Tag Archive: police

Cross-posted with Marie Corfield blog. – Promoted by Rosi.

Yesterday the mayors of New Jersey’s three largest cities, Ras Baraka of Newark, Jose Torres of Paterson and Steven Fulop of Jersey City, announced a bold move to collaborate on reducing violent crime in all three cities.

The proposal evolved from the Passaic River Corridor Initiative along Route 21, which has involved as many as 80 municipalities sharing police intelligence, according to Tom O’Reilly, the head of the Police Institute at Rutgers University. State authorities have said the program has led to hundreds of arrests.

But sharing police officers among three large cities that are not adjacent to one another while also combining social services is “sort of a first,” O’Reilly said. “They are challenging the traditional ways of thinking,” he said of the mayors. “The idea that three mayors have cut across bureaucratic lines is the first step.”

After this happened in Paterson today, Christie had some trouble with people who disagree with him at his “town hall” in nearby Caldwell and ejected some he didn’t want to hear from. – Rosi

Cross-posted with Marie Corfield.

Apparently Gov. Christie heeded the old saying, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” and high-tailed it out of the Silk City after uttering about 25 words in his swearing in of Mayor Jose Torres. But I don’t think it was the typical Jersey-style summer-in-the-city, +90° hazy, hot and humid weather that forced him out. No, I think it was the approximately 50 Paterson education professionals who showed up armed with their best teacher voices to protest. Clad in red shirts to symbolize Trenton’s bleeding of the school district, they were there to deliver a message to Gov. Christie: state control is hurting their students, their schools and profession, and forcing many education professionals out of their jobs because they can no longer support their families and pay their bills.

High-up observation posts with cameras. Thermal-imaging equipment. Police watching you, maybe even when you think you’re alone in your own home. These are the new police techniques of the new Camden County Police. HBO’s Vice, the news documentary series produced by Bill Maher, looks at the new realities of living in Camden, New Jersey.

Here’s a preview. The show’s on HBO tonight 11pm:

This post is shared from the Local Knowledge Blog. Promoted by Rosi.

Over the past week, Gov. Christie has been in Camden twice, once to tout the new police force as a policy model, and once in support of education changes. In doing so, there has been a lot of numbers thrown around regarding the new police force, some optimistic, and indicate the force is downgrading arrests. But none of these pieces has pointed out the obvious; Camden faced a violent crime epidemic in part because of layoffs caused by municipal cuts by Gov. Christie. The Governor is now taking credit for numbers normalizing back to the historical rates that existed before his catastrophic cuts.

This is new. With Gov. Christie’s protesters no longer reliably staying outside his “town halls” he’s got the police snapping pictures of people who speak out against the governor – at a public event. This is a new level of intimidation.

PolitickerNJ reporter Matthew Arco is reporting that a main dressed in plainclothes who later identified himself as a member of the NJ State Police, was seen taking photos of protesters at this morning’s Christie “town hall” in South River:

“The man snapped pictures of the protesters as they stood up and shouted at the governor and also took pictures of the hecklers as they walked past him on their way out of the event.”

Christie’s next “town hall” is:

DATE: Thursday, March 20th

WHEN: 10:30am Doors open at 9am

WHERE: St. Magdalen de Pazzi, 105 Mine Street, Flemington

RSVP: TownHall.Hunterdon@gov.state.nj.us

More, plus video – below the fold. Photo is not via police, but tweeted by Tony Aiello, CBS New York.

Crowdsourcing ideas to treat our capital city of Trenton the way its people deserve. I like it. Promoted by Rosi.

New Jersey is a tough place. A tough place to make a living. A tough place for politics. And most of all, a tough place for urbanites. I love this state, its history and potential, but I’m not going to lie to you. New Jersey’s cities are in horrendous shape. Newark, Paterson, Camden and our own state capital, Trenton, are ravaged by crime, poverty and deteriorating infrastructure. In the interest of honesty, we really should change the saying on that famous bridge into Trenton to: Trenton Rots While Jersey Trots.

And it is Trenton in particular that I want to focus on here. The city was once a gem of the Garden State, with neat, brick row houses standing aside historic streets. Bold architecture stood out in marble state buildings while the Golden Dome of the Statehouse dominated all. Its high school – now basically condemned – had its own gallant neoclassical facade attesting to its civic importance.  

Today our capital city is a national embarrassment, and it’s all our fault. Trenton has become symbolic of everything that is wrong with the state and its government. It makes no sense that a geographically small city of 85,000 souls could reach its present state without cowardly neglect. Just blocks away from the Capitol Complex on State Street are neighborhoods inundated with violence and joblessness. Young adults, many clearly in some kind of mental and physical distress, stroll about at all hours, wandering. Former storefronts deteriorate and rot. Even the city’s once-proud Transit Center is, from the point of view of this experienced educator and long-time Jersey resident, damn scary.  

Released by Fort Lee this morning, are 10 minutes of 911 tapes covering 28 hours during the time local lanes were suddenly closed off the George Washington Bridge. The incidents called in include an increasingly agitated woman calling several times when an ambulance is slow to arrive. Also included are reports of fender benders on the GWB, an employee at a Fort Lee diner calling in about an elderly customer who lost consciousness, and a motorist calling in a woman slumped over in her car in apparent distress

You will hear this phrase repeatedly: “Medical and personal identification information,” apparently inserted to protect individuals’ sensitive information. Audio:

Updates are filed in Comments.

Members of Congress, including New Jersey’s, are scrambling right now, trying to make sure their staffers and visitors are safe, after apparent shots were fired near the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington.

The photo above was posted in a tweet from Judd Legum, editor at ThinkProgress. The U.S. Capitol is on lockdown.

Multiple sources report that Capitol Police responding to the gunfire, and trying to keep people safe right now, are working without pay today, due to the federal government shutdown.

From shutdown to lockdown. Unbelievable week.  

Newly-minted Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop is wading into workers’ rights, but seems to be of two minds.

On the bright side, he’s pushing to require any Jersey City company with over 10 employees to provide all full-time employees five sick days per year. If it secures passage, this measure would be the first of its kind in the Garden State, making Jersey City one of the most progressive cities in the country on this issue.

On the other hand, Mayor Fulop also wants new police hires – called “Special Reserve Officers” – to be prohibited from joining the police union or engaging in any collective bargaining. According to Fulop’s Public Safety Plan, these SROs would be involved with “parking complaints, traffic control, backing up other police units, walking patrols, crowd control, and processing of prisoners.” They’d be paid hourly and have none of the contractual rights of their full-time counterparts. Fulop’s plan indicates that these officers would be used “In addition to, rather than instead of” the existing police force, but it’s not clear what that means, since parking complaints, traffic control, backing up other police units, walking patrols, crowd control and processing of prisoners sound like things that must already be going on, assumedly by full-time, unionized police officers. One can only conclude that by offloading these duties onto hourly non-unionized officers, Jersey City will either shrink its full-time police force, or re-assign the officers currently performing those tasks to other duties within the department.

The irony here, of course, being that it seems doubtful the hourly SROs would qualify for Jersey City’s sick day mandate, leaving a two-tiered employment system within the Jersey City Police Department. What do you make of it all?

promoted by Rosi

Trenton has been going through a bad time with crime and murder, and after letting go 100 cops a little while back is in bad need of more police officers.

But it’s kinda weird to have Trenton Mayor Tony Mack, indicted on any number of corruption and bad act charges, asking for more cops.  Usually the crooks want less law enforcement.