After reading a NY Times story on Kiryas Joel, the Orange County town that's home base for the Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews, a few non-Orthodox friends from Manhattan decided to pay the town a visit. Earlier this month they took a train to the nearest station and hiked five miles to the town, where they started snapping photos of some of the sights and attractions—like the air-conditioned bus stop! But it seems the locals don't take to kindly to Goy outsiders, and soon enough a private security force pulled up demanding identification. On Reddit, John Zwinck, a software engineer who lives in midtown Manhattan, describes how the situation quickly escalated: more ›

Last July Gothamist broke the story about the Hasidic cop who allegedly told a dog-toting straphanger, "If you're going to act like a woman I'm going to treat you like a woman" as he handcuffed her and allegedly grabbed her breasts. The next day, the Post spun the story 180 degrees with a statement from a mysterious witness, the infamous (non-existent?) Viane Delgado, who told the tabloid that the dog owner, one Chrissie Brodigan, had shouted anti-Semitic slurs at the officer. (Brodigan says she lost her job because of the unsubstantiated smear.) And exactly one year later, the Post is reporting on another young woman who got arrested for the same crime. It's tradition! more ›

You'll recall the brouhaha sparked by the video of a cop body-slamming a man off his bicycle back in the summer of '08; the officer lost his job and the cyclist, Christopher Long, filed a fat lawsuit. Well, the Post is quick to report today that Long was recently involved "in a drunken incident" in Bedford-Stuyvesant just before 1 a.m. on Wednesday. Does this mean we have to find a new hero? more ›

Though some bloggers have shrugged off Monday's allegedly rough arrest of a woman who was carrying her pug through the subway as "breathtakingly minor," the incident's certainly major enough to have gotten the attention of New York's top cop. Or, at least a reporter was able to ask NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly whether officer Joel Witriol used excessive force and made sexist remarks while arresting Chrissie Brodigan, who was trying to carry her sick pug out of the subway station. more ›