Category: In the News

In advance of an expected City Council vote on the proposed Community Safety Act next week, constituents and community groups will be holding actions in the districts of Council Members Peter Koo and Joel Rivera, calling on them to support the bills to ban racial profiling and establish an Inspector General for the New York […]

Bronx groups urge Councilman Joel Rivera to back legislation calling for an end to discriminatory profiling Rivera has not taken a stance on bills intended to curb profiling during stop-and-frisks and establish an Inspector General for the NYPD Bronx community groups are calling on the City Council Majority Leader to back a pair of bills […]

PABLO — In 2011 the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Defense office received an award from the Center for Holistic Defense sponsored by the Bronx Public Defenders office in New York for technical assistance that uses a holistic approach that allows the tribal defense team to be client-centered with limited financial resources. The award is […]

A Judge Takes on Stop & Frisk.  Article by Jeffrey Toobin. Excerpt: “…Bradley took the ticket to the offices of the Bronx Defenders, who have pioneered what they call “holistic defense,” a method based on recognizing that, for criminal defendants like Bradley, deportation, eviction, or the loss of parental rights may be more ruinous than conviction […]

An analysis by New York City’s public advocate may indicate that racial profiling does not contribute to effective stops. The report looked at public NYPD data on stop-and-frisk from 2012, and found that weapons and guns were more often found on white New Yorkers than African-Americans or Latinos. The NYPD discovered a weapon in one […]

When Lynn Sanchez, a Bronx parent activist, challenged police and education officials to address persistent school climate problems during a public forum on school safety last year, she did not think they would say yes. And yet just months later, Sanchez was sitting with safety agents during one of their training sessions — which, for […]

As the executive director of the Bronx Defenders, a public defense and legal services organization, Robin Steinberg has spent her career demanding justice for the residents of the poorest Congressional district in the nation. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark Supreme Court case that requires states to provide attorneys […]

A special Bronx Defenders project—in which a Wall Street law firm was lined up to help those accused of misdemeanors after arrests resulting from questionable stop-and-frisk tactics by police—has reached a grim conclusion. Contrary to what the U.S. Constitution and New York state law requires, there is effectively no right to trial or meaningful court […]

In New York City, marijuana is the most common reason for arrest, even though only possession of marijuana in public view is a crime. A dramatic spike in these arrests has accompanied the rise of the New York Police Department’s controversial stop and frisk tactic, and an equally controversial reported tactic of considering the marijuana […]

One man was walking home with groceries. Another was on a break from his job at a meat market. A third was walking down the street listening to headphones. That is when the men say police officers confronted them, sometimes violently, searched their clothing and discovered small amounts of marijuana, according to a federal civil […]