Mayor Bloomberg may be staunchly denying that he's running for president next year, but given the love New Yorkers seem to have for him, you can't blame him for high hopes. The latest Quinnipiac Poll says Bloomberg's approval rating is at 70%. This is down from his possible all-time approval ratings high of 75% at the start of the year, but it's still very high (back in 2003, his approval rating was around 33%). more ›

This past weekend, Al Sharpton welcomed NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to the headquarters of his National Action Network in what the New York Post described as a "cozy lovefest." Despite fierce criticism of police behavior over the years, Sharpton invited Kelly to his HQ in an attempt at what Kelly called "a new climate of respect and change." more ›

The city is moving forward with its "Ring of Steel"-style security camera initiative to fight terror attacks, and it looks like another ring may implemented. Newsday reports officials from Homeland Security as well as the state and local level have been discussing a plan to put radiation sensors "in a 50-mile radius around the city". more ›

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The Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau announced that the NYPD shut down a sport betting and numbers ring in the Bronx, indicting 11 people, 3 of whom have links to the Lucchese and Genovese crime families. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly admited that "the size of this operation was not particularly significant" - it only generated $200,000 in yearly profits - but the gambling ring was run out of the Hunts Point market. And the ring was open to employees, customers "anyone who stopped by the Hunts Point Cooperative Market and the New York City Terminal Produce Cooperative Market in the Bronx," according to the NY Times. more ›

With more public outrage over the 2-3AM subway rape at a G train station in Long Island City, due to NYC Transit's rules that keep transit clerks inside token booths and the empty police booth in the station, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said there just aren't enough police officers to man every single subway station. Newsday pointed out that even though there are 32 police booths in various stations (think the Bedford L stop), "only 15 of the booths are staffed at any given time." Kelly explained:

We do rotate them, rotate officers covering those booths, just as we rotate coverage under our [Operation] Atlas program.We don't cover all of our Atlas posts. We cover them on a daily, irregular basis you might say. There is nothing unusual about the fact that a particular booth wasn't covered at a particular time. We'd like to have booths in every station to give us the option to put the personnel there, but we could never possibly have enough officers to have a booth at every station."