MICHAEL O. ALLEN

Menu
Tag

NYPD

Of a fire next time

By HomepageNo Comments

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/nyregion/26decision.html?fta=y

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/nyregion/26about.html?ref=nyregion

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/27response.html?fta=y

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/27brown.html?fta=y

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/nyregion/26victims.html?fta=y

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/nyregion/26bell.html?fta=y

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/27bell.html?fta=y

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/nyregion/28bell.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/nyregion/26cops.html?ref=nyregion

Verdict in Sean Bell Case Draws a Peaceful Protest, but Some Demand More

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

About 150 people marched along Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem on Sunday to protest the acquittals in the Sean Bell case.

By CARA BUCKLEY and THOMAS J. LUECK
Published: April 28, 2008

The circle of people was thin but spread wide, looping an intersection in the heart of Harlem on Sunday and blocking long lines of cars and buses in four directions. In the middle of the circle stood a cluster of angry people, and in that cluster stood a young man with a bullhorn and a question.

Enlarge This Image

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Nicole Paultre Bell attended a news conference on Sunday held by the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Enlarge This Image

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Joseph Guzman at a news conference on Sunday where community leaders praised the peaceful response that followed the verdict.

“Why isn’t everyone else out here with us?” the man, Robert Cuffy, 22, asked. The circle of people, roughly 150 strong, stared back. It was two days after a judge acquitted three New York City detectives in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died on the morning of his wedding day 17 months ago after the detectives fired a total of 50 bullets at his car.

Unlike some previous verdicts in police shootings, the acquittals in the Bell case have so far been largely met with a muted response. Thousands of protesters did not fill the streets, no unrest ensued. Still, on Sunday, some protesters and advocates around the city demanded federal investigations into the case and greater oversight of the police, while others puzzled over why the verdict had not yielded a stronger response.

At a news conference at the Harlem headquarters of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Mr. Sharpton and other activists, politicians and community leaders praised the overall peaceful response that followed the verdict, and vowed to fight the judge’s decision in strategic rather than bellicose ways.

“Some in the media seemed disappointed, they wanted us to play into the hoodlum, thug stereotypes,” Mr. Sharpton said. “We can be angry without being mad.” And while many onlookers shouted their support, others admitted restlessness and a yearning for something more.

“People are hungry for leadership that’s not there,” said Calvin B. Hunt Jr., who listened to the news conference and joined the protest that followed, marching down Malcolm XBoulevard and blocking the intersection at 125th Street. He spoke longingly of prominent black activists in the 1960s and 1970s, among them Malcolm X, Angela Davis and Huey Newton. “After the Amadou Diallo verdict, we marched till we had corns on our feet, and nothing changed,” he said. “In this verdict, there was no justice. So why should there be peace?”

His sentiments were shared by some others in the crowd. A poet who gave his name as Thug Love said gang members from the Bloods and Crips should unite to “police and protect their own community” the way the Black Panthers did decades ago. A concert promoter, who goes by the name Goddess Isis, said that the news conference sounded to her like “politics as usual,” and that the community needed grass-roots leaders with concrete solutions to ongoing problems, like police harassment.

“We are on our own here,” she said.

But Nkrumah Pierre, a banker who lives on Long Island and who marched in the protest on Sunday, said: “We’ve progressed to the point where we don’t need to act out in violence. This is an intelligent protest, and a strategic protest.”

Still, others on Sunday called for changes within the system, in particular the ways in which the city’s police are monitored.

At a news conference outside Police Department headquarters in Lower Manhattan, civil rights advocates and lawmakers — including Norman Siegel, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union; State Senator Eric Adams of Brooklyn; and Marq Claxton of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care — called for the appointment of a permanent statewide special prosecutor, to supersede district attorneys in cases of police shootings or alleged police brutality.

Too often, the advocates said, district attorneys have close relationships with the police, muddying prosecutorial independence. The advocates also said the timing of the proposal was influenced by the ascension of David A. Paterson to governor.

“For the first time we realistically have someone in the governor’s seat that understands the need for these reforms,” Mr. Siegel said.

The proposal, Mr. Siegel said, was loosely patterned on the former Office of the Special State Prosecutor for Corruption, created under Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in the early 1970s on the recommendation of the Knapp Commission, which uncovered corruption in the Police Department. That office was disbanded in 1990.

Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paterson, said the governor would review the recommendation. “Like all New Yorkers, the governor takes the issue of police wrongdoing very seriously, but he also believes that the overwhelming majority of police officers perform their duties honorably and conscientiously,” Ms. Heller said.

In Harlem, one of the protesters, Melanie Brown, who is 29 and lives near the street in Queens where Mr. Bell was killed and two of his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, were wounded, said she believed that every response, no matter how seemingly small, helped.

“What happens next happens,” she said, as protesters chanted and hoisted aloft Pan-African flags, striped in red, black and green. “Right now this is a unity thing.”

April 28, 2008
Love0

Diallo Kin ‘Refuse to Lose Hope’ By PATRICE O’SHAUGHNESSY, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

nullSunday, April 29, 2001

Amadou Diallo’s parents expressed anguish yesterday over the Police Department’s exoneration of the four cops who killed their son, and urged supporters to “refuse to lose hope.”

“Whoever said [the cops] have done nothing wrong, they are wrong,” said Diallo’s mother, Kadiatou. “I am saying to Mayor Giuliani the decision is wrong, I am saying to the police commissioner the decision is wrong … let’s make changes to prevent this from happening again.”

Amadou Diallo’s parents speak out at Al Sharpton’s Harlem headquarters.
Kadiatou and Saikou Diallo flanked the Rev. Al Sharpton at his Harlem headquarters to denounce Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik’s decision Friday to put the cops back on the job — without guns or badges, but without punishment — based on the findings of two police panels that deemed the fatal shooting of the unarmed man a mistake.

“They are letting the police go free to kill and kill,” Saikou Diallo said.

Sharpton announced plans to compile a record of incidents of racial profiling, arbitrary stop-and-frisks and other interaction between cops and minority groups to build a civil class-action suit against the NYPD.

He also said the black community will target an unnamed major corporation that supports the police union.

Sharpton derided Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen for approving one of the cops, Edward McMellon, as a firefighter candidate and promised to protest at FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn.

“This week we will prepare for a huge visit to the Fire Department,” Sharpton said.

Meanwhile, Giuliani reiterated support for Kerik’s decision.

“The reality of the Diallo case is that it was tragic and horrible,” the mayor said on John Gambling’s WABC radio show.

“A mixed jury of four blacks and eight whites concluded that. As did the Clinton Justice Department, when they decided not to pursue a civil rights case. And that’s what the police panel concluded.

“All these people can’t be wrong. … You have to willing to adjust your attitude in the face of reality.”

With Michael O. Allen

April 29, 2001
Love0

He’s Held in Mom’s Slaying By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and JOHN MARZULLI, Daily News Staff Writers

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Saturday, April 14, 2001

Detectives were questioning a 20-year-old man suspected of stabbing his mother to death in an argument in their Brooklyn apartment, police said yesterday.

The son apparently had been given an ultimatum by his mother, Christine Thompson, 44, to “straighten out his act” or leave home, a police source said.

Neighbors in the building on Lincoln Place in Prospect Heights heard loud music, arguing and crashing objects coming from the victim’s fifth-floor apartment during the night and predawn hours.

Downstairs tenant Naoko Ozaki, 25, said she called the building superintendent when water began pouring from her ceiling about 8 a.m.

When the super, Cresencio Alvarez, went to check out the problem in Thompson’s apartment, he heard her screaming for help and called 911.

“The police kicked the door down,” Alvarez said. “I saw only the leg. She was lying in the hallway. The blood was everywhere — on the wall and on the floor. I saw bloody footprints.”

Thompson, a guard, was rushed to New York Methodist Hospital, where she was pronounced dead from stab wounds.

The son, who works at a Manhattan Kmart, showed up at the apartment about an hour after police arrived and was arrested before being questioned at the 77th Precinct stationhouse. A kitchen knife believed to be the murder weapon was recovered.

The pouring water came from a sink that apparently had been left running before the fight, police said.

Neighbor Raul Morales, 61, said the victim had trouble with her two sons.

“The big one is in jail now. The other one is a little bit out of his mind,” he said. “He looks at you with wide-open eyes, or he’s laughing like he’s crazy.”

Original Story Date: 04/14/01

April 14, 2001
Love0

Hizzoner’s Relationship Not Private Affair by JIM DWYER

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, May 07, 2000

Last fall, a Daily News reporter wondered why the mayor had vanished most summer weekends. For years, the mayor made public appearances on Saturdays or Sundays all summer long, so reporter Michael O. Allen asked the mayor’s press office about his schedule.

Because the answers were vague, Allen asked for the mayor’s public calendars.

File a freedom-of-information request, the reporter was told — a classic stalling tactic, but Allen sent in the paperwork.

A few weeks later, he got a call from the press office. Withdraw your official request, and we’ll tell you what you want to know.

Yes, the mayor had cut way back on his weekends.

How come? Speak to deputy mayor so-and-so, the press office told Allen, and he’ll give you what you need.

The deputy mayor said the mayor was taking more private time on weekends to be with his son.

“He’s also got a new love in his life,” the deputy mayor said. He gave a long, theatrical pause.

“It’s called golf.”

We now know the mayor has developed a very close relationship with a woman who is not his wife. He brought her to the party for the New York City Marathon and to be with him on New Year’s Eve in Times Square.

And he apparently stayed at the friend’s beach home in the Hamptons many weekends last summer.

Nothing here calls for Kenneth Starr and a grand jury investigation. While Bill Clinton lied about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky and confessed to being ashamed of himself, the mayor has all but boasted about his involvement with his friend Judi Nathan. She was posing for pictures all week.

Still, anyone who files Giuliani’s nonmarital relationship under the category “purely private” is hallucinating.

When three or four New York City Police detectives have the job of chauffeuring the mayor to liaisons in the Hamptons with his friend, the public life meets the private around the Douglaston exits of the Long Island Expressway. From the city line to Nathan’s condominium in Southampton, it is 75 miles.

“There’d be one or two city Town Cars in the parking lot all weekend,” said a Southampton neighbor of Nathan’s. “These big guys would be in the cars, with the motors running when you went to bed at night, and they’d be there in the morning. There were always at least two, sometimes three or four.”

Not so long ago, a New York City mayor got in trouble for sending city detectives to Long Island. In 1991, when David Dinkins dispatched two detectives to investigate a fire at the home of a friend, Giuliani clucked disapprovingly: “This poor guy gets into trouble every day.”

Last week, I asked the Police Department how much it cost the public to have the current mayor delivered by a police taxi service to his woman friend in Long Island. I wanted to know if helicopters had been used, hotels booked, food paid for, and if there had been any repayment by the mayor for these expenses.

“We never give out details of security,” Police Chief Thomas Fahey said Friday.

“Not details of security,” I said. “This is a request for costs.”

“Then you’ll be able to see which guy made the most overtime and figure out who spent the most time with him,” said Fahey.

“Give the cost information without the names,” I proposed.

“FOIL it,” he said.

“FOIL it” means file a freedom of information request. It would do no good, Fahey assured me, but I should file it anyway.

We argued some more, and then he said to put the questions in writing. I did. Late in the day, his office called back: “The chief wanted me to tell you that our statement is, ‘We’re not responding.'”

Later on, Fahey revised his official answer: “We don’t discuss security.” Of course, some of this is security, and some of it is a taxi service provided to the mayor.

Since the city has chosen to stonewall, we are free to analyze it ourselves. It is fair to say that the cost to the public of the mayor’s personal friendship was at least $200,000, much of that having to do with overtime and the need to dedicate so many detectives making $55,000 to $75,000 annually sitting in a Long Island parking lot.

Naturally, the mayor is entitled to protection, wherever he is. So are his wife and family, who continue to live in Gracie Mansion, the official residence supplied by the public. His wife and children also have police protection and chauffeurs, a reasonable precaution.

What about Judith Nathan? Asked by The News’ John Marzulli if she also receives police protection, Commissioner Howard Safir retorted: “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”

Whatever the bright line between public and private life, Giuliani long ago declared that his temperament was a force that would shape the city.

And if he were a senator, he has even declared what the standard of public morality should be. In February, he called for the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms.

“The Ten Commandments is part of our tradition, it’s part of our history,” said Giuliani.

A few weeks later, the mayor and his “very good friend” Judith Nathan marched on St. Patrick’s Day, in a parade where gays are banned for practices seen by the Catholic Church as sinful as, say, adultery.

The wife who shares a public home with the mayor was not in that parade.

May 7, 2000
Love0

HERO, BROTHER, EVERYMAN: BRONX MONUMENT IS ONE ALL OF US CAN EMBRACE By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

nullSunday, May 24, 1998
The monument to Cpl. Walter J. Fufidio, which has come to serve as memorial to those who served in World War II and the other wars that have followed, stands almost nondescript most of the year in the square named after him.
It will be spruced up in time for Memorial Day, for those who want to remember.
But for the surviving Fufidio brothers, the monument is a shimmering beacon to the good old days, to the values of sacrifice, family and community that typified that old Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx, something current and future generations can take lessons from.
Arthur, the oldest, went into the Air Force. Walter came next and he couldn’t wait to join up. He was in the Marines. Michael followed, joining the Navy in August 1945, but the war ended three weeks later. And George, the baby of the family, was too young to fight.
“We belonged in World War II and everybody knew it,” Michael Fufidio, now 71 and a resident of Melbourne, Fla., said. “A lot of us volunteered and for a small neighborhood, we sent a lot of people off to that war.”
In scenes that were probably repeated in every neighborhood, block, or corner in the city, kids played seemingly endless games of stickball in the streets one day and the next day their families were seeing them off to go fight in a distant war.
Michael Fufidio, their father who himself fought in the World War I a few short years after arriving in America from Italy in 1914, would take three of his sons over the Spofford Avenue hill to go to the Longwood Ave. station.
Walter Fufidio, an artilleryman, would participate in the campaign that came to symbolize the United States Marine Corps: The bloody invasion of the volcano island of Iwo Jima and the planting of the America flag on Mount Suribachi.
Nearly all of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers defending Iwo Jima were killed. Among the 6,821 Americans killed was Cpl. Walter Fufidio. In the waning days of that campaign, Marines undertaking a mop-up operation were pinned down by shattering shell fire from a fortified Japanese position.
As his posthumous Navy Cross Medal, second only to the Medal of Honor in American military honors, described, Walter was without cover when he delivered a steady stream of neutralizing shell fire against the enemy position, enabling his infantry unit to charge and wipe out the resistance.
“He galantly gave his life for his country,” the citation read.
George Fufidio said his mother took the loss very hard. Anna Fufidio, now 96 and living in a Throgs Neck nursing home, visited her son’s grave at St. Raymond Cemetery on Tremont Ave. for many years afterward.
“She’d go up there and she’d wipe the snow off the grave,” George Fufidio, who is 62, said.
In the years after the war, Michael would serve 20 years in the New York City Police Department and Arthur and George each served 20 years with the city Fire Department.
Arthur Fufidio was reflective when asked what lessons should be drawn from his brother’s monument. Government officials make wars and call on regular folks like him, his brothers and the other boys they grew up with to fight, he said.
“We were meant to serve and that was it,” Arthur Fufidio said. “It doesn’t seem like the world is in any different position now. That was supposed to be the war that ended all wars but we seem to live under a constant threat of war.”

May 24, 1998
Love0

FBI’s Most Vaunted

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, October 5, 1997

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

The Most Wanted List, an icon of a seemingly bygone era, started innocently enough.

A wire service reporter asked the FBI in 1949 for a list of the toughest guys it would like to capture. The resulting story in newspapers around the nation generated so much publicity that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made it a permanent list.

The Most Wanted Lists of the ’50s featured bank robbers, burglars and car thieves. By the ’60s, radicals made it onto the list. Revolutionaries, serial killers and mobsters hit the list in the ’70s.

Since the late 1980s, the FBI has been using tabloid television shows, such as “America’s Most Wanted,” to generate publicity.

That program’s first show in 1988 profiled David Roberts, an prison escapee who had been serving six life terms, two of them commuted death sentences.

After the show, New Yorkers tipped off law enforcement that Bob Lord, a homeless man who quickly worked his way to director of Carpenter Men’s Shelter in Staten Island, was none other than Roberts.

New York has been a favorite haunt of the famed list’s fugitives. At least 37 of 451 suspects that the FBI has put on the list have been nabbed here.

Gerald Watkins was profiled on “America’s Most Wanted” in 1995. In 1994, his girlfriend turned down his marriage proposal; he shot her, her son and their 18-day-old daughter. He then came to Harlem, his boyhood home.

Cops caught him trying to duck out of the window of an apartment.

Even serial killer Andrew Cunanan came this way once.

The current list includes Queens hoodlum Paul Ragusa.

“What the numbers might lead you to conclude is that fugitives think New York is a good place to come, to sort of blend in, be anonymous, disappear,” FBI Agent Jim Margolin said. “We think otherwise.

“What the numbers also indicate is that we and the NYPD are very good at finding people who don’t want to be found,” he said.

Even beyond the city limits.

Before his late son Tupac branded himself an outlaw rapper, Mutulu Shakur was a black revolutionary who masterminded a string of armored car robberies, including a 1981 Brink’s holdup in Nanuet, in Rockland County, that went haywire and led to the deaths of three people.

After 3 1/2 years on the Most Wanted List, Shakur was captured by two New York cops on a Los Angeles street corner in February 1986. One of the cops stopped Shakur with a flying tackle.

Mutulu Shakur is serving a 60-year prison sentence.

October 5, 1997
Love0

Don’t Sell Cops Short, Says Rudy

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, August 31, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN and PAUL SCHWARTZMAN, Daily News Staff Writers

A day after thousands protesting police brutality marched on City Hall, Mayor Giuliani yesterday sought to refocus attention on cops’ accomplishments while his chief rival took the day off.

Eleven days before the Democratic primary, front-runner Ruth Messinger spent the day out of sight with her family, while opponents Sal Albanese and the Rev. Al Sharpton reached for votes in Harlem, Brooklyn and Queens.

Of the Democratic candidates, only Sharpton invoked the rally and the alleged police torture on Abner Louima, as he has since the reports of the incident first surfaced three weeks ago.

Greeting a cheering Latino crowd in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Giuliani said it was time for the public to cease castigating cops.

“Yesterday, over a 24-hour period, there was one murder in New York City,” Giuliani said. “That didn’t happen because the Police Department aren’t doing its job.

“They are saving lives in New York City while some people have been spending time excessively bashing them. That’s a big mistake. That has to stop.”

Giuliani also praised the cops for enduring during Friday’s demonstration a torrent of curses and taunts that they are racists and Nazis.

“That’s a lot of people who are calling you names, rushing up towards you, using words like Nazis and fascists — things that should just not be said,” he said, adding that the cops’ restraint showed that they are the “finest police department” in the country.

Although protesters castigated Giuliani during the march — at which Messinger, Sharpton and former Mayor David Dinkins spoke — one political analyst said the mayor would not suffer politically from the event.

“The real story — that the police and the marchers were able to maintain civility — is a plus for him,” said Mitchell Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University.

Approaching the final week before the Sept. 9 primary, Messinger today plans to speak at a Brooklyn church service and campaign in Riverdale. Yesterday, she was nowhere to be found.

“She is spending it with her family,” said campaign spokesman Lee Jones, adding that it was the Manhattan borough president’s last chance for a respite before “eight weeks of solid fun and games with Uncle Rudy.”

Sharpton, for his part, sought to seize on the protest’s aftermath to attack Giuliani at a rally of approximately 200 supporters in Harlem.

“It gives people the idea that he can’t deal with issues other than his own pat issues,” Sharpton said afterward. “He can’t deal with unemployment, he can’t deal with schools and he can’t deal with police brutality. He’s a good law enforcement guy, but that’s the end of it.”

Touring Queens, Albanese said, when asked, that he hopes Friday’s demonstration focuses attention on what he said was Giuliani’s failure to deal with police brutality.

“You can’t lay the [Louima] incident at his doorstep,” he said, “but everyone is focusing on abuse. It focuses attention on the department and how it has addressed abuse.”

August 31, 1997
Love0

60 Rally for Slain Teen By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

nullSunday, July 6, 1997

The Rev. Al Sharpton led about 60 marchers yesterday in peaceful protest of a grand jury decision that exonerated a white city cop in the shooting of a black Washington Heights teenager last April.

Roma Cedeno, mother of the slain youth, Kevin Cedeno, 16, spoke of her sadness at her son’s death.

“Nobody’s doing anything about it,” she said. “I’m not surprised at the decision at all. The mayor himself called it a ‘justifiable shooting’ within 24 hours after my son was killed. It all started from there.”

Protesters carried signs saying “Police Don’t Shoot White Males in the Back” and chanted “No Justice, No Peace.”

The rally, at McKenna Square, in front of the 33d Precinct at 165th St. and Amsterdam Ave., was the first of what would be weekly protests in front of the precinct, Sharpton said.

On Monday, a group of Washington Heights residents are expected to march around the square 16 times to mark Cedeno’s age at the time he was shot in the back by Police Officer Anthony Pellegrini.

Pellegrini and other officers were responding to a report of youths fighting and shots fired on April 6 when the shooting occurred. Cedeno and a group of friends had been drinking and fighting when they saw officers arriving. Cedeno’s friends, knowing he was on probation and that he had a machete in his possession, urged him to run.

Pellegrini testified before a grand jury that he shot at the youth after mistaking the 23-inch machete for a shotgun.

Last week, a Manhattan grand jury declined to indict Pellegrini.

Sharpton called the decision unacceptable.

“Just like we didn’t let a grand jury stop us with Bernard Goetz, we will not let a grand jury stop us on Kevin Cedeno,” he said. “Justice is a matter of our struggling until we win.”

Monique Kelly, 26, an administrative assistant at North General Hospital in Harlem and a resident of Washington Heights, said she came to protest because she has cousins, nephews and nieces about Cedeno’s age. “This could be anyone’s kid,” she said. “It makes you live in fear with the police officers who work here.”

Edward Hughes, 36, of Roselle, N.J., said he doesn’t believe the police version of the incident. “It is Kevin Cedeno today, it could be my son tomorrow.”

Captain Garry McCarthy, commander of the 33d Precinct, watched the rally, his arms folded while standing in front of the stationhouse. He later spoke with community activists to schedule a meeting.

“I’m looking to open a line of communication,” said McCarthy. “If we don’t communicate we’re never going to come together.”

July 6, 1997
Love0

Yearbook Protest Planned by Advocates By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and DON SINGLETON, Daily News Staff Writers

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, April 6, 1997

Civil rights advocates yesterday announced a protest rally over Police Department efforts to get high school yearbooks for use in identifying potential crime suspects.

Accompanied by parents and students, New York Civil Liberties Union officials said protesters will rally outside Police headquarters in lower Manhattan on April 27, then march to City Hall.

“Our phones have been ringing, and people have been stopping me in the street and saying, ‘We’re with you on this one, Civil Liberties,’ ” said Norman Siegel, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The protest was sparked by the Daily News’ disclosure that police bosses ordered detectives around the city to obtain copies of all high school yearbooks in their precincts.

Cops said they want the yearbooks because the photos in some cases could help identify suspects.

But the request drew criticism from parents, students and some public officials. Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew said the high schools won’t routinely hand over the yearbooks.

Instead, they will consider police requests on a case-by-case basis, Crew said.

Mayor Giuliani yesterday repeated his call for Crew and Police Commissioner Howard Safir to resolve their disagreement over the issue.

“I think that the best solution to this is that they try to work it out,” Giuliani said at a Little League baseball game in Brooklyn.

“There are legitimate interests and concerns on both sides.”

April 6, 1997
Love0

SOMETHING BLUE AT CITY WEDDINGS Cops check immigrants By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Monday, March 17, 1997

The city clerk yesterday said law enforcement agents will continue to check for fraud among immigrants seeking to get married even as critics said the officers’ presence intimidates brides and grooms.

City Clerk Carlos Cuevas requested police support last month when city marriage offices overflowed with couples hoping to wed before immigration reforms go into effect April 1.

Yesterday, he said he will follow guidelines issued by city Corporation Counsel Paul Crotty, which allow immigrants to get married without valid visas but also support the use of cops.

In a letter Friday to First Deputy City Clerk Raymond Teatum, Crotty put to rest immigrants’ fears they needed valid visas to marry in the city. Any form of identification will do, Crotty said.

But the corporation counsel raised the specter of city employees turning immigrants away if they deem the marriage a sham.

“You are entitled to be vigilant of the use of false documents,” he said.

“The involvement of the Police Department and other law enforcement authorities in this effort is entirely appropriate and should be continued,” he wrote.

Cuevas said yesterday he had not yet seen Crotty’s letter. He said that cops from the police anti-fraud unit, along with Immigration and Naturalization officers, will continue to look over documents that people present for identification.

“Anyone that is proper and is not doing anything against the law should certainly not be intimidated by police. It is not my purpose,” he said.

But Norman Siegel, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called on Cuevas to remove the officers.

He said they are “a chilling and intimidating presence” to immigrants.

“How is the clerk going to know when two people come up to the desk that this is a sham marriage or not? You won’t know that until months later,” Siegel said.

Mayor Giuliani said Friday that the city clerk’s office has the right and the responsibility to make sure it is not being used to perpetrate a fraud.

Giuliani said a marriage is obviously a sham when the same person shows up with 10 different couples.

That person, more than likely, is a marriage broker taking advantage of desperate immigrants, the mayor said.

“If somebody is paying a broker for a marriage, $5,000, $10,000, that’s not something you should encourage or allow to have happen,” Giuliani said.

Cuevas said his only concern now is how to speed up the line at a time when his office’s caseload has quadrupled while he contends with an antiquated computer system and a budget that has been cut 41% over three years.

March 17, 1997
Love0