Three quick articles
Jul. 31st, 2008 06:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One about attempts to increase tourism on Staten Island.
I've seen those booths in the Ferry Terminal, and all I can say is "wishful thinking". (Seriously, there are a lot of tourists to Snug Harbor, which is really pretty, but all the shit that's going on there means it's not nearly as good as it could be. That's a problem with a *lot* of tourist-potential spots on SI, they're badly run or badly managed, or simply badly designed, because people figure "nobody's heading out here anyway", and so there's nothing for people to head out here *for*, and there could be!)
S.I. Attempts to Get People Off the Boat and on a Bus
By APRIL DEMBOSKY
When the ferry docked at Staten Island, a wave of tourists funneled down the ramp and made a U-turn to board the same boat they had just gotten off.
Few seemed to have heard of anything worth sticking around for in New York City’s southernmost borough. Only a handful ventured over to the makeshift tourist kiosk at the ferry terminal.
“Yes, can you tell me where is Alcatraz?” one woman asked.
Andrew Yuen, 22, who was on duty at the kiosk, maintained a chipper demeanor in the face of such demoralizing questions. He cheerfully handed out maps and brochures, and directed a few people to the red faux trolley outside.
“There’s a tour bus that just opened three weeks ago,” he told one couple from England.
A man in a red vest picked up on Mr. Yuen’s cue and rushed to hand out a flier that begged, “Don’t hurry back on the ferry! New! Discover Staten Island Tour.” The salesman pointed to three small photos of unrecognizable tourist destinations and promised, “You’ll see this, this and this.”
The tour, Staten Island’s newest year-round attraction, is operated by Gray Line New York Sightseeing, which also runs bus tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In an hour, visitors get an overview of the island’s north shore. The $15 tour stops at places like the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; the house of Alice Austen, a pioneering photographer in the 19th century; and the Staten Island Zoo. Riders have the option of getting off at any of these places and catching the next trolley an hour later, but one tour guide said that most choose to stay in the bus.
“We’ll just wait to see the Bronx Zoo,” Karim Pacheco said.
Ms. Pacheco, 24, who is from Peru and studying English in Manhattan, brought two visitors from home — her mother and her mother’s friend — on the ferry. They happened upon the tourist kiosk and decided to take the tour.
“There’s an episode of ‘Sex and the City’ where Carrie takes the ferry to Staten Island,” Ms. Pacheco said. “I thought, since Carrie did it, I should do it.”
The bus rumbled along Davis Avenue, through a residential neighborhood of Cape Cod houses, then turned into the business district, a strip of single-story nail salons and pharmacies and a McDonald’s.
“Does this feel like New York City?” the tour guide, Patricia McGann, asked.
“Noooooooo,” the five passengers responded.
What Staten Island may lack in breathtaking skyscrapers, it makes up for in historical tidbits, most of them involving celebrities. The tour drove by the cream-colored stucco building of the Mandolin Brothers guitar shop, which has been visited by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, George Harrison and Suzanne Vega.
“Joni Mitchell wrote a song called ‘Song for Sharon’ that starts, ‘I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin,’ ” Ms. McGann said into the microphone.
After passing Wagner College, where Joan Baez’s father taught, the bus merged onto the Staten Island Expressway. Later, Ms. McGann pointed out the Stapleton station of the Staten Island Railway.
“That’s where Madonna filmed her music video for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’ ” she said.
The more striking points on the tour are its architectural highlights. The Staten Island 9/11 Memorial displays on two wing-shaped walls portraits of the nearly 270 Staten Islanders who died in the terrorist attack. Visitors standing between the walls look directly at the spot where the towers once stood.
Zach Moore, 17, came to the island specifically to see the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which connects Staten Island and Brooklyn. The tour stops underneath it for eight minutes so passengers can get off the bus and take photos. “When we were at the Empire State Building, it was getting dark and we could see the green lights on the bridge,” Zach said. “We said, ‘Oh, we should go see it.’ ”
The Staten Island Ferry is one of the most popular tourist attractions in New York City, drawing 1.5 million visitors every year, according to the borough president, James P. Molinaro.
Gray Line declined to say how many people had taken the tour so far, saying it often takes up to five years before a new tour catches on. But the company is optimistic that the numbers will grow as Staten Island — once reputed for its enormous Fresh Kills landfill, which has closed — earns some credibility in the tour books.
“It’s a huge market,” said Eva Lee, Gray Line’s tour guide manager. “And they should be educated that Staten Island is important.”
Though the borough does not support the tour financially, it has been investing resources in developing its tourism potential. With the help of foundation grants, Mr. Molinaro’s office recently printed brochures, installed a wide-screen high-definition television in the Manhattan ferry terminal advertising the island’s attractions, and plans to build a permanent tourist gazebo in the Staten Island terminal to replace the kiosk where Mr. Yuen, an intern in Mr. Molinaro’s office, was stationed.
Mr. Molinaro said he hoped that tourists who did take the tour would spend their money and spread the word about Staten Island’s parks, beaches and golf courses.
“We’re no longer the home of the largest dump in the world,” he said.
One on the much-touted official double dutch teams in NYC public schools. (Interesting fact about me, I can't jump rope.)
Double Dutch Gets Status in the Schools
By WINNIE HU
The rhythmic clicking of double-dutch ropes smacking the tennis court the other day at the Grand Street Campus High School in Bushwick drew 13-year-old Stephanie Moronta like a siren’s call. She edged closer to the ropes, rocking back and forth on her heels before lunging into the whirling center.
Click, click, click, then nothing.
“I stopped doing this for a while, so I’m kind of rough,” Stephanie explained as she untangled her feet from the doubled-over orange rope. “If you hear the rhythm, you just flow right into it.”
Stephanie was practicing double dutch, an urban street staple that dates back centuries and, come next spring, will become the newest of 35 varsity sports played in New York City schools. As part of an effort to increase the number of students — particularly girls — participating in competitive athletics, the city will create coed double-dutch teams at 10 high schools, many in predominantly black neighborhoods like Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem where the ropes have long swung on asphalt playgrounds.
Double dutch follows cricket, which was added last year and is now played by more than 400 students at 14 schools, including the elite Stuyvesant High School.
School officials said they were also considering cycling, badminton and netball for varsity sports.
Nearly 33,000 students, about 10 percent of the high school population, play on varsity or junior varsity teams, compared with more than a third in many suburban districts.
“As an urban district, we need to be creative in an urban kind of way, and double dutch does that for us,” said Eric Goldstein, who oversees the Public Schools Athletic League, the governing body for the city’s interscholastic sports. “If you see people doing it, it looks hard and it is hard.”
Kyra D. Gaunt, who wrote “The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop” (N.Y.U. Press, 2006), said that recognizing double dutch as a sport not only taps into something that many children are passionate about, but also gives a nod to the influence of black culture. “They’re helping to regenerate a tradition in the black community and legitimize it in the eyes of a lot of parents,” she said.
Dr. Gaunt, an associate professor of anthropology and black music studies at Baruch College, said that she avoided double dutch as a child because she was so bad at it but that she relearned it while writing her book. She said the appeal of double dutch was that anyone could do it, and that once mastered, it lent itself to individual expression through fancy footwork and dance routines.
Double dutch is believed to have been first played by Dutch settlers along the Hudson River and was later given the name “double dutch” by the British, according to a history of the game written by David A. Walker, a former New York City police sergeant who was one of its biggest advocates for more than three decades.
Mr. Walker, who died last week, wrote that double dutch once thrived in the city’s neighborhoods, with children singing rhymes while turning ropes and jumping along sidewalks during World War II. But by the late 1950s, he wrote, its popularity had waned in part because of a shortage of playgrounds near apartment buildings.
Mr. Walker developed rules for competition so that double dutch could be played by girls as an intramural sport in the city schools. In 1974, the first double-dutch tournament drew nearly 600 children. Today, the Apollo Theater in Harlem hosts competitions that draw teams from around the world.
“Double dutch has always been a part of our everyday recreation,” said Mr. Walker’s daughter, Lauren. “Just as guys would go off to the schoolyard and shoot hoops and play stickball, girls would just pull out their ropes and start jumping.”
Ms. Walker is the program director for the National Double Dutch League, an organization started by her father that holds competitions, youth clinics and coaching workshops. It also has a demonstration team, called the Dynamic Diplomats of Double Dutch, that performs internationally with members ranging from teenagers to adults in their 30s.
School officials said they would work with the double-dutch league to develop rules and a scoring system for interscholastic competition. Double-dutch teams typically have two turners and one or two jumpers, and they earn points for their speed, technique in executing routines and acrobatic feats like flips and cartwheels.
Mr. Goldstein is also negotiating with the developer Forest City Ratner to sponsor the double-dutch teams by providing $10,000 for uniforms, ropes and other equipment.
The first double-dutch team has already formed at Bedford Academy High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where 14 girls and 2 boys signed up even before the official announcement by the athletic league last weekend, said Shani Newsome, a physical education teacher who will coach the team.
Ms. Newsome, 32, grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and recalled scavenging clothes lines because they were long enough to use for double dutch and once borrowing a spare cord from a telephone repairman. “In Bed-Stuy it’s an unspoken rule that you have to learn how to jump rope,” she said. “You can’t stay outside if you don’t know how to double-dutch.”
Now Ms. Newsome is showing the ropes to a new generation, including the daughters of her friends and her own 9-year-old son, William. She said that her varsity team would not just be jumping, but also running and lifting weights to build muscles.
On Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Newsome was expertly turning ropes while a half-dozen teenage girls tried jumping at a summer camp at the Bushwick high school. “Who can jump in?” she called out as the girls peppered her with questions:
Does the rope hurt? (It can.)
Was the rope wobbling too much in the wind? (It was.)
Calixta Crowder, 10, who lives in the Flatbush neighborhood, described double dutch as “medium hard” but said she liked that “whenever you mess up, you get to try again and you get better at it.”
Stephanie, who wore a black T-shirt and cropped jeans, worked her way up to nearly a minute of uninterrupted jumping. She said that she learned to jump rope at age 8 by watching friends in her neighborhood, and that this summer, she had been trying to double-dutch every few days in a park near her family’s apartment.
“I know a lot of people who like to double-dutch and can do it,” said Stephanie, who will be in the eighth grade and is already planning to try out for the double-dutch team when she gets to high school. “It’s going to be exciting going up against other schools. I’m a competitive person, and I really hate to lose.”
And one about a cop, and a bicyclist, and a collision, and a heck of a lot of videos of the event.
It's possible the cop isn't actually lying, just that his memory is seriously flawed. I guess.
When Official Truth Collides With Cheap Digital Technology
By JIM DWYER
Around 9:30 on Friday night, a bicyclist pedaling down Seventh Avenue veered to the left, trying to avoid hitting a police officer who was in the middle of the street.
But the officer, Patrick Pogan, took a few quick steps toward the biker, Christopher Long, braced himself and drove his upper body into Mr. Long.
Officer Pogan, an all-star football player in high school, hit Mr. Long as if he were a halfback running along the sidelines, and sent him flying.
As of Tuesday evening, a videotape of the encounter had been viewed about 400,000 times on YouTube. “I can’t explain why it happened,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Tuesday. “I have no understanding as to why that would happen.”
But this episode was not just a powerful crash between one bicyclist and a police officer. It may turn out to be yet another head-on collision between false stories told by some police officers in criminal court cases and documentary evidence that directly contradicts them. And while in many instances the inaccurate stories have been tolerated by police superiors and prosecutors, Officer Pogan’s account is getting high-level scrutiny.
Later that night, Officer Pogan composed a story of his encounter with Mr. Long. It bore no resemblance to the events seen on the videotape. Based on the sworn complaint, Mr. Long was held for 26 hours on charges of attempted assault and disorderly conduct.
Over the weekend, though, the videotape, made by a tourist in Times Square with his family, fell into the hands of people involved with Critical Mass, the monthly bicycle rally that Mr. Long had been riding in.
The availability of cheap digital technology — video cameras, digital cameras, cellphone cameras — has ended a monopoly on the history of public gatherings that was limited to the official narratives, like the sworn documents created by police officers and prosecutors. The digital age has brought in free-range history.
Hundreds of cases against people arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention collapsed under an avalanche of videotaped evidence that either completely contradicted police accounts, or raised significant questions about their reliability. The videotapes were made by people involved in the protests, bystanders, tourists and police officers.
At the New York Public Library, a small group holding a banner against one of the stone lions was arrested and charged with blocking traffic in the middle of 42nd Street, although video showed they were on the steps, and nowhere near the street.
In another case at the library, a police officer testified that he and three other officers had to carry one protester, Dennis Kyne, by his hands and feet down the library steps. Videotape showed that Mr. Kyne walked down the steps under his own power, and that the officer who testified against him had no role in his arrest. The charges were dismissed; the Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to bring perjury charges against the officer who gave the testimony.
Dozens of complaints were sworn by police officers who said they had witnessed people violating the law on Fulton Street and near Union Square, but later admitted under oath that their only involvement was to process the arrests, and that they had not actually seen the disorderly conduct that was charged.
An assistant to District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau wrote to the Police Department to stress the importance of officers’ not swearing to things they had not seen for themselves. The prosecutors said the confusion surrounding mass arrests made it hard to bring perjury charges.
The case of Christopher Long and Officer Pogan is shaping up as another example of an official narrative being directly challenged by videotape.
In a criminal court complaint, Officer Pogan wrote that Mr. Long deliberately attacked him with the bike — although the videotape shows Mr. Long veering away from Officer Pogan, who pursues him toward the curb.
The officer said he was knocked to the ground by Mr. Long. Throughout the tape, though, he remains on his feet, even after banging into Mr. Long.
The police officer wrote that Mr. Long had been “weaving” in and out of traffic, “thereby forcing multiple vehicles to stop abruptly or change their direction in order to avoid hitting” Mr. Long. However, in the videotape, it appears that there are no cars on the street.
Mr. Long is due back in court in early September. By then, most of Mr. Long’s bruises are likely to have healed. The prognosis for the truth is not so clear.
I've seen those booths in the Ferry Terminal, and all I can say is "wishful thinking". (Seriously, there are a lot of tourists to Snug Harbor, which is really pretty, but all the shit that's going on there means it's not nearly as good as it could be. That's a problem with a *lot* of tourist-potential spots on SI, they're badly run or badly managed, or simply badly designed, because people figure "nobody's heading out here anyway", and so there's nothing for people to head out here *for*, and there could be!)
S.I. Attempts to Get People Off the Boat and on a Bus
By APRIL DEMBOSKY
When the ferry docked at Staten Island, a wave of tourists funneled down the ramp and made a U-turn to board the same boat they had just gotten off.
Few seemed to have heard of anything worth sticking around for in New York City’s southernmost borough. Only a handful ventured over to the makeshift tourist kiosk at the ferry terminal.
“Yes, can you tell me where is Alcatraz?” one woman asked.
Andrew Yuen, 22, who was on duty at the kiosk, maintained a chipper demeanor in the face of such demoralizing questions. He cheerfully handed out maps and brochures, and directed a few people to the red faux trolley outside.
“There’s a tour bus that just opened three weeks ago,” he told one couple from England.
A man in a red vest picked up on Mr. Yuen’s cue and rushed to hand out a flier that begged, “Don’t hurry back on the ferry! New! Discover Staten Island Tour.” The salesman pointed to three small photos of unrecognizable tourist destinations and promised, “You’ll see this, this and this.”
The tour, Staten Island’s newest year-round attraction, is operated by Gray Line New York Sightseeing, which also runs bus tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In an hour, visitors get an overview of the island’s north shore. The $15 tour stops at places like the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; the house of Alice Austen, a pioneering photographer in the 19th century; and the Staten Island Zoo. Riders have the option of getting off at any of these places and catching the next trolley an hour later, but one tour guide said that most choose to stay in the bus.
“We’ll just wait to see the Bronx Zoo,” Karim Pacheco said.
Ms. Pacheco, 24, who is from Peru and studying English in Manhattan, brought two visitors from home — her mother and her mother’s friend — on the ferry. They happened upon the tourist kiosk and decided to take the tour.
“There’s an episode of ‘Sex and the City’ where Carrie takes the ferry to Staten Island,” Ms. Pacheco said. “I thought, since Carrie did it, I should do it.”
The bus rumbled along Davis Avenue, through a residential neighborhood of Cape Cod houses, then turned into the business district, a strip of single-story nail salons and pharmacies and a McDonald’s.
“Does this feel like New York City?” the tour guide, Patricia McGann, asked.
“Noooooooo,” the five passengers responded.
What Staten Island may lack in breathtaking skyscrapers, it makes up for in historical tidbits, most of them involving celebrities. The tour drove by the cream-colored stucco building of the Mandolin Brothers guitar shop, which has been visited by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, George Harrison and Suzanne Vega.
“Joni Mitchell wrote a song called ‘Song for Sharon’ that starts, ‘I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin,’ ” Ms. McGann said into the microphone.
After passing Wagner College, where Joan Baez’s father taught, the bus merged onto the Staten Island Expressway. Later, Ms. McGann pointed out the Stapleton station of the Staten Island Railway.
“That’s where Madonna filmed her music video for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’ ” she said.
The more striking points on the tour are its architectural highlights. The Staten Island 9/11 Memorial displays on two wing-shaped walls portraits of the nearly 270 Staten Islanders who died in the terrorist attack. Visitors standing between the walls look directly at the spot where the towers once stood.
Zach Moore, 17, came to the island specifically to see the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which connects Staten Island and Brooklyn. The tour stops underneath it for eight minutes so passengers can get off the bus and take photos. “When we were at the Empire State Building, it was getting dark and we could see the green lights on the bridge,” Zach said. “We said, ‘Oh, we should go see it.’ ”
The Staten Island Ferry is one of the most popular tourist attractions in New York City, drawing 1.5 million visitors every year, according to the borough president, James P. Molinaro.
Gray Line declined to say how many people had taken the tour so far, saying it often takes up to five years before a new tour catches on. But the company is optimistic that the numbers will grow as Staten Island — once reputed for its enormous Fresh Kills landfill, which has closed — earns some credibility in the tour books.
“It’s a huge market,” said Eva Lee, Gray Line’s tour guide manager. “And they should be educated that Staten Island is important.”
Though the borough does not support the tour financially, it has been investing resources in developing its tourism potential. With the help of foundation grants, Mr. Molinaro’s office recently printed brochures, installed a wide-screen high-definition television in the Manhattan ferry terminal advertising the island’s attractions, and plans to build a permanent tourist gazebo in the Staten Island terminal to replace the kiosk where Mr. Yuen, an intern in Mr. Molinaro’s office, was stationed.
Mr. Molinaro said he hoped that tourists who did take the tour would spend their money and spread the word about Staten Island’s parks, beaches and golf courses.
“We’re no longer the home of the largest dump in the world,” he said.
One on the much-touted official double dutch teams in NYC public schools. (Interesting fact about me, I can't jump rope.)
Double Dutch Gets Status in the Schools
By WINNIE HU
The rhythmic clicking of double-dutch ropes smacking the tennis court the other day at the Grand Street Campus High School in Bushwick drew 13-year-old Stephanie Moronta like a siren’s call. She edged closer to the ropes, rocking back and forth on her heels before lunging into the whirling center.
Click, click, click, then nothing.
“I stopped doing this for a while, so I’m kind of rough,” Stephanie explained as she untangled her feet from the doubled-over orange rope. “If you hear the rhythm, you just flow right into it.”
Stephanie was practicing double dutch, an urban street staple that dates back centuries and, come next spring, will become the newest of 35 varsity sports played in New York City schools. As part of an effort to increase the number of students — particularly girls — participating in competitive athletics, the city will create coed double-dutch teams at 10 high schools, many in predominantly black neighborhoods like Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem where the ropes have long swung on asphalt playgrounds.
Double dutch follows cricket, which was added last year and is now played by more than 400 students at 14 schools, including the elite Stuyvesant High School.
School officials said they were also considering cycling, badminton and netball for varsity sports.
Nearly 33,000 students, about 10 percent of the high school population, play on varsity or junior varsity teams, compared with more than a third in many suburban districts.
“As an urban district, we need to be creative in an urban kind of way, and double dutch does that for us,” said Eric Goldstein, who oversees the Public Schools Athletic League, the governing body for the city’s interscholastic sports. “If you see people doing it, it looks hard and it is hard.”
Kyra D. Gaunt, who wrote “The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop” (N.Y.U. Press, 2006), said that recognizing double dutch as a sport not only taps into something that many children are passionate about, but also gives a nod to the influence of black culture. “They’re helping to regenerate a tradition in the black community and legitimize it in the eyes of a lot of parents,” she said.
Dr. Gaunt, an associate professor of anthropology and black music studies at Baruch College, said that she avoided double dutch as a child because she was so bad at it but that she relearned it while writing her book. She said the appeal of double dutch was that anyone could do it, and that once mastered, it lent itself to individual expression through fancy footwork and dance routines.
Double dutch is believed to have been first played by Dutch settlers along the Hudson River and was later given the name “double dutch” by the British, according to a history of the game written by David A. Walker, a former New York City police sergeant who was one of its biggest advocates for more than three decades.
Mr. Walker, who died last week, wrote that double dutch once thrived in the city’s neighborhoods, with children singing rhymes while turning ropes and jumping along sidewalks during World War II. But by the late 1950s, he wrote, its popularity had waned in part because of a shortage of playgrounds near apartment buildings.
Mr. Walker developed rules for competition so that double dutch could be played by girls as an intramural sport in the city schools. In 1974, the first double-dutch tournament drew nearly 600 children. Today, the Apollo Theater in Harlem hosts competitions that draw teams from around the world.
“Double dutch has always been a part of our everyday recreation,” said Mr. Walker’s daughter, Lauren. “Just as guys would go off to the schoolyard and shoot hoops and play stickball, girls would just pull out their ropes and start jumping.”
Ms. Walker is the program director for the National Double Dutch League, an organization started by her father that holds competitions, youth clinics and coaching workshops. It also has a demonstration team, called the Dynamic Diplomats of Double Dutch, that performs internationally with members ranging from teenagers to adults in their 30s.
School officials said they would work with the double-dutch league to develop rules and a scoring system for interscholastic competition. Double-dutch teams typically have two turners and one or two jumpers, and they earn points for their speed, technique in executing routines and acrobatic feats like flips and cartwheels.
Mr. Goldstein is also negotiating with the developer Forest City Ratner to sponsor the double-dutch teams by providing $10,000 for uniforms, ropes and other equipment.
The first double-dutch team has already formed at Bedford Academy High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where 14 girls and 2 boys signed up even before the official announcement by the athletic league last weekend, said Shani Newsome, a physical education teacher who will coach the team.
Ms. Newsome, 32, grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and recalled scavenging clothes lines because they were long enough to use for double dutch and once borrowing a spare cord from a telephone repairman. “In Bed-Stuy it’s an unspoken rule that you have to learn how to jump rope,” she said. “You can’t stay outside if you don’t know how to double-dutch.”
Now Ms. Newsome is showing the ropes to a new generation, including the daughters of her friends and her own 9-year-old son, William. She said that her varsity team would not just be jumping, but also running and lifting weights to build muscles.
On Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Newsome was expertly turning ropes while a half-dozen teenage girls tried jumping at a summer camp at the Bushwick high school. “Who can jump in?” she called out as the girls peppered her with questions:
Does the rope hurt? (It can.)
Was the rope wobbling too much in the wind? (It was.)
Calixta Crowder, 10, who lives in the Flatbush neighborhood, described double dutch as “medium hard” but said she liked that “whenever you mess up, you get to try again and you get better at it.”
Stephanie, who wore a black T-shirt and cropped jeans, worked her way up to nearly a minute of uninterrupted jumping. She said that she learned to jump rope at age 8 by watching friends in her neighborhood, and that this summer, she had been trying to double-dutch every few days in a park near her family’s apartment.
“I know a lot of people who like to double-dutch and can do it,” said Stephanie, who will be in the eighth grade and is already planning to try out for the double-dutch team when she gets to high school. “It’s going to be exciting going up against other schools. I’m a competitive person, and I really hate to lose.”
And one about a cop, and a bicyclist, and a collision, and a heck of a lot of videos of the event.
It's possible the cop isn't actually lying, just that his memory is seriously flawed. I guess.
When Official Truth Collides With Cheap Digital Technology
By JIM DWYER
Around 9:30 on Friday night, a bicyclist pedaling down Seventh Avenue veered to the left, trying to avoid hitting a police officer who was in the middle of the street.
But the officer, Patrick Pogan, took a few quick steps toward the biker, Christopher Long, braced himself and drove his upper body into Mr. Long.
Officer Pogan, an all-star football player in high school, hit Mr. Long as if he were a halfback running along the sidelines, and sent him flying.
As of Tuesday evening, a videotape of the encounter had been viewed about 400,000 times on YouTube. “I can’t explain why it happened,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Tuesday. “I have no understanding as to why that would happen.”
But this episode was not just a powerful crash between one bicyclist and a police officer. It may turn out to be yet another head-on collision between false stories told by some police officers in criminal court cases and documentary evidence that directly contradicts them. And while in many instances the inaccurate stories have been tolerated by police superiors and prosecutors, Officer Pogan’s account is getting high-level scrutiny.
Later that night, Officer Pogan composed a story of his encounter with Mr. Long. It bore no resemblance to the events seen on the videotape. Based on the sworn complaint, Mr. Long was held for 26 hours on charges of attempted assault and disorderly conduct.
Over the weekend, though, the videotape, made by a tourist in Times Square with his family, fell into the hands of people involved with Critical Mass, the monthly bicycle rally that Mr. Long had been riding in.
The availability of cheap digital technology — video cameras, digital cameras, cellphone cameras — has ended a monopoly on the history of public gatherings that was limited to the official narratives, like the sworn documents created by police officers and prosecutors. The digital age has brought in free-range history.
Hundreds of cases against people arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention collapsed under an avalanche of videotaped evidence that either completely contradicted police accounts, or raised significant questions about their reliability. The videotapes were made by people involved in the protests, bystanders, tourists and police officers.
At the New York Public Library, a small group holding a banner against one of the stone lions was arrested and charged with blocking traffic in the middle of 42nd Street, although video showed they were on the steps, and nowhere near the street.
In another case at the library, a police officer testified that he and three other officers had to carry one protester, Dennis Kyne, by his hands and feet down the library steps. Videotape showed that Mr. Kyne walked down the steps under his own power, and that the officer who testified against him had no role in his arrest. The charges were dismissed; the Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to bring perjury charges against the officer who gave the testimony.
Dozens of complaints were sworn by police officers who said they had witnessed people violating the law on Fulton Street and near Union Square, but later admitted under oath that their only involvement was to process the arrests, and that they had not actually seen the disorderly conduct that was charged.
An assistant to District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau wrote to the Police Department to stress the importance of officers’ not swearing to things they had not seen for themselves. The prosecutors said the confusion surrounding mass arrests made it hard to bring perjury charges.
The case of Christopher Long and Officer Pogan is shaping up as another example of an official narrative being directly challenged by videotape.
In a criminal court complaint, Officer Pogan wrote that Mr. Long deliberately attacked him with the bike — although the videotape shows Mr. Long veering away from Officer Pogan, who pursues him toward the curb.
The officer said he was knocked to the ground by Mr. Long. Throughout the tape, though, he remains on his feet, even after banging into Mr. Long.
The police officer wrote that Mr. Long had been “weaving” in and out of traffic, “thereby forcing multiple vehicles to stop abruptly or change their direction in order to avoid hitting” Mr. Long. However, in the videotape, it appears that there are no cars on the street.
Mr. Long is due back in court in early September. By then, most of Mr. Long’s bruises are likely to have healed. The prognosis for the truth is not so clear.
