NYC NOW - April 27, 2023: Midday News

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

WNYC's data analysis reveals that NYPD pedestrian stops are up, but few weapons were found, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg urges vigilance as multiple people face charges for drugging and robbing bar-goers and a new report highlights New York State's failure to pre-register 16 and 17-year-olds to vote. Lastly,Garden State Plaza Mall’s solution to 'disruptive' teens is to make them get chaperones. WNYC producer Verónica Del Valle sits with Michael Hill to discuss.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Thursday, April 27th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. On WNYC, police only found a weapon during about one out of six pedestrian stops last year, and they found a firearm in just about one out of 13 stops. All that according to a data analysis from WNYC, Samantha Max, who has this report. Pedestrian stops increased about 70% last year, according to newly released NYPD data. The majority of stops resulted in no arrest or summons.

Just 7% of people stopped were white. Chris Dunn with the New York Civil Liberties Union says pedestrian stops are not an effective crime-fighting tool. We now know from 20 years of data that stopping more people does almost nothing to identify criminal behavior. The NYPD says officers are expected to follow the law, and that the department has measures and least to make sure officers comply with policy. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is warning people to be vigilant when they go out to bars and clubs. His office has charged multiple people in recent weeks and accused them of drugging and robbing customers after they left bars in Hell's Kitchen and on the Lower East Side.

At least two customers have died. Bragg called the case as sobering during a virtual town hall with council member Eric Botcher who represents Hell's Kitchen. Manhattan is known for many great things, and one of those things is our nightlife. So we're going to continue to sort of be on the accountability end and seek and get deterrence. Bragg also recommended that people turn off facial recognition before going out at night so that robbers cannot unlock their phones. 55 and cloudy right now.

Chance of early afternoon showers, mostly cloudy and 62 today. Once again, 55 and cloudy. A new report finds New York State is ignoring the law, and it's failing to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote. WNMIC's Bridget Bergen starts this story in a place where they're getting it right. When Amanda Ferreira talks about why she wants her students to register to vote, you can feel it. How are you going to talk to these students about the history of America and why it was the way it was without telling them how it was changed? She teaches U.S. history and government at Tottenville High School, on Staten Island.

There's definitely other ways that their voices can be heard, but voting is the number one way to do it. Last month, her school managed to pre-register 850 of the 1100 juniors there. That's a 77 percent completion rate. That means when they turn 18, they're automatically added to the roles. It makes the school an outlier. Only 16 and a half percent of eligible students are pre-registered across New York State, according to a new report from the Civic Center, a voter education nonprofit.

We as a country have not created an easy on-ramp simply to register. Laura Brill is the group's founder and CEO. She says when young people don't register in school settings, it can take years before they end up on the voter rolls. And that leaves them invisible to candidates. Some candidates can't see them, can't understand their concerns, and can't really represent them and all of us in the way that they should. The law was passed in 2019 when Democrats took control of the state Senate

as part of a series of reforms to make voting easier. Now, Rill says she wants state and local officials to do more to effectively pre-register young people. 16-year-old Sonia Abel, a junior at Brooklyn Tech, says she plans to lead a voter registration drive for her classmates after AP exams wrap up next month. I think that there are a lot of issues that are really significant to my peers and myself, whether that be queer justice or educational equity or climate justice.

She says her real goal is helping her peers understand they have this right and connect voting with change on those issues. Bridget Bergen, WNYC News. Teenagers hanging out at the mall, is a time-honored tradition. But now, what New Jersey shopping center is trying to put an end to that? Come this Friday, Garden State Plaza and Paramus will bar teenage visitors from its halls on weekend evenings. And Garden State Plaza is far from the first mall to do this.

The number of malls with similar policies has jumped in the last few decades. Here to tell us more about the push to get the mall rats out of the mall is W&MIC's Veronica Del Valle. Veronica, good morning. Good morning, Michael. Veronica, tell us more about this mall and the rules they're putting into action here. Just to give you a sense of this place, Garden State Plaza is one of the oldest and most successful malls in the country. It opened just one year after the first ever mall in the U.S. opened, and some studies have called it one of the most lucrative malls in the United States. But starting at 5 p.m. on Friday, anyone 17 or younger needs to be with an adult 21 or older to visit the mall on Friday and Saturday evenings.

This adult can have up to four kids with them, but only between the ages of 11 and 17. Anyone younger, the rule does not apply to. According to the new policy, kids can be asked to show an ID upon entering to prove their age. This can include a school ID, a military ID, a passport, a driver's license, you name it. The ID just needs to have a photo, a date of birth, and must be tamper-proof. I also have to note that this rule does not apply everywhere in the mall, the AMC movie theater and any adjoining restaurant is exempt. Why is mall management doing this?

So the mall issued a statement saying that they want to make sure that everyone feels comfortable in the shopping center. Mall leadership says that some younger visitors have been engaging in so-called disruptive behavior and evaluating the code of conduct. More specifically, senior general manager Wesley Rebsy told North Jersey.com that kids are running through the property in large groups and fighting and putting it on tick. You can actually see some of that on the app if you look up Garden State Plaza, videos of large groups of kids congregating, dancing, sometimes fighting. I'm curious to find out what teenagers to the mall have to say about this. I wondered that too, Michael.

So I headed to Garden State Plaza on Friday afternoon to check the whole thing out. And I have to tell you that the whole place was teeming with people shopping, even in the middle of the day on a weekday. I spent a lot of my time there at the food court, which several teenagers told me. told me as like the center of life at Garden State Plaza. I met 17-year-old Crystal Quasco there, and she's from the nearby city of Passaig. It's about half an hour from Garden State Plaza on the bus, which is how she came. She was with her eight-year-old sister, and when I told her about the justification for management for these new policies, she was pretty skeptical.

She sees teenagers laughing and dancing as signs of life. It doesn't bother me. It looks kind of nice people expressing themselves, even if it is a mall, and even if there's people around. I also spent some time with 14-year-old Gabriel Alloes from Rochelle Park, New Jersey. He says his school is walking distance from the mall, so he spends a lot of time there. Rochelle Park is a tiny town. Less than 6,000 people live there, and he says there's not a lot to do as a result.

Sometimes when it's really hot in the summer, he hangs out in the laundromat because there is free air conditioning there. And he says the mall is a lot more interesting. It's very close to everyone, and there's a lot of things to do here, especially. So there's always going to be something to do in the mall. And like I said, you can get food, water, and there's a lot of really interesting stories around here. Half the mall we haven't even seen or explored super thoroughly. So I feel like that could be interesting.

Alos says he will miss his mall rat days when the policy is implemented. Other malls have taken the same approach. Tell us a little bit more about that. So things like curfews and codes of conduct are nothing new when it comes to malls. They started cropping up in the 80s and 90s during the big. mall boom. The Mall of America was actually one of the first places to implement a kind of curfew policy back in 1996, and it looks shockingly like Garden State Plaza's policy of today. Alexander Lang is an architecture critic, and she wrote a book called Meet Me by the

Fountain. She says these policies keep coming back because teenagers fundamentally keep acting like teenagers. There's very little institutional memory in a lot of cases about, oh, like, we tried to institute this policy before, and there was a backlash. But now all of those people are gone from the mall or all of those people don't care anymore because their kids are grown up. In the Mall of America case, the ACLU actually sued the mall for infringing on the rights of young people. They also said the mall was applying the policy differently to black and brown teenagers. At Garden State Plaza, meanwhile, there are two more days to hang out, San's curfew. We'll see how enforcement there shakes out in the coming weeks and months.

Veronica Delvalier is a producer at WNYC. Veronica, thank you for this. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More this evening.