Second Safest City Blog

Two New Jersey women, 28-year-old Stephanie Setiff of Secaucus and 27-year-old Jaqueline Aragon of South Hackensack, were arrested on a variety of charges Tuesday afternoon after they went to the Lace topless bar in West Nyack and allegedly tried to steal a stripper’s purse.

Police say the women got a lap dance and from one of the dancers. When they were about to leave, one of the women hugged the dancer while her friend reached over the bar and took the dancer’s purse, which contained about $400. Employees stopped then women when they tried to get to the front door, and called the police.

Police have accused Aragon of having the dancer’s purse. Also, police say when officers tried to arrest Setiff, she resisted, kicking one of them. She then kicked out the side window of the police car. Police charged Setiff with assaulting a police officer, criminal mischief, as well as petty larceny, resisting arrest and criminal possession of stolen property. Aragon is charged with petty larceny and criminal possession of stolen property. Both women are free after posting bail.

Three Schenectady men, James Charvis, 39, Peniel Pope, 21, and Shennal Charvis, 30, were arrested Friday night by New York State Police after they were stopped for speeding while on the Thruway passing through Clarkstown. Officers smelled burned marijuana in the car and brought in K-9 Robbie and his handler. They found some marijuana and 6.3 ounces of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $7,000, in a bag inside the vehicle.

Joe Queenan, writer for the New York Times, recently spent a day at the Palisades Mall. He wrote about it in the paper, in an article that tears the Palisades Center Mall a new one. This one is a must-read! Couldn’t have said it better myself:

From the outside, the Palisades Center has little to recommend it. Vast, inert, lacking any discernible architectural theme, and plunked down next to the cheerless Interstate that leads to the Tappan Zee Bridge, the mall is often described as a series of interlocking coffins. The Brutalist exterior conveys the impression that some senescent, unemployed Eastern Bloc architect was summoned to the developer’s office and threatened with severe reprisals against his family if he dared to introduce a single visual nuance suggesting that someone had actually designed the building. The visible trash gondolas that greet visitors when they enter from the I-287 side do not help.

Inside the cavernous structure, things improve dramatically. With pipes and panels and air-conditioning vents laid bare, the four sprawling floors suggest a retail version of the Centre Pompidou. The gargantuan, airy building is built around a series of atriums, suggesting that it had been modularly assembled by an industrious but agoraphobic child.

Clarkstown Police arrested 24-year-old Jessica Toodle of Vallejo, California on charges that she possessed a forged North Carolina driver’s license and nine forged credit cards. She was arrested when police responded to the Best Buy at the Palisades Center mall after she allegedly attempted to purchase merchandise with the forged documents. Store employees claimed Toodle tried to purchase three cell phones valued at $1,650 with the forged documents. Police also discovered she had eight other forged credit cards and receipts totaling over $20,000 for merchandise.

Toodle was charged with 21 counts of possession of a forged instrument in the second degree, nine counts of criminal possession of stolen credit cards and four counts of grand larceny in the fourth degree.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing more than 100 kids running amok in the Palisades Center yesterday, screaming and breaking glass. Police were unable to locate any one of the teens. Rockland Journal News reported police spokesperson Sgt. Harry Baumann as saying, “We did have several calls of suspicious incidents with kids, but every time we got to the location, there was nobody there.” Broken glass could still be observed where the teens had been hours later. The story also mentions the February 2006 McDonald’s riot, when fight broke out between 40 children aged 12 to 19, resulting in felony arrests and charges of rioting.

The Missouri Highway Patrol has decided to mark 142 of its unmarked vehicles because it will improve traffic safety. Missouri Highway Patrol Superintendent James Keathley said, “When the motoring public sees a trooper, they pay closer attention and improve their driving habits, making the roadways safer for everyone.”The Clarkstown Police should adopt a policy to mark its vehicles for enhanced public safety.  The benefits of having plain clothes officers performing traffic stops in “taxis” and other completely unassuming vehicles are dubious at best. Contrary to public efforts by Clarkstown Police that would lead us to believe our fleet of “taxis”, Honda Civics, and mayors from Spring Valley are contributing to enhanced safety, the inability of drivers to discriminate legitimate police officers from impersonators is obviously a serious issue, as has been learned numerous times in our area.

Notably, on December 21, a FedEx delivery truck was hijacked in Manhattan by a group of men who displayed fake badges and forced the driver to follow their instructions.  While being driven around for the next three hours, the driver said one of the men taunted him by saying, “I paid a couple hundred dollars for that badge. Did you think I was police?” Interestingly, the robbery was bungled when the crooks failed to open the specially designed aircraft flight case filled with goods, so they ditched the truck in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and let the driver go unharmed and even allowed him to keep enough of his own money to get home.

A Valley Cottage man was arrested for DWI on Thursday afternoon, after he ignored a police officer’s request to leave his car in a parking lot and take a taxi instead. The officer assisted Burke into a taxi and left the scene, but it wasn’t long before the taxi driver called the police to let them know Burke was trying to go back to his car. Police arrived then and discovered Burke leaving the parking lot in his car, when he was stopped, arrested, and charged with DWI.

The Urinal News doesn’t explain how police initially discovered he was drunk when he wasn’t already driving, before they advised him to take a taxi instead.  Perhaps they should have had him take the town’s police “taxi” instead.