Chris Gelardi is a reporter for New York Focus investigating the state’s criminal-legal system. His work has appeared in more than a dozen other outlets, most frequently The Nation, The Intercept, and The Appeal. He is a past recipient of awards from Columbia and Northwestern universities to cover immigration enforcement, US militarism, contemporary colonialism, and county jails. His investigations into the use of a police gang database in Washington, DC, have spurred lawsuits and legislation. He’s based in Queens.
Legislators are taking aim at a host of police surveillance tools, from undercover social media accounts to facial recognition to aerial drones.
The New York State Police bought social media monitoring programs that have violated platforms’ policies and been used to surveil Black Lives Matter protesters.
This time last year, Hochul promised to fully staff the parole board. But vacancies have only grown — and went unmentioned in this year’s agenda.
Legislators wanted to make judges warn defendants about deportation risks. They say Kathy Hochul’s veto left them blindsided.
New documents obtained by New York Focus offer a glimpse into the last hours of Kevin Bryan’s life. His was one of several recent deaths at Rikers in dorms with unstaffed posts.
Legislators told the prison department it was violating a solitary confinement reform law. So it ignored them.
The Israeli firm Cellebrite offers tools that unlock data, trawl search histories, and perform facial recognition. The New York State Police are in the market.
Eric Adams pledged to cut police overtime in half. Instead, his initiatives helped it soar to the second-highest level on record.
Anthony Annucci’s internal memo tells staff to restrain incarcerated people during any out-of-cell time, affecting at least 5,000.
Anthony Annucci’s internal memo tells staff to restrain incarcerated people during any out-of-cell time, affecting at least 5,000.
New York prisons have illegally sent at least 1,100 people to solitary confinement for infractions that aren’t eligible for the punishment, a New York Focus analysis has found.
Rikers staff repeatedly altered records to extend the clock on a 24-hour time limit for holding people in notorious intake cells.
A landmark solitary confinement reform law created a new, “rehabilitative” type of isolation unit. In practice, they’re often little different from the solitary units they were meant to replace.
Lawmakers banned solitary confinement for people with disabilities. But the state prison agency has crafted its own policies.
Five months after a law to scale back solitary confinement went into effect, a majority of the New York prison system’s solitary population had been held there for longer than the law permits.
Prison officials had already seen his genitals three times. But the superintendent ordered a more invasive exam, the lawsuit alleges. (Note: detailed descriptions.)
The Monroe County legislature’s president, Sabrina LaMar, has denigrated public defenders and shut them out of the now-eight-month-long process to appoint the next head of their office.
The partnership split homeless advocates: Some welcomed the additional dollars, arguing “more is better,” while others predicted they would function mainly to keep people off corporate property.
The court’s last term included a slew of cases rolling back defendants’ rights. Progressives hope to reset that trajectory.
Officers trained for the NYPD’s new Neighborhood Safety Teams average nearly double the number of substantiated civilian complaints than the NYPD as a whole.