Photo for tonight
Tag Archives: New York City
“It’s a different city when the lights are out.”
After Hurricane Sandy tore through the East Coast, filmmaker Jared Levy took the opportunity to reacquaint himself with the dark netherlands of Lower Manhattan as if for the first time:
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/52933219 w=700&h=303]No words
(Transformer exploding in lower Manhattan. Source: New York Magazine.)
New York awaits Sandy
The Atlantic Wire is updating throughout the day with the latest images, tweets, and descriptions of the moving weapon of mass destruction that is Hurricane Sandy. Landfall just south of New York City is expected later tonight or just after midnight. If you’re living in New York and don’t know whether you’re in an evacuation zone or not, please check…now.
The New York Times is also live-updating. Hopefully the power and Internet stay on throughout the night tonight, but there are no guarantees. Stay tuned.
Press organizations protest police treatment
A few months ago I noted (in a somewhat hyperbolic tone, or so I thought at the time) that the methods used by London authorities to quell the summer riots were heavy-handed and oddly reminiscent of practices more often associated with ne’er-do-well authoritarian dictatorships in the Middle East.
Well, things have only gotten weirder since then. The Occupy Wall Street movement — which, in my judgment, would likely have been ignored long ago if not for senseless police brutality — really picked up steam this past week, when a campus police officer at UC Davis pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters. (Try saying that five times fast.) The school’s chancellor, who was initially somewhat defiant, has since apologized.
And yet perhaps the more notable form of anti-police brutality backlash came in the form of this New York Times post, which stated, “A cross-section of 13 news organizations in New York City lodged complaints on Monday about the New York Police Department’s treatment of journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street movement.”
What I found particularly disturbing about the UC Davis incident, apart from the obvious insanity of the event itself, was the extraordinarily calm and collected manner in which the officer sprayed the students. There were cameras everywhere; he had to have seen them. A police force that can act with such impunity, metaphorically taunting the cameras with its nonchalance, is not fit to “protect” a populace. Coming less than one month after a strange scene in the Bronx in which hundreds of off-duty cops angrily protested their colleagues’ apparently justified indictments for ticket-fixing, one increasingly gets the impression that police departments around the country are collectively in need of a major overhaul. (In that Bronx story, the police even went so far as to taunt welfare recipients, and some wore t-shirts that read, “Improving everyone’s quality of life but our own.”)
I would like to suggest that this start a national conversation about police tactics, but genuine national conversation doesn’t seem to be much in vogue these days.
UPDATE (11/23/2011 1:42 AM Paris time): Well, that certainly didn’t take long. One Times reporter fires a warning shot.
Related articles
- Pepper Spray at UC Davis (loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com)
- UC Davis pepper spray cop once lauded (cbsnews.com)
- UC Davis student: Pepper spray like ‘hot glass was entering my eyes’ (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
- Youtube video of police brutality at UC Davis (ajeffri.wordpress.com)
- Occupy the Law Enforcement-UC Davis’s English Dept. Proposes Disbanding UC Davis Police Dept. (kymkemp.com)
- UC Davis students put up new encampment (csmonitor.com)