Hi Neighbor,<\/p>\n
The only thing keeping you from learning about crimes taking place in or around your neighborhood, accidents tying up the Staten Island Expressway, or just about anything NYPD related, is Gov. Kathy Hochul\u2019s signature.<\/p>\n
The governor just has to sign a bill sitting on her desk that would require the New York City Police Department to turn its police scanners back on.<\/p>\n
The NYPD has kept the public in the dark for the past year on the theory that bad guys listen to police calls and plan their crimes accordingly. A couple of years ago, Mayor Adams and New York City Police Department decided to \u201cencrypt\u201d NYPD police radio calls on Staten Island. We aren\u2019t alone. The rest of the city is shut out, too.<\/p>\n
My partner in opinion, Tom Wrobleski, and I have opined about this for a year. It\u2019s our opinion that the greater good is transparency and keeping you informed.<\/p>\n
Staten Island is a big place. It\u2019s obvious we can\u2019t have reporters scouring every neighborhood in search of crime news. So reporters monitor the police scanner, listening for 911 operators dispatch officers to whatever is going on, wherever it\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n
Or we did until we got shut out. Thing is, when we don\u2019t know, you don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
We aren\u2019t the only ones griping about this. Todd Maisel is founder of the New York Media Consortium, made up of eight local, state-wide, and national press organizations. He also was breaking news editor for amNewYork.<\/p>\n
\u201cInsistence on transparency in law enforcement has nothing to do with whether one likes or dislikes police officers,\u201d Todd wrote in an op-ed. \u201cIt comes down to trust and this is essential for a free society and the effective, honest policing of our streets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Senate Majority Leader Michael Gianaris of Queens and Assemblymember Karines Reyes of the Bronx took it even further. They sponsored that bill now on the governor\u2019s desk, the \u201cKeep Police Radios Public Act.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took two hard-fought years to get both houses of the legislature to approve this bill that grants credentialed members of the media and emergency volunteer first responders access to encrypted police radios,\u201d Todd said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNearly the entire Democratic conference voted in favor,\u201d he reported.<\/p>\n
Your party wants this to happen, Governor. We live in a nation where journalists are vilified like never before. <\/p>\n
I doubt any president was fond of the press. But even Dick Nixon never \u2013 publicly \u2013 called a woman reporter \u201cobnoxious,\u201d \u201cpiggy\u201d or \u201cstupid.\u201d It is unthinkable that these things spew from the mouth of a president of the United States.<\/p>\n
It sets a tone. A tone where many think they can say or do whatever pops into their minds. And a lot of what pops in their minds, and often winds up for millions to see on the internet, is twisted and wrong.<\/p>\n
It is essential that thinking politicians realize the value of an independent and principled press in America at a time when the internet is rife with misinformation, exacerbated by misuse of powerful Artificial Intelligence tools.<\/p>\n
When government \u2013 in this case, the NYPD \u2013 shuts down the public\u2019s right to know, which is what they did by curtailing reporters\u2019 ability to cover breaking news, it allows the \u201cbad actors,\u201d as they now are called, to run wild with disinformation, fabricated or distorted news.<\/p>\n
And it keeps you dangerously misinformed or in the dark.<\/p>\n
There are real-life examples on Staten Island of events going unreported \u2013 or almost unreported, if not for tips from the public.<\/p>\n
Last year, a 17-year-old was shot in the leg in a park across from McKee High School in St. George. The only way our reporters found out about it was a tip from a reader.<\/p>\n
Imagine. The only source of news for parents, St. George residents and businesspeople about a shooting outside a high school could well have been from unverified, unreliable rumors on social media.<\/p>\n
Not long after, a 62-year-old man was brutally attacked by a mob of teens on Clove Road near Howard Avenue in Sunnyside. He was bloodied and lost teeth. The mob attacked him just for the sake of attacking. This time, it took a week for a concerned Staten Islander to call, wondering why the attack was never reported or why no arrests were made.<\/p>\n
Our reporters got into it, the borough president then condemned it and suddenly, the NYPD was all over it. Two were arrested a month later.<\/p>\n
If the NYPD is worried about the \u201cbad guys,\u201d credential police radio access much the same way it credentials reporters with press passes. Make them show up at One Police Plaza. Give them a password to access transmissions.<\/p>\n
Gov. Hochul, this is not the time to dimmish the press\u2019 ability to keep the public informed of news that is not fake.<\/p>\n
Brian<\/p>\n
Oh by the way: A couple of weeks ago, I wondered how a United States president who called a man running for mayor of New York City a Communist, while that man called the president a fascist, could pal around in the Oval Office just days after the man labeled a Communist became NYC\u2019s mayor-elect. A neighbor, Joel, asked me an even better question. \u201cI\u2019m much more curious how he thought about the pardon for the former Prez of Honduras, a person responsible for the importation of TONS of cocaine into the US . . .\u201d The thought process, Joel, is keep a cascade of questionable, if not crazy, proposals and decisions flowing every day, and we\u2019ll forget the ones from the day before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hi Neighbor, The only thing keeping you from learning about crimes taking place in or around your neighborhood,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":{"0":"post-67959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-staten-island","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-staten-island","12":"tag-staten-island-headlines","13":"tag-staten-island-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}