NYC NOW - March 8, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Police are investigating the death of a Bronx teenager shot and killed just after leaving school on Thursday afternoon. Meanwhile, former New York State Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin is facing felony bribery and fraud charges again after three judges on an appeals panel reinstated the dismissed charges. Finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson speaks with transportation reporter Stephen Nessen and editor Clayton Guse about the MTA’s dog policy, Governor Hochul’s deployment of the National Guard into subway stations and the significance of the move.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Friday, March 8th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Police are investigating the death of a Bronx teenager shot and killed just after leaving school yesterday afternoon. WNYC's Brittany Craigstein has more. Police say 17-year-old LaQuai Dash was barely a block away from Legacy College Prep Charter High School in Melrose. when he was fatally shot. It's the latest in a series of incidents

involving teens, gun violence, and weapons found at or near schools. Dash's grandmother, Vivian Coward, is calling for more police. They need to have cops around these schools now. They know that these kids are going around these schools with guns. It has to stop. It really has to stop. Officials are still unsure exactly what sparked the shooting.

Police have not reported any arrest. Former New York State Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin is once again facing felony, bribery, and fraud charges. This morning, three judges on an appeals panel reinstated the 2022 dismiss charges against Benjamin. Benjamin is accused of steering a $50,000 estate grant to a real estate developer's nonprofit in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to Benjamin's political campaigns. Governor Kathy Hochel had appointed Benjamin as Lieutenant Governor in August 2021. He resigned seven months later after his arrest.

An attorney for Benjamin says they're confident he'll be vindicated. 50 with sunshine right now. Mostly sunny and mid-50s for a high today. We have a low around 40 tonight. Then tomorrow afternoon, rain likely, cloudy and 51, a lot of rain at night and gusty, and then Sunday scattered rain in snow showers, a high of 53.

Time springs forward on Sunday. close, there's more after the break. On WNYC, I'm Sean Carlson. It is time for On the Way, our weekly segment unpacking all things transit in New York City. Joining us is WNIC's transportation reporter Stephen Nesson and editor Clayton Goosa. We do have a lot to unpack today, but we're going to kick off with something a bit lighter. This week's On the Way newsletter focuses on something that's been, and I can't believe you're making me say this on the radio, hounding Stephen Nesson. And over the last year, he's noticed a lot more dogs on the subways.

Stephen, what did you dig up? So I started thinking about this recently. And when I went out to actually start recording people, it was unbelievably easy to find big dogs on the subway, not in bags. So just this week, I ran into Baby, a chocolate lab who is sitting calmly with Jojo, a Siberian husky, who himself was creating a small pool of drool on the floor of an uptown queue train. Derek Newman is the doggy daddy. He says he doesn't want to break the MTA's rules requiring dogs being bags on the subway. But in this case, he just doesn't agree with it. No dogs on subway rule is ridiculous because there will behave and people love them

and there's just no reason not to have them here. And they need transportation too. They are New Yorkers, right? That's exactly right. Like, we like subways here in New York. I don't want to take an Uber. Like, that's a pain. I should add, Derek, like many people I spoke to, was bold enough to bring their big dogs on the subway, but at the end of our interview said, please don't get me in trouble for doing this.

Like, they know they're flouting the law. I mean, I'm a dog supporter, so I might be a little bit biased. But let's be real here. What are the rules? How are they enforced? Well, the MTA's policy actually goes back to 2004, which states no animals are allowed on the trains. Service animals are an exception unless they're enclosed in a container and carried in a manner which would not. annoy other passengers.

This, of course, has led to, as I said, the notorious dogs in bags photos, you know, the blue IKEA bag cut up with dogs, paws coming through the bottom. But I wanted to get a broader sample size. So I stopped by a dog run in Washington Square Park to talk to dog owners. 54-year-old Sharon Jordan, who has a much smaller lap dog, thinks it is not a place for dogs. He tries to protect me a lot. So if there's a crazy person or something, I would feel bad if he got. upset and then like he could get stepped on. He could get trampled. It's kind of a free for all

nowadays, I guess, people just doing what they want. Come to think of it, I've never seen anybody like get a ticket or something for, for any of this. Is there enforcement of the policy anymore? Well, it seems it's on pause. Okay. I'm not quite sure. I'll take it. I'm not quite sure it's ever been heavily enforced. I should say the NYPD has discretion. They can warn people or issue a ticket. They did issue 10 tickets last year. I have seen reports that in 2019, for example, the NYPD wrote 50 tickets in the first half of that year. As for the MTA, no comment on this topic. But as board member Norman Brown tells me, no one will want to comment out of fear of being labeled anti-dogite.

Whoa. He called it political poison. Sure. A third rail, if you will, yeah. Another board member, Andrew Albert, a self-professed cat man, says, hey, if bringing dogs on trains makes you happy, great. His goal is just to get more people riding trains. We're going to shift gears a bit here to the big subway news of the week. Governor Kathy Hokel has deployed 750 National Guard soldiers, another 250 MTA and state cops to do bag checks at busy subway stations. Clayton, you've covered police deployments on the subway before. How is this different? Deploying the National Guard in the subway system doesn't have much precedent, even in major incidents in recent history, like in 2017, when a subway bomber lit off an explosion in that. that path between Times Square and Port Authority, no one died, but it was a really troubling incident for a lot of riders. The state didn't deploy the National Guard in the aftermath of that. You look at some other examples where the National Guard has been deployed in a meaningful way in the transit system. Those were search and rescue operations, talking about Sandy, talking about 9-11 when there were all kinds of armed forces in Manhattan. We found a clip from 1965 that shows

the National Guard was sent into the subway, but that was during a blackout when riders were stranded in the tunnel, again, a search and rescue operation. Now, there is some context for time and again over the decades in recent years of government officials flexing more police into the subway. Most recently in 2019, Governor Andrew Cuomo wanted to add 500 more MTA police officers to patrol the subways. That caused a lot of conternation with Mayor de Blasio because the NYPD under the direct. of the mayor has territory over the subways. You look again in even as recently as 2022. When Adams took office, he said, okay, I want a lot more NYPD officers on subways to crack down on crime, which was perceived to be a large problem coming out of COVID. He deployed like a thousand extra members of the department, tons of patrols that weren't in the transit bureau just to just to go

into the subway. It could cause overtime costs for police to skyrocket. But there's a reason, the National Guard isn't deployed a lot of the time and a lot of it has to do with jurisdiction, right? The subways have been the NYPD's turf since the 90s when the transit police merged into the department. And now you kind of have four different law enforcement agencies that are all kind of overlapping. You have the National Guard, the MTA police, the state police, and the NYPD. Now, the NYPD has jurisdiction over platforms and trains, but at the same time, you still have a lot of conflicting bosses responsible for keeping riders safe at this point or at least enforcing the rules. And we should add the NYPD never really stopped doing bag checks. I think they were scaled down. Obviously, they were very visible after 9-11. And as for these new bag checks, the MTA is not really saying how long they're going to last or where they're going to be. They do say it'll be random, like every 10 people, for example, but already groups like the NYCLU say there's been a long history of law enforcement targeting black and brown people during these sorts of things. Think of stop and frisk or the disproportionate number of tickets that people of color get for fair. invasion, something like 90% of the tickets are issued to black and brown people. Just today, MTA chair, Janal Lieber says 55% of customers, though, say seeing uniformed officers makes them feel safer. That is still only about half of riders. Hockel says it's really about the psychological impact of seeing uniformed officers on the subway. And she's indicated that this move is really about putting riders at ease even more than just deterring crime or fighting crime.

Every week in our All the Way newsletter, we answer a curious commuter question. This one is from Anne in Brooklyn, and it's actually quite relevant to this week's news. She asks, what good is having two police officers standing in a subway station together next to the booth? Commuters go out at it alone. Why can't cops? It's an interesting question and something that people point out a lot. But it wasn't always the case that police patrolled the subway in Paris. Cops used to do solo patrols. Mayor Eric Adams brings us up all the time.

He was a transit police officer in a previous life. and he constantly says he used to go out into the system alone. The NYPD kind of started to change this in a meaningful way in 2014. You might remember when a pair of police officers were shot and killed in Brooklyn. They were sitting in the car. They weren't in the subway, but the NYPD instituted of policy saying do dual patrols as a safety precaution. Now Adams in 2022 said, hey, we want to cover more ground in the subway. Police going in there will do solo patrols.

That backfired almost immediately. The day that happened, a police officer was allegedly assaulted in a subway station. Adams retreats. They say, okay, back on dual patrols. That answer is an question to a degree why you're seeing two cops instead of kind of one walking alone. You can keep up on the latest in New York City Transportation News by signing up for our weekly newsletter at gotthmus.com slash on the way. You can even send in a question about getting around New York City. Maybe Stephen and Clayton will answer it on the air.

Stephen Clayton, thanks to you both. Thanks, Sean. Thank you. 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. Also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back this evening.