pleased our motion was granted,” tweeted Public Advocate Letitia James. “The public has the right to know what happened behind closed doors.”

On April 14, James filed papers seeking expedited appeal of a decision by Judge William E. Garnett, who ruled last month that the parties who sought release of grand jury minutes in the Garner case had failed to establish a sufficient need for the disclosure.

Eric Garner died on July 17 following a confrontation with police officers. Video of the confrontation, which included an officer placing Garner in a chokehold, circulated widely and led to protests calling on the district attorney to open the grand jury records.

By law, grand juries in New York State operate in secret, in part to protect witnesses and jurors. “In addition, those who were not charged by the grand jury have a reputational stake in not having their conduct reviewed again after the grand jury had already exonerated them,” Garnett wrote in an order released March 19.

According to Garnett, one who seeks release of grand jury minutes must show a compelling need for the material and explain the purpose for which that person seeks access to the minutes.

Categories
New York City

Cold nights, big city

A constant
A constant

February here in New York City started cold and ended colder.

The temperature on February 1 reached 36 degrees. Today, the 28th of the month, is slated to reach 29. This month is the third-coldest February on record, according to the National Weather Service. That makes it the coldest February since 1934.

I realized recently that the temperature displays atop the old bank building at 73rd and Broadway and the one above Columbus Circle seem to change by fewer than 10 degrees no matter when I see them. Whenever I pass, the digits rarely, if ever, exceed 30.

“It was like the most sick month you can think of,” Jay Engle, a meteorologist with the weather service, told the Times, which noted that it even has been cold on subway platforms and other places that don’t usually get cold.

Which brings me to the one redeeming thing I can say about February. I never hurried home from the grocery store for fear that my frozen yogurt would unfreeze.

On Presidents Day, I went into a movie at 4:00 p.m. Though the feature was fine, I bought a ticket mostly because I wanted to warm up.

That reminded me of a piece from The New Yorker that I like. It’s about the Bleecker Street Cinema, an art house theater that closed in 1991. In the piece, from 1974, a guy named Larry emerges from the ticket booth. Les Rubin, the impresario behind showing old movies, tells the reporter:

Larry has an M.A. in meteorology. It wasn’t until tonight that he realized there was a difference between William Powell and Dick Powell. And look what it’s done for him! He just had a brilliant idea. We put a big sign out front that says, ‘40° WARMER INSIDE.’”

Categories
Law News

‘Hamilton,’ hip-hop and immigration

hamilton

I had the pleasure recently of seeing “Hamilton,” the new musical at The Public Theatre about the immigrant from the West Indies who helped found the nation, wrote two-thirds of the Federalist Papers and practically invented the U.S. financial system.

The show, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, is the “buzziest” of the spring, according to The Wall Street Journal. As the Journal reports, “The founding fathers and Mr. Burr are played by non-white actors—Mr. Miranda was born in New York to Puerto Rican parents—to underscore the diverse American experience.” The show’s run has been extended three times.

As it happens, the anticipation that awaits “Hamilton” comes as Republicans in the U.S. Senate tried for a third time last week to stop President Obama from allowing as many as five million immigrants who arrived in the U.S. unlawfully as children to remain here and work, study or serve in the military without fear of deportation.

The wrangling in the Senate follows passage along party lines in the House of a measure that would gut the president’s latest order and a similar initiative from three years ago. As the GOP’s moves suggest, immigration continues to drag down Republicans, who, with some exceptions, remain captive to the Tea Party, which opposes any action that might connote an easing at the border. As Elizabeth Drew writes in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books:

In less than two weeks in office, the House also voted to strip enforcement provisions from the Dodd–Frank bill to reform financial institutions, and to roll back some of the president’s immigration initiatives, a move that could end in the deportation of millions—this despite the deep concern of Republican pragmatists, including party chairman Reince Priebus, that unless the party can attract a great many more votes of Hispanics and other minorities, its chances in the Electoral College are dim for 2016.

Though Hamilton himself, who arrived in North America at about age 17, would have been too old and possibly too undocumented to qualify for the president’s policies, his spirit imbues them. As someone who has the privilege of performing pro bono legal service on behalf of immigrants, I have seen first hand the anticipation that accompanies the documenting of oneself and the hopefulness that greets the ability to work in, serve or otherwise contribute to this country. It’s hard to get more Hamiltonian.

Miranda depicts the Founding Fathers as upstarts who birthed a nation and as the forbears of the pushing back, from civil rights to hip-hop, that follows. Miranda traces a line from one to the other and captures the energy that America on its best days draws from those of us assembled here. “To me there’s nothing more fascinating than a roomful of young people just trying to look at the world and seeing how they can affect it as they’re being affected by it,” Christopher Jackson, who plays George Washington in the show, told the Times.

The idea of having a stake in one’s country runs through both the president’s order and Miranda’s show. “By telling the story of the founding of the country through the eyes of a bastard, immigrant orphan, told entirely by people of color, [Miranda] is saying, ‘This is our country. We get to lay claim to it,’” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, told The New Yorker.

For his part, the president, recognizing the extent to which his actions resonate with this nation of immigrants, practically dares Republicans to go forward with their plans. “I will veto any legislation that got to my desk that took away the chance of these young people who grew up here and who are prepared to contribute to this country” he told young immigrants in a meeting last Wednesday.

The people whom the president aims to assist have been referred to as “Dreamers,” an acronym inspired by “Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors,” a cleanup of immigration laws first introduced nearly 14 years ago that would provide a path to citizenship for certain groups of green card holders.

Of course, dreams have spurred immigrants as long as there’s been an America. “Hey, you, I’m just like my country. I’m young, scrappy and hungry,” Miranda’s Hamilton announces in verse. “And I’m not throwing away my shot.”