Police opened fire on a subway platform in Brooklyn during a confrontation with an alleged fare-beater, striking the man cops said was armed with a knife, two straphangers caught in the fray, and one of the firing officers, NYPD officials said Sunday.

One of those two passengers hit by the cops’ bullets, a 49-year-old man, was hospitalized in critical condition after he was hit struck in the head, according to the NYPD.

The two officers who opened fire were assigned to patrol the Sutter Avenue subway stop in the 73rd precinct when they spotted a man skip the station turnstile and walk through an open gate toward the train platform, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey explained at an evening press conference from Brookdale Hospital.

  • Tiefling IRL@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    NYPD goes HARD on toll jumpers, but there’s virtually zero enforcement on traffic and cars. Everywhere I go I see assholes with illegally modified vehicles, degenerates speeding down shoulders and medians, motorcycles on crowded sidewalks and pedestrian paths, and too many drunk drivers to count. There are so many cases where one pig parked on the shoulder during rush hour would fund the city budget for a year.

    Instead we get whole families of pigs loitering by the turnstiles

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      The NYPD also loves to go after jaywalkers and vagrants, particularly when they’re interfering with the flow of street traffic.

      Cars are King, baby.

      • Gimpydude@lemmynsfw.com
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        2 months ago

        I totally agree about the vagrancy thing. I have never seen nor heard of anyone in NYC getting a ticket for jaywalking but I only lived there for 50 years.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldOP
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          2 months ago

          I have never seen nor heard of anyone in NYC getting a ticket for jaywalking

          I had a friend who got grabbed by a police officer and thrown against a wall by a NYPD officer, then arrested on the spot, for crossing outside of a designated crosswalk.

          But that was during OWS, so maybe a few other political winds were involved.

    • Moneo@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Apparently we’re calling commuters “straphangers” now too. I wonder if the NYPD will shoot at speeding wheelgrippers next.

      • Gimpydude@lemmynsfw.com
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        2 months ago

        The subways used to have straps on the bars to hold on to during the ride. They’ve been called straphangers for a very long time. In the 80’s one of my brothers was part of the Straphangers Campaign.

        • Moneo@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Fair enough, my ignorance/age is showing.

          I’ve taken public transit all my life so I understood what it meant. Never heard the term in Canada before though.

        • clif@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          So now can we call them “pole hangers”? “Pole grabbers”? “Pole holders”? If they’re listening to music and swaying in time, perhaps “pole dancers”?

          I’m sure there are better terms but I’m not very creative.

    • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      The reason is the same reason why bullies go after vulnerable and/or isolated kids. The type of person who has a car and has the money and means to illegally modify it is also the type of person who would give the police absolute hell if they so much as dared to look at them the wrong way. A person jumping a small toll is someone who is poor and will never attract the sympathies of any judge who will treat them very harshly.

      • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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        1 month ago

        Yeah I just can’t help but think of all that sweet sweet money that we absolutely used to get by charging the rich assholes being bad with their fancy toy cars to the point of it being the main funding force for police for decades and wonder…

        Why not take?

        • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          I want that. I really do. The major problem is that throughout most of history the wealthy have always gotten away with the most incredibly blatant shit and the general attitude of the legal system has been to comfort the comfortable and grieve the aggrieved. The times where the people on the top got their comeuppance and where the wealthy were forced to comply with some level of propriety towards the average person are both rare and brief.

          In the US, the New Deal era was by far the most prosperous era in US history, and many of the wealthy people HATED it. The whole modern anti-politics as politics started shortly after WW2 as a response to the whole thing. The video I linked has more information on it… and it is far from the whole story. What I am saying is that it is really fucked just how powerful the propaganda apparatus of capitalism has grown. This isn’t to say that it was somehow unbiased in the past. Prior to WW2 the liberal media basically aided fascists gain power even when fascists were killing many of the same liberal journalists and shutting down their newspapers.

          It isn’t impossible. It is just fucked is what I am saying, and things will get a lot worse before things get better… and the sad reality is any recovery will be very brief since that is the way how humans work.

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Once I was in NYC and saw a little pack of motorcycles doing wheelies and running red lights.