Second Safest City Blog

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.