Pimp raped and forced teenage girl to sell her body at the Umbrella Hotel

 

Queens Post 

A Brooklyn man who trafficked a 16-year-old girl across Queens for sex—including at the now shuttered Umbrella Hotel in Kew Gardens—has pleaded guilty to an array of sex crimes and is expected to be sentenced to eight years in prison.

Jordan Adderley, 32, pleaded guilty Tuesday to sex trafficking of a child, sex trafficking, rape in the third degree and other crimes for manipulating a 16-year-old runaway to perform sex acts for money.

According to court records, Adderley met the victim in September 2020 and rented a room at the Hillcrest Hotel in Queens where he taught her how to make money by selling her body for sex. He also had intercourse and oral sex with the girl at the hotel.

Adderley, according to the authorities, drove the teen to various hotels in September and October 2020 to meet strangers who would pay for sex.

He was busted by an undercover NYPD unit while prostituting the teen at the now-defunct Umbrella Hotel, which was located at 124-18 Queens Blvd. Cops found him in the parking lot waiting for the victim. When officers nabbed him, he had dozens of glassines of cocaine in his possession.

“No one can undo the trauma inflicted upon this young teenager by this defendant’s callous actions, but as a result of his guilty plea, secured by my Office, the defendant will serve prison time and be held accountable for these egregious crimes,” said Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz in a statement.

Woman gets raped twice by two men with her family present in Little Neck home invasion robbery

 QNS


Two men robbed and raped a 34-year-old woman and terrorized her family during a home invasion in Little Neck over the weekend, police reported.


Cops are looking for the duo, as well as a third individual who assisted them, in the violent encounter that took place at about 9:31 p.m. on May 4 in the vicinity of 251st Street and 57th Avenue.

According to law enforcement sources, the 34-year-old woman was leaving the residence when the two men — one of whom brandished a firearm — approached and forced her back into the home.


Security camera footage that the NYPD released on May 6 shows one armed suspect chasing the victim inside the house and two other perpetrators walking in.

 Seven other people were in the residence when the victim re-entered along with the two home invaders, sources familiar with the investigation said. The seven residents were forced to a bedroom, where they were detained as one of the robbers took the victim upstairs and searched for loot.


The victim provided the robber with $1,000 in cash, and then the suspect sexually assaulted her, police said. After the attack, he brought the victim back downstairs and removed another $800 in cash from the woman’s 54-year-old mother.


But that wasn’t enough for the perpetrators, police said, as they demanded more money. Authorities said the victim then went to another bedroom and provided $8,000 in cash from a nightstand. The second robber then sexually assaulted her in that bedroom, police noted.

 #SafestBigCity my ass de Blasio.

Now this is what you call a bad hombre!

From the Queens Chronicle:

A Jackson Heights man convicted of rape and twice deported from the United States was sentenced to 57 months in prison by a federal judge last Wednesday for illegally re-entering the country, prosecutors said.

Judge Sandra Feuerstein ruled that Rogelio Mendez, 38, a Mexican national who also has gone by “Rogelio Mendez-Puebla” will serve the time consecutively with the 30-month sentence he got in Suffolk County court last year after pleading guilty to third-degree rape.

He was working at a restaurant in Southampton, LI, when that crime occurred in September 2016. Mendez raped a woman at a house he shared with co-workers.

He’s incarcerated for the rape now.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Mendez was first deported from America in 2004, after he served a two-year prison term for illegally possessing a loaded gun in Queens.

He came back to the United States in 2005 and was deported again in 2009.

Then, Mendez illegally re-entered the United States a year later.

Why secret shelters are a bad idea

From the NY Post:

The homeless shelter that housed four young men accused in a gang sex assault on a Queens churchgoer opened last year without any notice to the neighborhood — because “confidentiality and privacy are important” to the program, City Hall said Monday.

Residents near the 21-bed facility in Jamaica were furious to learn it was operating under their noses and blasted officials for not alerting them, with one saying, “The city should put a sign there.”

“It’s not safe for the community not to know,” added Josephine Alarcon, a stay-at-home mother of three who lives a block away.

Mayor de Blasio pleaded ignorance on Monday when asked about the community outrage over the homeless shelter, which serves youths ages 16 to 21 and is about a half-mile from where the assault occurred.

The life of a trafficking victim

From the NY Post:

Sandra, 30, is one former sex slave helped by Sanctuary for Families. Kidnapped from her hardscrabble hometown in central Mexico and forced into the sex trade at age 19, she escaped her pimp-captor in 2011 and has received counseling, legal aid and health care from the group ever since. Wanting to protect her family, Sandra declined to provide her last name.

Here she tells her story:

On a good day, I’d only have to sleep with 30 men.

I always wore a tight, short skirt and stilettos. Alfredo was my “padrote” (pimp), and he arranged for different drivers to take me through Corona, Jackson Heights and sometimes Brooklyn. I would nod off in the car. I had a different driver every week.

On a bad day, when we left New York and went to Long Island or Connecticut, I couldn’t rest. One day, over the span of 16 consecutive hours in Boston, there were 80 men.

Alfredo beat me, refused to give me food or even water. The drivers he worked with advertised women on a “chica card” that they handed out to potential clients as they stumbled out of cheap nightclubs in Queens and Brooklyn.

I was also forced to hand out the cards to potential customers. Sometimes the cards had pictures of nude women. Other times they advertised children’s birthday parties. Everyone knew what the cards really meant; that the number on the back was to arrange deliveries of women.

We were delivered like pizzas.

Most of the men were day laborers. But some were well dressed, in suits. If they spoke Spanish, they paid $35 for 15 minutes, but if they spoke in English, the price went up to $45. For that price, the men could do whatever they wanted with me.

People think that prostitutes somehow enjoy what they do, but I can tell you that’s not true.

I had never been a prostitute. I did nothing wrong, but I was raped every day for the four years that I was a prisoner.

Peace on Earth, can it be?

From AM-NY:

For all of 2014, New York City reported 333 homicides — the lowest number since the modern era of police record keeping began in the early 1960s. Criminal justice experts are predicting the city will record about 350 homicides by year’s end, an increase of just over five percent.

Overall, serious crime was down 2.1 percent through Sunday. Rapes continue to show an increase. But the nearly six percent spike is being driven by a large number of old allegations only now being reported by victims, police said.

Yet South Jamaica has gone 365 days without a shooting!

Crime on the rise before summer kicks off

From DNA Info:

Serious crime increased in three-quarters of the city's neighborhoods last month as New York heads into a summer that may be long, hot and violent, DNAinfo New York has learned.

Fifty-seven of the city's 76 NYPD precincts reported spikes in serious crime during a four-week period ending May 24 compared to the previous four weeks, according to NYPD statistics compiled on a new DNAinfo crime mapping system.

The other 19 precincts reported overall crime remained steady or declined during the period, compared to the previous month.

While it has long been police lore that crime rises with warmer weather, the trend is even more disturbing because it is not confined to the two eye-catching categories — murder and shootings — that Mayor Bill de Blasio and police brass have blamed on localized gang activities.

Serious crime includes rape, robbery, assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft.

Assembly stalling on Forest Park cameras

From The Forum:

While a sexual predator responsible for six attacks in Forest Park remains at large, the application to install security cameras on the grounds is still being reviewed by the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, with no firm date set for the completion of the process.

“There was an initial delay by the city Police Department returning the preliminary application to the Ways and Means Committee,” said Assemblyman Mike Miller (D-Woodhaven), who formally requested the extra security measure. “After final review, the application will be sent to the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York for their own independent review of the NYPD’s application for the security cameras. Since we have no control over these processes, I cannot guarantee a date for the installation of the cameras; however, the process is moving swiftly and we will continue to follow up to ensure the cameras are installed as soon as possible.”

The bureaucratic procedure has done little to assuage the anxiety of park patrons and area residents. According to the NYPD, the suspect has struck half a dozen times during daylight hours over a two-year period inside the expansive, 507-acre flagship green space: On Aug. 26, 2013 he used a stun gun to subdue and rape a 69-year-old woman near Myrtle Avenue and Forest Park Road; on March 29, 2013, the suspect sexually assaulted a 23-year-old jogger; on Nov. 18, 2012 he assaulted a 40-year-old woman as she walked her dog; on Aug. 15, 2012, the man fondled a 34-year-old woman at Woodhaven Boulevard and Park Lane South; he struck and attempted to disrobe his youngest victim, a 13-year-old girl, on Sept. 7, 2011; and on March 25, 2011, in what cops believe was his initial attack, the man jumped a 54-year-old female jogger from behind on Park Lane South, the NYPD said.

Kitty Genovese apathy story was pretty much made up

From the NY Post:

At 3:15 on the morning of March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old bar manager named Kitty Genovese drove her red Fiat into the parking lot of the LIRR station by her Kew Gardens home.

As she walked home — she was only about “a hundred paces away” from the apartment she shared with her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko — she heard a man’s footsteps close behind her. She ran, but the man, Winston Moseley, was too quick. He caught her, slammed her to the ground and stabbed her twice in the back. She screamed twice, once yelling, “Oh, God! I’ve been stabbed!”

Across the street, a man named Robert Mozer heard Genovese from his apartment. Looking out his seventh-floor window, he saw a man and a woman, sensed an ­altercation — he couldn’t see exactly what was happening — and yelled out his window, “Leave that girl alone!”

Moseley later testified that Mozer’s action “frightened” him, sending him back to his car. At this point, Genovese was still alive, her wounds nonfatal.

Fourteen-year-old Michael Hoffman, who lived in the same building as Mozer, also heard the commotion. He looked out his window and told his father, Samuel, what he saw. Samuel called the police, and after three or four minutes on hold, he reached a police dispatcher. He related that a woman “got beat up and was staggering around,” and gave them the location.

Other neighbors heard something as well, but it wasn’t always clear what. Some looked out the window to see Moseley scurrying away, or Genovese, having stood up, now walking slowly down the block, leaning against a building. From their vantage point, it wasn’t obvious that she was wounded. Others who looked didn’t see her at all, as Genovese walked around a corner, trying to make her way home at 82-70 Austin St.

But the police did not respond to Samuel Hoffman’s call, and Moseley, seeing no help was imminent, returned. He hunted down Genovese — who had made it to a vestibule in her building before collapsing — stabbed her several more times, then raped her.

Word of the attack spread though the building. A woman named Sophie Farrar, all of 4-foot-11, rushed to the vestibule, risking her life in the process. For all she knew, the attacker might have still been there. As luck would have it, he was not, and Farrar hugged and cradled the bloodied Genovese, who was struggling for breath.

Despite the attempts of various neighbors to help, Moseley’s final stab wounds proved fatal, and Farrar did her best to comfort Genovese in the nightmarish ­final minutes of her life.

The murder of Kitty Genovese shifted from crime to legend a few weeks later, when The New York Times erroneously reported that 38 of her neighbors had seen the attack and watched it unfold without calling for help.

The Times piece was followed by a story in Life magazine, and the narrative spread throughout the world, running in newspapers from Russia and Japan to the Middle East.

New York became internationally infamous as a city filled with thoughtless people who didn’t care about one another; where people could watch their neighbors get stabbed on the street without lifting a finger to help, leaving them to die ­instead in a pool of their own blood.

The people of Kew Gardens — before that, a relatively crime-free neighborhood where few bothered locking their doors — were referred to in the press as monsters.

But as journalist Kevin Cook details in his new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America” (W.W. Nor­ton), some of the real thoughtlessness came from a police commissioner who lazily passed a falsehood to a journalist, and a media that fell so deeply in love with a story that it couldn’t be bothered to determine whether it was true.

Gallagher gets away again

From the NY Post:

Disgraced former City Council Member Dennis Gallagher — who beat criminal charges of raping a woman in his office — scored another big victory when an appeals court threw out the same claim in her lawsuit.

The judge ruled Wednesday that Gallagher was not liable for rape in the civil matter because he didn’t plead guilty to that charge in his sensational criminal case.

In August 2007, the married father of two was indicted on charges that he raped and beat Jacqueline Morrow, 52, in his Middle Village, Queens, office. The two had first met at a bar.

Morrow, a grandmother who worked as a cook in a Queens Catholic church, said the attack left her with torn cartilage in her knee, bruises all over her body and emotional scars.

A judge threw out the rape charge and Gallagher pleaded guilty to misdemeanor sex charges and had to have alcohol counseling.

Morrow quickly filed the civil suit claiming that Gallagher had raped her and asking for unspecified damages, including medical expenses.

In early 2013, a Queens Supreme Court judge found that Gallagher could still be found civilly liable for rape, but the appeals court has overturned that ruling.

“This decision vindicates him from that heinous and false allegation,” Gallagher’s attorney, Keith Sullivan, said in a statement.

Do you recognize the Flushing rapist?

From WPIX:

In Queens, cops have released surveillance video of a man they say sexually assaulted a young woman walking home from a Halloween party.

Police say the 23-year-old international college student was walking home in Flushing at about 4:30 in the morning Nov. 1 near Melbourne avenue and 152nd Street.

That’s when, cops say, the suspect ambushed her, punched her in the head, covered her mouth, dragged her into the bushes nearby, and tried to remove her underwear.

If you have any information, please call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS.

Verizon workers stop rape in progress

From the Queens Courier:

Three Queens-bred heroes thwarted a rape in Flushing last week by chasing, catching and sitting on the attacker until cops arrived.

Verizon technicians Michael Popowich, Anthony Howley and John Gilday were finishing up a job at 150-24 Northern Boulevard on October 30 when they saw a man lurking across the street around noon.

They said the alleged assailant, identified by police as 53-year-old Young Song, ran up to a woman who was leaving a corner café and put his hand on her waist.

But then the man “got a lot more aggressive and physical with her” and allegedly pushed her down to the ground, they said.

“She had a skirt on. He put his hand up her skirt and proceeded to pull her underwear down,” Popowich claimed. “No one did anything.”

The three technicians shouted, but the noise did not scare him off, said Gilday, 53, of Douglaston.

The trio sprang into action and chased the man, who ran onto the street. They caught him and brought him to his knees, they said.

“The three of us manhandled him back onto the sidewalk,” Popowich said. “We sat on him with all of our weight until the police showed up.”

Song, a Flushing resident, was arrested and charged with rape, sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment, police said. He did not know the victim before allegedly attacking her, the victim told her rescuers.

Some want Forest Park to have its own precinct

From DNA Info:

In the wake of two sexual attacks on joggers within the past five months in Forest Park, local advocates and elected officials want the city to create a new precinct devoted solely to the park, similar to the one in Central Park.

Proponents said the spate of attacks merits a precinct that will exclusively monitor the 550-acre greenspace. A 23-year-old jogger was Tasered and sexually assaulted in the park in March, and a 69-year-old woman was raped in the park last Monday near Forest Park Drive and Myrtle Avenue.

“It doesn’t have to be a big precinct,” said Ed Wendell, president of the Woodhaven Residents' Block Association. “But that would guarantee police presence there and it would make the park a lot safer.”

Although the description of the attackers in both incidents is similar — both are men described as being about 5-foot-9 and approximately 35-years-old — the sketches appeared to be of two different men, cops said.

Following the first incident, police created a special two-officer police unit to patrol the park on a daily basis from approximately 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley, who represents Ridgewood, Middle Village, Glendale and Woodhaven, and who jogs in the park, said “a dedicated precinct for the park is an idea that is worth exploring.”

Critics said that the park struggles with a number of safety issues, such as lack of lighting in the early hours of the day along its main roads, including Myrtle Avenue.

“There is a good number of people who are out jogging, walking their dogs around that time and all the lights are out,” said Wendell, who said early-morning joggers have to run with flashlights at Victory Field, near Myrtle Avenue and Woodhaven Boulevard.

A spokesman for the Department of Transportation said in an email that the outage at Myrtle Ave. and Woodhaven Blvd. near Victory Field "appears to have been caused by vandalism" and that "the agency is currently working with the Parks Department here and will also discuss potential enforcement with the NYPD."

If Flushing Meadows doesn't have a dedicated precinct, then Forest Park isn't getting one.

At Forest Park, safety continues to be a joke

From Project Woodhaven:

There has been another attack on a female jogger, again in the Forest Hills section of Forest Park. This attack, similar to an attack in the same area in March, took place near the secluded horse trails which joggers frequently use. Is it the same perpetrator? Here are the 2 sketches of the suspect -- the April attack suspect is at left (wearing a stocking cap) and the suspect from last week is at the right:


Unresolved Dangerous Conditions

There are lights out all over the area -- and the amount of time it is taking to resolve is completely unacceptable.

1) Forest Park Drive - From Park Lane South to Myrtle, through Forest Park, across Woodhaven Boulevard. Reported to 311 and DOT inspected and, unbelievably, they closed the 311 after inspecting it.

2) Myrtle Avenue, from Woodhaven Boulevard to Park Lane South - a long dark stretch. We parked along there the other morning -- when we got back from the track, this had happened:


And yet, even though the lights have been out for a while (reported 8/16) they have not yet been repaired. The map below shows where we know there to be lighting issues in and around Forest Park.

These issues have been reported to 311. But in light of the recent attacks, DOT and Con Edison needs to escalate these problems and fix them immediately. As in, today.

There is no excuse for the city to put people who use the park in jeopardy.

And people wonder why the residents of Woodhaven aren't enthusiastic about the QueensWay? Check out how the city currently takes care of park security -- and this isn't a new problem and ask yourself if you want more of that brought directly into your neighborhood.

I'm sure Liz Crowley will get right on this. Just about every article about the rape mentions that she regularly jogs in Forest Park. I guess she's been jogging with a blindfold on.

Rego Park rape

From WPIX:

The NYPD released surveillance video of man they say brutally raped 52-year-old woman in Rego Park Friday.

The victim was caught on camera in the Rite Aid on 63rd Drive and Queens Blvd just moments before the heinous crime. Police say the suspect, who identified himself as “Junior” to the woman, approached the victim as she exited the Rego Park Subway station and asked her for her name and phone number. She refused and ducked into the Rite Aid, where he followed her in and began harassing her but then left. That is where he was caught by surveillance.

Police say the suspect then waited outside the store and followed the woman to an apartment building on Saunders Street, pushed her down a small flight of stairs and raped her.

Flushing Meadows is 2nd most dangerous park in City

From Eyewitness News:

Crime statistics over the last four years from the NYPD and compiled by the Park Advocates revealed the five parks with the highest number of incidents:

Central Park had 649 serious crimes, including 13 rapes and 415 grand larcenies.

Flushing Meadows had 387 serious crimes including five rapes and 40 robberies.

Prospect Park had 192 serious crimes including two murders and 92 robberies.

Riverside Park had 194 serious crimes including five rapes and 95 robberies.

And, Crotona Park had 102 serious crimes including 14 assaults and three rapes.

Rape at Flushing massage parlor

From the Daily News:

Cops are investigating a rape at a Queens massage parlor Saturday.

Sources said the victim was attacked inside the Union St. shop near Northern Blvd. in Flushing at about 5:30 p.m.

Paramedics rushed the woman to Queens General Hospital in stable condition, officials said. Her attacker remained at large Saturday night.

Police sources said they don't know exactly what transpired at the massage parlor, noting there's a "language barrier" between investigators and the Asian victim.

Cops were seen entering and leaving the second-floor business - its windows covered by a neon "Open" sign and pictures of men and women getting massages - for most of the night.

The attack occurred at a time when communities are complaining about the proliferation of massage parlors and spas that stay open late and where workers provide more than just rubdowns.

Yeah, by the way, there's a website where you can find out what's "on the menu" at each massage parlor. Nice, eh?

Roosevelt Avenue underworld

From the Times Ledger:

Trafficking happens all around the city and the country, but the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights, Corona and Flushing have been identified as key centers for the crime. City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras (D-East Elmhurst) said with the cleanup of Times Square in the 1980s and 1990s, the criminal element moved down the No. 7 line into Queens. In these neighborhoods, johns have access to prostituted women not only from houses set up for the purpose, but from the back of vans and at bars that advertise $2 dances.

In recent years, Queens lawmakers have pushed legislation and conducted campaigns to combat sex trafficking. When asked, advocates do not have numbers for how prevalent it is in the borough, but Ferreras said she has heard often from constituents at Council hearings, at community meetings and in her daily life of sex trafficking going on in her district, especially around Roosevelt Avenue.

She said girls can be trafficked from as young as 12 and boys from as young as 10.

“It’s here. It’s a problem,” she said in an interview. “I think it happens behind closed doors. It happens in small areas of the community.”

Leticia Brown, of Girls Education and Mentoring Services, an organization aimed at helping victims, said during a panel at the Long Island University-C.W. Post in Brookville, L.I., earlier this year that the girls who are trafficked are often minorities and low-income, if not homeless or runaways.

“The girls, women I work with are deemed ‘less than’ in our society,” Brown said.

People are trafficked into the city both domestically and internationally, with victims coming into Queens from as close by as Brooklyn to as far away as Latin America and Asia via John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports. Advocates say the pimps offer their victims the promise of a better life: an opportunity for work, a green card, a boyfriend.

Nassau County Police Detective John Birbiglia said pimps often set themselves up as a girl’s father, giving them gifts of clothes and jewelry or dinner before demanding they earn these gifts by sleeping with men for money of which they never see a dime. Once the pimps have the girls, they can keep them intimidated either through rape, physical abuse or threats to themselves or their families.

Some women who have been trapped in the lifestyle for years also grow up to become “top girls” who run prostitution rings, Ferreras said.

“You think this must be the movies,” Ferreras said. “This is someone’s reality.”

Bottom line: It's the City Council's fault

From Metro:

At a time when four women have been raped in the past month in popular New York City parks, some are calling attention to the dramatically depleted ranks of Parks Enforcement Patrol.

In the 1990s, the city kept on staff 450 Parks Enforcement Patrol officers, according to Joseph Puleo, the vice president of DC 37 Local 983, the union that represents Parks Enforcement Patrol (PEP) officers.

By 2002, that number had been slashed to just 156. And today, there are only 91 city-funded officers who are available to patrol any and all parks.

...there was one PEP officer manning all of the parks in Queens this summer, while a majority of PEP officers were allocated to beaches and pools.

From the Daily News:

In the days since the attack, elected officials have called upon Mayor Bloomberg to halt any budget cuts to the NYPD or the Parks Department, which employs rangers.

But Bloomberg said Monday that New Yorkers need to accept that “we’re not going to put a cop on every corner.”

“We just can’t afford to do that,” he said. “But crimes continue to come down in the city.”

He said the police budget has not been cut “in a long time” and “the bottom line is we only have so much money.”

From CBS New York:

Elected officials led by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn joined together at Hudson River Park in Lower Manhattan in a show of solidarity and outrage.

“We’re not going to yield one blade of grass to sexual perpetrators. We’re not going to yield one street corner,” Quinn told reporters including WCBS 880′s Jim Smith.

Members of the city council have written a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg in an effort to prevent $100 million in mid-year NYPD budget cuts that could take some officers out of city parks.

From the NY Post:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn needs a quick catch-up course on the City Charter.

Quinn called a Sunday press conference in the wake of a weekend rape in Hudson River Park to request that Mayor Bloomberg let the NYPD and the Parks Department off the hook when it comes to pending budget cuts.

Bloomberg, looking at substantial revenue shortfalls and related issues, last week told all his commissioners to begin planning for smaller budgets next year.

Said Quinn:

“We simply cannot take away resources from our NYPD at this time with these types of incidents occurring. We also cannot cut back on resources for parks enforcement. They have already been cut to [the] bone.”

On the merits, these are arguable points.

As expressed, though, they pretty much miss the point — which is that Speaker Quinn doesn’t have to ask Mayor Bloomberg for budgetary relief of any sort.

She writes the budget.

Or, at least, she has so much control over the budget-making process that if she wants the NYPD and Parks Department to be held harmless from the coming cuts, she can see to it that they are.

It’s all right there in the City Charter: The mayor proposes, and the council disposes.

Thank you, I couldn't have expressed this better myself. Beware the politicians that do dastardly deeds and then act surprised when there are bad results. The fact is that the mayor has presented budgets this past decade that have decimated the ranks of law enforcement and the Council Members bobbleheaded their way through the rubberstamp process each year with barely a whimper. After each budget was passed, there was Quinn - front and center - taking credit and bragging about how great the agreements were that she worked out. But now that the chickens are coming home to roost, she and others are "shocked and outraged" over how few officers are patrolling parks and that further cuts are proposed? Please give us all a break.

It's YOUR fault we have no cops, and we ain't letting you off the hook that easily.

In the past, there were knock-down, drag-out battles between the City Council and the mayor at budget time. Today's council members are more concerned with photo ops and hosted parties at the mayor's mansion, so they bend over for anything he wants. As you are aware, I am no fan of Bloomberg, but I don't blame him, I blame them. And you should, too. They are supposed to lead and represent the people and they do nothing but kowtow and represent themselves.

DA Brown messes up yet again

From Eyewitness News:

...he was behind bars at Rikers, IDed by a witness who picked him out of a lineup.

He was charged with the attempted rape of a woman last September near a bus stop along the Cross Island Parkway in Whitestone.

A crime in progress was stopped by a former Marine who happened to be in the area.

A police sketch led police to the 41-year-old.

For 9 months, that question was hanging over his head. The Queens DA's office pressed forward with their case against him. It took 7 months before a DNA test was ordered.