Talk Of Budget Cuts Leads To Inevitable NYPD CTU Puff Piece

Again, they act like this is a good thing:

Working largely on its own, the NYPD has transformed an unmarked Brooklyn warehouse into a counterterrorism center with a national and global reach. In a second facility in Manhattan, the department runs undercover operations, recruits spies and houses intelligence analysts.

Inside police headquarters is a high-tech situation room where rows of computer monitors give off a moody blue light and floor-to-ceiling television screens beam images from around the world. It’s staffed 24 hours a day with officers tracking local and international threats as well as the movements of as many as a dozen NYPD detectives on foreign assignments.

During a recent interview there, Mr. Kelly and the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, were interrupted by a liaison officer calling from the scene of a suicide bombing in Israel to report on a new technique employed by the bomber.

Successes include the arrest in 2004 of two Muslim men on charges of plotting to blow up a subway station near the Republican National Convention, and the arrest and deportation in 2003 of two Iranian men who were filming a subway track in Queens, Mr. Cohen said. The former probe, in which one of the men pleaded guilty and the other received a 30-year prison term, was based on a year of undercover work by one of Mr. Cohen’s top detectives.

A subway station near the Republican National Convention . . . oh yeah, they’re talking about the two saps they entrapped back in 2004.

Easy To Solve: Just Look For The Girlfriend Who Is Still Pissed Off About Valentine’s Day

Make it a dozen long-stemmed, and fast:

Cops are hunting for an armed robber who hit a flower shop and a candy store in the Bronx.

The bandit held up Heavenly Treats Candy Bouquet in Morrisania about 2:40 p.m. on Feb. 28, flashing a handgun to rob the register and steal property from a 48-year-old woman, police said.

He struck again on March 2 at Diana’s Party Supply & Flowers in Longwood, holding up two teenage girls, 15 and 18.

Up Is Up And Down Is Down, After All

After a lower court ruled that jumping off the observation deck of the Empire State Building is constitutionally protected free speech, an appellate court reverses the ruling:

The four-judge panel overturned a lower court decision that had found that Jeb Corliss, a professional skydiver who tried to leap from the 86th-floor observation deck in April 2006 did not violate any laws because, among other things, he was experienced and had carefully planned the jump.

The judges, however, reduced the charge in the indictment from a felony charge of reckless endangerment with depraved indifference to life to a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment.

See also: First You Tap That Building, Then You Tax It.

The Fake Prada Window Shopping Theory Of Policing

Do the police need something to do? Because doing the fashion industry’s dirty work seems like it has little to do with public safety*:

Cops launched a massive predawn raid on counterfeiters in Chinatown yesterday, seizing about $1 million in phony brand-name apparel.

Sunglasses, watches and handbags with fake Coach, Prada and Rolex labels were taken from 32 stores in what Mayor Bloomberg called “one of the biggest takedowns ever of trademark counterfeiters.”

“It has been one of the most notorious knock-off shopping malls in the five boroughs,” Bloomberg said of the three-building strip along Canal Street.

*And this link to public safety seems like a stretch for the NYPD to make.

Another Testimonial For NYC & Company

You know things have turned around in New York when instead of the bad old days you have “You don’t expect this . . . especially not in front of Starbucks”

A brazen robber pistol-whipped a man yesterday on a Midtown street, wrestling a black duffel bag filled with $150,000 cash out of his hands as dozens of pedestrians looked on in horror.

Investigators are looking into the possibility that Seton Ijams, 50, was a victim of an inside-job robbery, and that someone may have tipped off the thief as to what time he would pick up the cash, a police official said.

Ijams, a vice president at Columbia Artists Management Inc., had just withdrawn the money from a Chase Bank branch on West 56th Street at Sixth Avenue shortly after 2 p.m., police said.

As he walked west along 56th Street, a young man followed Ijams and tried to grab his money bag.

When Ijams resisted, his assailant — described as a black man in his 20s and wearing a black coat — dragged him along the sidewalk while hitting him in the head with a silver pistol.

While he continued to whack Ijams in the head, the pistol went off, witnesses said.

. . .

Ijams, bleeding profusely from the head, fell to the sidewalk in front of a Starbucks as the robber got lost in the crowd carrying the bag filled with wads of bills.

“I saw the guy running” after leaving the victim on the ground, said Amado Delacruz, 34. “You don’t expect this — not on 56th Street, and especially not in front of Starbucks.”

And way to squeeze one off, asshole! If you’re going to beat someone over the head with your piece, try keeping the safety on . . .