Second Safest City Blog

Early this morning, two men forced their way into Bob’s Furniture on Route 59 near Hutton Ave at gunpoint after a cleaning woman unlocked the door to let another cleaning woman inside.  The men displayed guns and proceeded to tie up the cleaning woman while the manager was ordered to open the safe.  Unfortunately, neither witness was able to provide any useful information aside from a cursory description of one of the assailants, described as a black man in his late 20s standing approximately 5′ 10″ and weighing 160 lbs.

The robbers made off with about $20,000 in cash and checks.  Despite that the entire event was caught on various security cameras, police have no leads, and could not even confirm whether or not the robbers left in a vehicle.  Police believe the men crossed the street and drove off from there. Still this demonstrates the futility of the pervasive surveillance state at actually stopping crime.

Brett Vasquez, an 18 year old man from New City, was arrested today on charges that he struck a 17 year old male from Nanuet with his vehicle during a dispute between teens from Clarkstown South and Nanuet high schools.  The Journal News describes it as an “accident”. Perhaps they should elaborate exactly what was accidental about it?

The Second Safest City blog sometimes recognizes that Clarkstown Police aren’t all that bad, and sometimes do have sensible policies (even if we bury that between criticism). Today’s case involves a police officer from the nearby Ramapo Police, who was accused of being ‘insensitive’ for requring a Hasidic woman, charged with first-degree welfare fraud, to remove her wig for her mug shot. Clarkstown Police Chief Peter Noonan said he would expect that his officers would have done the same thing. “The objective of the photograph is to identify the person,” Noonan said in an interview with the Journal News. “You want to know what the person looks like with or without the wig.” And the authors of this blog agree.

The Journal News article goes out of its way to fail to describe the nature of the woman’s charges, or how prevalent such charges are in the area, or even what is being done to combat welfare fraud, in a likely effort to avoid also being ‘insensitive’ to the needs of the Hasidics. We have no such qualms and will keep this story and more updated as it happens.

19 year old Patrick Coudin was arrested by Ramapo Police and charged with first-degree assault and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, both of which are felonies, in addition to a charge of possession of crack cocaine. According to the Journal News, this incident of epic proportions included 30 people armed with improvised weapons including tire irons and box cutters. This is the third gang attack in Rockland since April. Coudin allegedly fired a single shot, wounding the leg of another teen. The article does not describe if the wounded teen was armed at the time, but as the old saying goes, never bring a knife (or a tire iron) to a gun fight.

Overpaid, underworked suburban cops are brushing up on their crime solving skills by searching social networking sites (like Facebook, Myspace, etc.) looking for underage after-prom drinking parties.  The article’s sidebar has an interesting anecdote where police crashed a party because the party’s description included the words “cheese platter”. You can’t make this stuff up. To be fair, Clarkstown Police Lt. Steve Morgan said the department is skeptical of the effectiveness of such tactics, preferring instead to target alcohol vendors that sell to minors. Despite this sensible policy, Lt. Morgan also admitted that there’s no way to verify the veracity of the information they find online: “there’s counterintelligence,” he said.

After grand juries indicted 46 Rockland residents on various gun and drug charges, police launched an early-morning blitz on all the alleged drug dealers and gang members.

Less than two months ago, 21 people were arrested in a cocaine raid in Nyack. Both raids were part of the larger “Operation Clean Sweep”, a massive multi-year cross-jurisdiction effort to crack down on gangs and drug dealing in Rockland County. Despite the massive effort required to combat gang, gun, and drug crime in Rockland County, Clarkstown, the county seat of Rockland, remains the Second Safest City!