Kimora Lee Simmons is often on official business...shopping! The NY Post caught her out and about with a possibly illegal parking permit recently. Their "eagle-eyed lensman" saw Simmons and boyfriend Djimon Hounsou "shopping at the swanky department store Barneys late last week while her driver dutifully stood guard outside Simmons' Cadillac Escalade, which had a New York Correction Department placard on its dashboard." The placard stated: "This Vehicle Is On Official Business"; must have been......

The city is still taking seriously an unsubstantiated threat of a dirty bomb issued over the Internet that was publicized last night. The New York Times is reporting that Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne stated the threat was noticed by the NYPD after it appeared on Debka.com, a website that reports many threats, some of which are substantiated. The particular threat that caused the alarm last night was one that named New York, Los Angeles, and......

Local news stations are reporting late this evening that an unverified radiological threat was made against New York City sometime Friday. The city's alert level remains at the long-standing orange level though. WNBC passes along a statement from the NYPD: "While the threat remains unverified, our counterterrorism posture, which is reconfigured daily based on intelligence from around the world, has been modified to include increased deployment of radiological sensors, including vehicle, marine and helicopter-mounted, as......

Nineteen-year-old Natasha Aerial, who was the only survivor from Saturday night's shootings in a Newark schoolyard, managed to speak to police yesterday. While her brother and two friends died from being shot in the head, execution-style, Aerial survived a gunshot to the head. She is heavily sedated and under police guard. Still, Newark Police Director (and former NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Operations) Garry McCarthy said, "We're getting the story piecemeal from her. Based upon......

Today, we received a tip about recent attacks on women in Williamsburg. so Friday night at about 1:30am i got attacked right out front of my apt building as i was trying to get in the door. i fought a good fight but the asshole got everything... id, cc cards, cash, phone, and a couple of kicks to my face. bruises and cuts aside... be careful in your own neighborhoods. he literally came out of......

Something is happening with congestion pricing in Albany, but we're not exactly sure what. It's not put-a-fork-in-it dead yet, but it might be close to it. Or not! WCBS said the plan was "dealt [a] crippling blow", but Spitzer's staff is looking to create a commission that would give Albany the power to scale the plan back. The Daily News said that Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver won't bring his members back to vote on it......

To anyone attending next year's Puerto Rican Day Parade, we have this suggestion: Don't wear black-and-gold. At a press conference, parade organizers decried arrests of people who were not engaged in any illegal activity during Sunday's event. National Puerto Rican Day Parade president Madelyn Lugo said, "We are very disappointed and alarmed that these violations of civil rights should occur." The organizers, who admitted they warned the NYPD that the Latin Kings might try to......

The new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says the NYPD thinks it's the NPD - the National Police Department. The Daily News reports that Democratic Mississippi representative Bennie Thompson is critical of the NYPD's tactics that stretch into other jurisdictions. He told the News, "While I understand that chasing down leads in other locales might help keep the city safe, I emphasized that the NYPD is not the FBI, that it does......

Showing that the NYPD really hates cowards who punch out and mug elderly women with walkers, the entire police force is on alert to find the man who mugged two Queens seniors. Over 25,000 police officers have seen the video and there are "several dozen detectives assigned to the case," according to Newsday. Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne explained, "Considering the brutality of the attacks, and the fact the women appeared to be targeted because of......

It's probably good that the NYPD is telling the public that they were able to buys parts to build a 1.3 ton truck bomb two years ago, because then it raises the awareness of how these parts are too accessible. But check out this excerpt from the NY Times:The detectives, who had no formal training in the use of explosives, used information gathered over the Internet and from easily available books to educate themselves about......

Weird stuff is happening with the Department of Transportation. First, the head of the bike program, Andrew Vesselovitch, left the DOT last Friday, and his farewell email pointed some serious criticism of the DOT. From Streetsblog: There is much more that the bicycle program could have done than it was allowed to do. The bicycle program, for example, could have produced plans for 40-50 miles of workable bicycle lanes each year. Instead, DOT installed little......

Nice work, NYPD. The Post is reporting that an al Qaeda expert from the FBI the police department hired has quit before he even started! Daniel Coleman, a former FBI agent who CNN called the "al Qaeda hunter", was hired ostensibly to bolster the NYPD's anti-terror efforts. But when Coleman asked the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen if he spoke to the detectives on the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorist Task Force, things when fubar.......

The testimony for the NYCLU's lawsuit agains the NYPD for the subway bag searches has ended, and after reading the NY Times article, it seems that both sides pull out the stops for crazy quotes. NYPD did admit that the bag searches occur very rarely, but tried to scare Judge Richard M. Berman. Deputy Commissioner for counterterrorism Michael Sheehan said, "There is no doubt in my mind that the introduction of bag searches - even......

Ah, leave it to a little pipe bomb to stir up tensions between the FDNY and NYPD. Firefighters found a pipe bomb in Queens. Now, procedure says that the NYPD has to be notified immediately, but the firefighters brought the bomb back to the stationhouse, calling the NYPD about an hour later. Now this is where things get crazy: Before the NYPD arrived, some firefighters may have tried to reassemble the pipe bomb...and then it......

It's become an expected refrian: Crime in the city is still dropping, down 6% from last year. The NY Post reports that murders are down 16% versus the same first-five-months-of-the-year period last year, while rape is down 8.8% and bank robberies have declined by almost 50% (except at Commerce Banks, probably). Also: 20% more DWI arrests, leading to 13% less DWI-related accidents and 25% less DWI-related deaths, and crime in "impact zones," the targeted neighborhoods,......

For our weekly dose of terror fears, New York magazine gives us a look at how terror simulation drills are scripted. While Gothamist thought that many books and movies provided some good fodder for "What if?" scenarios, what the the Office of Emergency Management’s Deputy Commissioner of Planning and Preparedness, Edward Gabriel, thinks of is much more crazy and, well, disturbing. In the article, he describes terror drills at Shea Stadium and at the Bowling......

Now that it's official that the Freedom Tower design will be redone due to security concerns, it turns out that maybe the Port Authority knew about the NYPD's concerns last year. The Daily News reports that Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism, Michael Sheehan, expressed the department's concerns in letters sent in August and October of 2004. While there's no official statement from the Port Authority, some PA sources say that one letter may have never reached......

The NYPD announced an increase in subway crimes, many of them stemming from people stealing iPods and cellphones. NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told the media, "The robbery increase is linked to a rash of forced taking of cell phones and iPods by juveniles from other juveniles." But it doesn't stop at the subways: Apparently people listening to their iPods at bus stops are very enticing to thieves. A police source tells the Daily News......

Ah, to wake up on the first spring Monday morning of 2004 and not only hear about Israel killing the founder of Hamas which then in turn has the Hamas saying the U.S. will pay, but to also read that the NYPD is conducting subway sweeps to try to prevent terror attacks and the FDNY is creating a terror school at Randall's Island. The Martians hiding on the darkest spots of Mars are shaking......