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Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“Don't bring your friend if it ain't gonna B! a threesome” — Burna BoyB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - ‘Tis that time again … Bottles up and Cheers till next new mix; God willing — February 2026 … Until, STAY Blessed!1 Like I - Wale/Andra Day2 We Won't Stop - Dave East/Young Chris3 I Guess It's Fuck Me - Drake4 YOU - NAV/Don Toliver5 Deeper - Ddm6 Break Me Down - Bobby J From Rockaway/Dom Dirtee/Vivian Green7 The Silent Life Of A Truth - De La Soul8 Hear Me Clearly - Pusha T/Nigo9 Young G's - Puff Daddy/JAY-Z/The Notorious B.I.G.10 They Say - Rapper Big Pooh/Choklate11 Right About Now - Talib Kweli12 You Can't Front (Shit Is Real) - Diamond D/Sadat X/Lord Finesse13 Too Many Nights - Metro Boomin/Don Toliver/Future14 wgft - Gunna/Burna Boy15 Kozy Kondition - Tony DJSOUL Dobson16 Oldie - Odd Future17 Gyal On Fyah - Tony DJSOUL Dobson18 Mind Sex - Dead Prez19 Let's Start Rap Over - The L.O.X./Carl Thomas20 Don't Take It Personal (Just One Of Dem Days) - Monica21 Music Is - MC Lyte/JoiStarr22 Watch ‘Em Holla - Ghostface Killah/Raekwon/Masta Killa/Cappadonna23 Risin' to the Top - Keni Burke“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP JAR - Thankful for the wonderful LUV received!CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“I never would've made w/out you” —Tish HymanB! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - May 3, 20231 Princess Skrewd Diana - Ice Spice/Nicki Minaj2 Told Ya - Chlöe/Missy Elliott3 Where You Belong - The Groovers/Dionne Warwick4 Biz Is Goin' Off - Biz Markie5 As Long As I've Got You - The Charmels6 Open Hand - DeJ Loaf/Rick Ross7 I Wanna Be Down - Brandy/MC Lyte/Yo-Yo/Queen Latifah8 100 Chicagos - Lupe Fiasco9 Replace Me - Nas/Don Toliver/Big Sean10 Baby, This Love I Have - Minnie Riperton11 Can't Get Over You - Westside Boogie/Smino/Teezo Touchdown12 Diet Coke - Pusha T13 Black Woman - Fatoumata Diawara/Lauryn Hill14 Us vs. The World* - Fabolous/Chris Brown/Teyana Taylor15 Come See About Me - Mary J. Blige/Fabolous16 Trying People - De La Soul17 My Man's Gone Now - Nina Simone18 Guilty - Lady Wray19 Effortless - Wale20 All Good - Lil' Kim/The Notorious B.I.G.21 Millionaires - Vic Mensa/Tish Hyman* Excerpt courtesy We Cry Together - Kendrick Lamar/Taylour Paige“HipHip Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP JARCASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Meg dives into The Killing Fields of East New York by Stacy Horn and uncovers the roots of the downfall of a Brooklyn neighborhood. Jessica tells of the time the moral majority and radical feminists got in bed together to legislate against porn.Please check out our website, follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, and...WRITE US A REVIEW HEREWe'd LOVE to hear from you! Let us know if you have any ideas for stories HEREThank you for listening!Love,Meg and Jessica

Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“My Name Tone Starks, not Frosted Flakes” — Ghostface KillahB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn1 Tres Leches (Triboro Trilogy) - Big Pun/Prodigy/Inspektah Deck2 Beat Box - Ghostface Killah/Ty Boogie/Aisha Hall3 In The Ghetto - Eric B. & Rakim4 Sing Like Bilal - Joell Ortiz/ Sheek Louch5 The Beautiful Decay - Skyzoo6 Come On - The Notorious B.I.G./Sadat X7 Motives - Lauryn Hill/Rick James 8 This Is a Journey - Tony DJSOUL Dobson/Gil Scott-Heron9 Bear Hill - Raekwon10 Round N Round - Bobby J From Rockaway/Dom Dirtee11 Tested, Approved & Trust - Burna Boy12 Reach Out -  Lloyd Banks13 1995 - Ddm14 Got It for Cheap - Clipse15 Jazz (We've Got) - A Tribe Called Quest16 Could It Be - Jaheim/The Notorious B.I.G./DJ Clue17 Breathe - Blu Cantrell/Sean Paul18 No Panties - Raedio/Sexyy Red19 Can't Stop Us Now - Nas/Eban Thomas/The Last Poets20 No One Else - Lola Brooke/Jeremih21 Soul Thang - Ghostface Killah/Reek da Villian/PiLLZ/Iceman Bronxman/DRIS22 Losin' Weight - Cam'ron/Prodigy23 Respiration - Black Star/Common24 You Know My Steez - Gang Starr25 Home Is Where the Hatred Is - Gil Scott-Heron26 You Already Know - 112/Foxy Brown 27 Look At Me - Mobb Deep/Clipse

From humiliation to almost interesting — the Yankees somehow managed to turn a 13–7 loss into a moral victory, even if it still counts as an “L” in the scorebook. Meanwhile, in Washington, it's Day 6 of the Government Shutdown, and absolutely nobody's blinking. And finally — the Great Recess Return. For the first time since May, the schoolyard is alive again with shouts, sneakers, and a few “Coach Brandon!” moments. We'll talk about the chaos, the nostalgia, and that feeling when it all starts again.In the headlines on #TheUpdate this Monday, NYPD officers fatally shot an armed man after a brief foot chase in Brooklyn.A worker at a Brooklyn discount store tried to foil a would-be shoplifter — only to get stabbed. The 30-year-old victim, who was not identified, was working at a Family Dollar store on Flatlands Avenue in East New York around 11:48 a.m. when she was slashed by the thief, police and sources said.And in Washington, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deploying any National Guard units to Oregon at all, after a legal whirlwind that began hours earlier when the president mobilized California troops for Portland after the same judge blocked him from using Oregon's National Guard the day before.

Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“Thought I could turn emotion, on and off” — Diana RossB! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - December 2, 20201 Not About You - Honey Dijon/Hadiya George2 I Ain't - Francis Overcast/Kenny Dope3 Til the Morning - Mr. V4 Soulmagic - Soulmagic5 Memories - Scott Diaz/LOA.6 Coffee in the Morning - Detroit Swindle/Jitwam7 Baby Wants To Ride - Jamie Principle/James Curd8 Hey Hey - Dennis Ferrer9 Moody - ESG10 Voices In My Mind - Jihad Muhammad/The Police11 Always There - Kid Crème12 Can't Feel My Face - The Weeknd13 Line C - JHNS14 Don't U Know (Still In Luv) - Meli'sa Morgan15 Play Low Now - Delgado16 Formation - Beyoncé/Big Freedia17 My Faith - Kemal/Maiya Sykes18 Happy Ending - Yooks19 The Boss - Diana Ross* Intro courtesy Spirit | Mariah Carey

Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“So pick a B.C. date 'cause you're history” — Big Daddy KaneB! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - April 5, 2023 - This week's mix, titled “No Words Necessary,” felt fitting during our government shutdown. 1 Rich Flex - Drake/21 Savage2 Good Man - Raphael Saadiq3 He Moans - Tony DJSOUL Dobson4 So Gone - Monica/Missy Elliott5 Keep It Thoro - Prodigy6 School Science - Westside Gunn/Busta Rhymes7 You Can't Turn Me Away - Sylvia Striplin8 Ice Cream - Raekwon/Method Man/Ghostface Killah/Cappadonna9 Go Crazy - Jeezy10 Freak Like Me - Adina Howard11 The Formula - The D.O.C. 12 Lil' Ghetto Boy - Dr. Dre13 Mic Checka - Das EFX14 Work That (MJB RMX) - Tony DJSOUL Dobson15 Plug Tunin' (Last Chance To Comprehend) - De La Soul15 Special Delivery - G. Dep16 Ain't No Half Steppin' - Big Daddy Kane17 Classic (Better Than I've Ever Been)  - DJ Premier/KRS-One/Kanye West/Nas/Rakim18 You Can't See What I Can See - Heavy D & the Boyz19 Soul Clap - Showbiz & A.G.20 Live at the Barbeque - Main Source/Nas/Akinyele/Joe Fatal21 About Damn Time - Lizzo22 Tush - Ghostface Killah/Missy Elliott23 Joyous - Pleasure24 Cavern - Liquid Liquid25 Scratchin' - Magic Disco Machine26 Petrified - Tony DJSOUL Dobson27 Treat ‘Em Right - Chubb Rock28 A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturday - De La Soul29 Related to What Chant - The Last Poets30 Bra - Cymande31 (Fallin' Like) Dominoes - Donald Byrd32 Nas Is Like - Nas33 Lemon Pepper Freestyle - Drake/Rick Ross34 HipHop - Royce Da 5'9”35 Clockwork - Dilated Peoples37 Come Clean - Jeru the Damaja38 Breathe - Blu Cantrell/Sean Paul39 Soul On Ice - Ras Kas40 One - Ghostface Killah41 Respiration - Yasiin Bey42 7182313 - Bobby J From Rockaway/Nef* Intro courtesy excerpt “Bill Cosby” | Eddie Murphy |Raw“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonCASH APP - $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“Our presence is felt like the Black Panther movement” — Lil' KimB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - Dear, Summer …1 Hoodstar - Redman/Faith Evans/Kid Capri2 The Jump Off - Lil' Kim/Mr. Cheeks/Nicki Minaj3 Live at the Barbeque - Main Source/Nas/Joe Fatal/Akinyele4 Keep Bouncin' - Too $hort/Snoop Dogg/will.i.am/Fergie5 Angelic - Slick Rick6 Super Sporm - Captain Sky7 Jungle Boogie -  Kool & The Gang8 Scratchin' - The Magic Disco Machine9 The Sugarhill Gang - Rapper's Delite10 The Breaks - Kurtis Blow11 Tush - Ghostface Killah/Missy Elliott12 The Assembly Line - The Commodores13 This or That - Jermaine Dupri/Rich Homie Quan14 Ecstasy - Ciara/Normani/Teyana Taylor15 THIQUE - Beyoncé16 Pretty Girl - Ice Spice/Rema17 You The One - Lola Brooke18  The Omerta - Raekwon/Nas19 Community - JID/Clipse20 Let It Breathe - Gunna/Roddy Ricch21 Dreams Rarely Do Come True - Young Thug/Mariah The Scientist22 BBL Love - Drake“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonCASH APP - $TonyDJSOULDobsonIntro courtesy The Voices of East Harlem

Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“When a brutha rolls a blunt and his breath smell like pure ass” — RedmanB! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - October 10, 20211 Sweet Tea - MattMatt RayBeam2 Alpha Fag - MattMatt RayBeam3 Autumn Leaves - Bobby J from Rockaway4 Every Time I Wake - Mz Jonz/William Scott5 Love All - Drake/Jay-Z6 R.A.G.U. - Raekwon/Ghostface Killah7 How To Roll a Blunt - Redman8 Baddest - Yung Bleu/Chris Brown/ReFix Kingz/Karlex Pitt9 Rock the Boat - Aaliyah/MC Lyte10 Black Ego - Digable Planets11 Perfect Timing - YG, Mozzy & Blxst12 Summer Rain - Carl Thomas13 Honey - Fat Joe/DJ Drama/Angelica Vila14 Still a Slave - Analog L.U.S.T.15 The Next Movement - DJ Jazzy Jeff/Jazzyfatnastees/The Roots16 The Quan - Foxy Brown/Lady Saw17 Do Me Better - Lady Saw18 East New York - Tony DJSOUL Dobson19 Just to Get a Rep - Gang Starr20 Die For It - Belly/The Weeknd/Nas21 Clockwork  - Dilated Peoples22 Bad Azz - Kash Doll/DJ Infamous/Mulatto/Benny the Butcher23 Intercourse - Megan Thee Stallion/Popcaan/Mustard24 LaLa  (Unlocked) - Alicia Keys/Swae Lee25 You Want My Love - Earth, Wind & Fire/Lucky Daye“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonCASH APP - $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“No, we don't make wack traxs” — GURUB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn1 The Zoom - Lionel Ritchie2 The Zoom - Ghostface Killah3 Hard Part - Teyana Taylor/Lucky Daye4 Escapism. - RAYE/070 Shake5 Test My Gangsta - Bry'Nt/Medino Green/Swanny River6 Drop - Pharcyde7 Soul Vibrations - Dorothy Ashby8 Burning Bridges - Mike Curb Congregation/Sistah Soulja9 Mango Meat - Mandrill10 Machine Gun Funk - The Notorious B.I.G.11 Da Bridge 2001 - Nas/Mobb Deep/Nature/Millennium Thug/MC Shan/Capone/Cormega/Tragedy Khadafi/Marley Marl11 Oochie Wally - Nas/Bravehearts12 Can You Believe It - Styles P/Akon13 Street Life - Mobb Deep/Randy Crawford14 Chains & Whips - Clipse/Kendrick Lamar15 Mass Appeal - Gang Starr16 Solong - Musiq Soulchild17 Could It Be - Jaheim/Duganz18 Sittin' On Top of the World - Burna Boy/21 Savage19 The Jam - Graham Central Station20 Poke It Out - Wale/J. Cole/Cool & Dre21 Addictive - Truth Hurts/Rakim22 $$$ - Gunna/Normani23 SWANK WHITE - Joey Bada$$/Westside Gunn24 Community - JID/Clipse“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonCASH APP - $TonyDJSOULDobson* Intro courtesy Ain't No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight - Stanley Crouch

Backdoor Media presents: HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - A 60-minute, commercial-free HipHop; sometimes HOUSE, mixtape by LGBTQ recording artist/producer Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Every Wednesday @ Midnight (EST)“Lift Ya SPIRIT” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonB! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - November 4, 20201 Liquid Spirit - Gregory Porter2 I Hear You - Steve Bug/YouANDme/Black Soda3 House for All - Blunted Dummies4 Heaven - The Vision5 Try My Love (On For Size) - The Shapeshifters/Teni Tinks6 Love Yourself - Pat Bedeau/The Self Love Witch7 That's The Way - Alexz/Angelo Ferreri8 Marvins Touch - T.Markakis9 Lost - Frank Ocean10 U Got Me Spinning - Belezamusica/Seamus Haji11 One Man - Chanelle/Eric Kupper/Michael Gray12 Church Lady - Dennis Ferrer/Danil Wright/Ken@Work13 Hold Your Head Up High - Inaya Day14 Got 2 Be Loved - Soul Reductions15 The Heat - David Penn16 Clap Clap - CLiQ17 Let's Fly - Man Go Funk/MJ White/Roland Nights“Deep House Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonCASH APP - $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson featuring best LGBTQ voices in Hip Hop - Weds 12a (EST)“I luv u like I love my dick size” — CappadonnaB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - Happy Black, LGBTQ+ PRIDE Month!1 M.T.B.T.T.F. - Clipse2 Dreamin' - Common/Pete Rock/Aretha Franklin3 I Walked On Gilded Splinters - Johnny Jenkins4 Butter (SOUF Fried) - Greg Nice/Ceelo Green/Khujo Goodie/Bun B5 Don't Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days) - Monica6 Da Heavies - Raekwon7 School Science - Westside Gunn/Busta Rhymes8 You Can't Stop the Reign - Shaquille O'Neal/The Notorious B.I.G.9 Oh My Lord - Junior M.A.F.I.A.10 You Know My Steez - Gang Starr11 Ice Cream - Raekwon/Ghostface Killah/Cappadonna12 Mess You Made - Sean Price13 Change - Tim'm West14 Respiration - Black Star/Common15 Soul on Ice - Ras Kass16 People Say - Wu-Tang Clan/Redman17 DND (It's Not Personal) - Rapsody/Bee-B18 You Came Up - Big Pun/N.O.R.E.19 Fruits of the Spirit - Jay Electronica20 No One Else - Lola Brooke/Jeremih21 Sky's the Limit - The Notorious B.I.G./11222 Goin' Be Some Shit - Sheek Louch/MC Lyte23 My Life - Kool G. Rap/C-N-N24 Auntie Diaries - Kendrick Lamar* Intro courtesy I, AM, Woman - Betty Wright“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonCASH APP - $TonyDJSOULDobson

In this exclusive sit-down, East New York artist Glo Bands opens up about growing up in one of Brooklyn's toughest neighborhoods and what it really takes to make it as an independent artist in today's music game. From his early influences to the daily hustle of chasing his dreams, Glo keeps it raw and real.

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson featuring best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)"I wanna B! more than just a random" — Jack HarlowB! NOTED  - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - July 5, 2023 - CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson 1 Muscles - Diana Ross2 Oh Boy - Cam'Ron/Juelz Santana3 Thru The Struggle - Styles P/Curren$y/Raheem Devaughn4 Pain Away - Meek Mill/Lil Durk5 Foolz - Kaoz6 Lituation - Fabolous7 Broken Language - Smoothe da Hustler/Trigger Tha Gambler8 Who Even Cares - Little Simz9 Affirmative Action - Nas/Foxy Brown/A.Z./Cormega10 Loyalty v. Royalty - Belly/Gil Scott-Heron11 Questions - Jack Harlow12 24/7 - Meek Mill/Ella Mai13 Ten Crack Commandments - The Notorious B.I.G.14 Girls Want Girls - Drake/Lil Baby15 No Hook - Shorty Roc/Pretty Boy Rich16 You Will See - Prodigy/Berto Rich17 89 Earthquake - Larry June/The Alchemist18 Chanel Pearls - Conway the Machine/Jill Scott19 Show Out - KiD CuDi/Pop Smoke/SKEPTA20 God Don't Make Mistakes - Conway the Machine/Annette Price21 Smooth Operator - Yung Bleu/Lil Durk22 Patience - Lil Uzi Vert/Don Toliver“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL Dobson* Intro courtesy comedian Robin Montague/Def Comedy Jam - S1/EP 7

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson featuring best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“We built this foundation from the ground up” — M.O.P.B! NOTE  - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson 1 Stress - Slick Rick/Diggs2 That Tree - Snoop Dogg/Kid Cudi3 Halfcrazy - Musiq Soulchild4 Ain't No Half Steppin' - Big Daddy Kane5 A Night to Remember Shalamar6 Body Talk - Eddie Kendricks7 Person to Person - Average White Band8 Like a Throttle - KRS-One9 Classic (Better Than I've Ever Been) DJ Premier/Kanye West/Rakim/Nas/KRS-One10 Funky Dividends - Three Times Dope11 Old to the New - Nice & Smooth12 Skate Odyssey - Ghostface Killah/Raekwon/October London13 Hate It or Love It - The Game/G-Unit14 Rubber Band - Trammps15 What Cha Gonna Do With My Lovin' - Stephanie Mills16 Bring the Pain - Method Man17 It's My Thang '99 - EPMD/Redman/Keith Murray 18 Ecstasy - Ciara/Normani/Teyana Taylor19 We Won't Stop - Dave East/Young Chris20 Turn It Up Tonite - Curren$y/DJ Fresh/DeJ Loaf21 Bitch Niggaz - Dr. Dre22 Everything's So Grand - Common/Pete Rock/PJ23 Tale of the Tape - Falside/M.O.P.24 Living for the City - Curren$y25 You - NAV/Don Toliver26 I Guess It's Fuck Me - Drake“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL Dobson* Intro courtesy Arsenio Hall/Eddie Murphy - Coming to America | John Landis

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson featuring best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Country's at war, little kids cry rape” — Greg NiceB! NOTED  - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - June 18, 2008 - CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson 1 Summertime In Brooklyn - Joell Ortiz2 Mr. Carter - Lil Wayne/Jay-Z3 Magic - Robin Thicke4 Understand Me - D-Block/Styles P/Wyclef5 State of Clarity - Guru/Common/Bob James6 Electric Relaxation - A Tribe Called Quest7 Pink Cookies In a Plastic Bag Getting Crushed By Buildings - LL Cool J8 Heard 'Em Say - Kanye West/Adam Levine9 Hit It from the Back -  Mobb Deep10 That's the Way Love Goes - Janet Jackson11 How to Flow - Nice & Smooth12 Look-Alike - Bob James13 You Can't Turn Me Away - Sylvia Striplin14 A Milli - Lil Wayne15 Think We Have a Problem - Sheek Louch16 Diamonds On My Neck - Smitty/Lil Wayne/Twista17 Still Got Love - Freeway18 American Boy - Estelle/Busta Rhymes19 Step Out - Busy Signal20 Glow of Love - Change21 Spank - Jimmy Bo Horn22 Treat ‘Em Right - Chubb Rock23 You Know How to Love Me - Phyllis Hyman“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL Dobson

Plus - A Judge temporarily blocks a plan to remove part of a Brooklyn bike lane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this week's episode, we are speaking with Sassee Walker, founder of the non profit cat rescue Sassee Cats operating in New York City, specifically Brooklyn and East New York areas. She also works full-time for NYC Health and Hospitals in their billing department. Sassee started working in cat rescue and welfare in 2011 so she's been doing this for a long time. And she is another person out there, boots on the ground, walking the walk, and making a HUGE impact on the welfare of street cats in New York.  She is also supporting and educating other animal lovers on how to trap through getting certified to do TNR or trap/neuter/return, and how we all can learn how to help so many cats get fed, vet care, and find homes. Sassee is deep in the stray cat trenches, and she's here to take us through a day in the life of a cat rescuer and what it really means to be all-in for one of our favorite companions. We're so happy to introduce you to our new favorite Catwoman. Halle Berry and Michelle Pfeiffer were iconic, sure, but in our book no one beats Sassee Walker.Lots of Love.Time Stamps:Introduction: 00:16Interview: 6:32TA: 1:00:29Show Notes:⁠https://www.sasseecats.org/https://www.instagram.com/sassee_badass_tnr/

Today's guest is Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He spent two years as a police officer in Baltimore. I asked him to come on and talk about his new book, Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year (and it was one of my three book recommendations on Ezra Klein's show last week).Peter spoke with hundreds of police officers and NYC officials to understand and describe exactly how the city's leaders in the early 1990s managed to drive down crime so successfully.We discussed:* How bad did things get in the 1970s?* Why did processing an arrest take so long?* What did Bill Bratton and other key leaders do differently?* How did police get rid of the squeegee men?I've included my reading list at the bottom of this piece. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits.Subscribe for one new interview a week.Peter, how would you describe yourself?I would say I'm a criminologist: my background is sociology, but I am not in the sociology department. I'm not so big on theory, and sociology has a lot of theory. I was a grad student at Harvard in sociology and worked as a police officer [in Baltimore] and that became my dissertation and first book, Cop in the Hood. I've somewhat banked my career on those 20 months in the police department.Not a lot of sociologists spend a couple of years working a police beat.It's generally frowned upon, both for methodological reasons and issues of bias. But there is also an ideological opposition in a lot of academia to policing. It's seen as going to the dark side and something to be condemned, not understood.Sociologists said crime can't go down unless we fix society first. It's caused by poverty, racism, unemployment, and social and economic factors — they're called the root causes. But they don't seem to have a great impact on crime, as important as they are. When I'm in grad school, murders dropped 30-40% in New York City. At the same time, Mayor Giuliani is slashing social spending, and poverty is increasing. The whole academic field is just wrong. I thought it an interesting field to get into.We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. I had a blast reading it. Tell me about the process of writing it.A lot of this is oral history, basically. But supposedly people don't like buying books that are called oral histories. It is told entirely from the perspective of police officers who were on the job at the time. I would not pretend I talked to everyone, because there were 30,000+ cops around, but I spoke to many cops and to all the major players involved in the 1990s crime drop in New York City.I was born in the ‘90s, and I had no idea about a crazy statistic you cite: 25% of the entire national crime decline was attributable to New York City's crime decline.In one year, yeah. One of the things people say to diminish the role of policing is that the crime drop happened everywhere — and it did end up happening almost everywhere. But I think that is partly because what happened in New York City was a lot of hard work, but it wasn't that complicated. It was very easy to propagate, and people came to New York to find out what was going on. You could see results, literally in a matter of months.It happened first in New York City. Really, it happened first in the subways and that's interesting, because if crime goes down in the subways [which, at the time, fell under the separate New York City Transit Police] and not in the rest of the city, you say, “What is going on in the subways that is unique?” It was the exact same strategies and leadership that later transformed the NYPD [New York Police Department].Set the scene: What was the state of crime and disorder in New York in the ‘70s and into the ‘80s?Long story short, it was bad. Crime in New York was a big problem from the late ‘60s up to the mid ‘90s, and the ‘70s is when the people who became the leaders started their careers. So these were defining moments. The city was almost bankrupt in 1975 and laid off 5,000 cops; 3,000 for a long period of time. That was arguably the nadir. It scarred the police department and the city.Eventually, the city got its finances in order and came to the realization that “we've got a big crime problem too.” That crime problem really came to a head with crack cocaine. Robberies peaked in New York City in 1980. There were above 100,000 robberies in 1981, and those are just reported robberies. A lot of people get robbed and just say, “It's not worth it to report,” or, “I'm going to work,” or, “Cops aren't going to do anything.” The number of robberies and car thefts was amazingly high. The trauma, the impact on the city and on urban space, and people's perception of fear, all comes from that. If you're afraid of crime, it's high up on the hierarchy of needs.To some extent, those lessons have been lost or forgotten. Last year there were 16,600 [robberies], which is a huge increase from a few years ago, but we're still talking an 85% reduction compared to the worst years. It supposedly wasn't possible. What I wanted to get into in Back from the Brink was the actual mechanisms of the crime drop. I did about fifty formal interviews and hundreds of informal interviews building the story. By and large, people were telling the same story.In 1975, the city almost goes bankrupt. It's cutting costs everywhere, and it lays off more than 5,000 cops, about 20% of the force, in one day. There's not a new police academy class until 1979, four years later. Talk to me about where the NYPD was at that time.They were retrenched, and the cops were demoralized because “This is how the city treats us?” The actual process of laying off the cops itself was just brutal: they went to work, and were told once they got to work that they were no longer cops. “Give me your badge, give me your gun."The city also was dealing with crime, disorder, and racial unrest. The police department was worried about corruption, which was a legacy of the Knapp Commission [which investigated NYPD corruption] and [Frank] Serpico [a whistleblowing officer]. It's an old police adage, that if you don't work, you can't get in trouble. That became very much the standard way of doing things. Keep your head low, stay out of trouble, and you'll collect your paycheck and go home.You talk about the blackout in 1977, when much of the city lost power and you have widespread looting and arson. 13,000 off-duty cops get called in during the emergency, and only about 5,000 show up, which is a remarkable sign of the state of morale.The person in my book who's talking about that is Louis Anemone. He showed up because his neighbor and friend and partner was there, and he's got to help him. It was very much an in-the-foxholes experience. I contrast that with the more recent blackout, in which the city went and had a big block party instead. That is reflective of the change that happened in the city.In the mid-80s you get the crack cocaine epidemic. Talk to me about how police respond.From a political perspective, that era coincided with David Dinkins as [New York City's first black] mayor. He was universally disliked, to put it mildly, by white and black police officers alike. He was seen as hands off. He was elected in part to improve racial relations in New York City, to mitigate racial strife, but in Crown Heights and Washington Heights, there were riots, and racial relations got worse. He failed at the level he was supposed to be good at. Crime and quality of life were the major issues in that election.Dinkins's approach to the violence is centered around what they called “community policing.” Will you describe how Dinkins and political leaders in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s thought about policing?This is under Ben Ward, the [NYPD] Commissioner at the time. The mayor appoints the police commissioner — and the buck does stop with the mayor — but the mayor is not actively involved in day-to-day operations. That part does go down to the police department.Community policing was seen as an attempt to improve relations between the police and the community. The real goal was to lessen racial strife and unrest between black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) communities and the NYPD. Going back to the ‘60s, New York had been rocked by continued unrest in neighborhoods like Central Harlem, East New York, and Bushwick. Community policing was seen as saying that police are partly to blame, and we want to improve relations. Some of it was an attempt to get the community more involved in crime fighting.It's tough. It involves a certain rosy view of the community, but that part of the community isn't causing the problems. It avoids the fact there are people who are actively criming and are willing to hurt people who get in their way. Community policing doesn't really address the active criminal element, that is a small part of any community, including high-crime communities.Arrests increased drastically during this era, more than in the ‘90s with broken windows policing. If the idea is to have fewer arrests, it didn't happen in the ‘80s. Some good came out of it, because it did encourage cops to be a bit more active and cops are incentivized by overtime. Arrests were so incredibly time-consuming, which kind of defeated the purpose of community policing. If you made an arrest in that era, there was a good chance you might spend literally 24 hours processing the arrest.Will you describe what goes into that 24 hours?From my experience policing in Baltimore, I knew arrests were time-consuming and paperwork redundant, but I could process a simple arrest in an hour or two. Even a complicated one that involved juveniles and guns and drugs, we're talking six to eight hours.In the ‘80s, Bob Davin, [in the] Transit Police, would say they'd make an arrest, process at the local precinct, search him in front of a desk officer, print him, and then they would have to get a radio car off patrol to drive you down to central booking at 100 Centre Street [New York City Criminal Court]. Then they would fingerprint him. They didn't have the live scan fingerprints machine, it was all ink. It had to be faxed up to Albany and the FBI to see if it hit on any warrant federally and for positive identification of the person. Sometimes it took 12 hours to have the prints come back and the perp would be remanded until that time. Then you'd have to wait for the prosecutor to get their act together and to review all the paperwork. You couldn't consider bail unless the prints came back either positive or negative and then you would have that initial arraignment and the cop could then go home. There are a lot of moving parts, and they moved at a glacial pace.The system often doesn't work 24/7. A lot of this has changed, but some of it was having to wait until 9 am for people to show up to go to work, because it's not a single system. The courts, the jails, and policing all march to their own drummer, and that created a level of inefficiency.So much of the nitty-gritty of what cops actually do is boring, behind-the-scenes stuff: How do we speed up the paperwork? Can we group prisoners together? Can we do some of this at the police station instead of taking it downtown? Is all of this necessary? Can we cooperate with the various prosecutors? There are five different prosecutors in New York City, one for each borough.There's not a great incentive to streamline this. Cops enjoyed the overtime. That's one of the reasons they would make arrests. So during this time, if a cop makes an arrest for drug dealing, that cop is gone and no cop was there to replace him. If it's a minor arrest, there's a good chance in the long run charges will be dropped anyway. And you're taking cops off the street. In that sense, it's lose-lose. But, you have to think, “What's the alternative?”Bob Davin is a fascinating guy. There's a famous picture from 1981 by Martha Cooper of two cops on a subway train. It's graffitied up and they're in their leather jackets and look like cops from the ‘70s. Martha Cooper graciously gave me permission to use the picture, but she said, "You have to indemnify me because I don't have a release form. I don't know who the cops are." I said, "Martha, I do know who the cop is, because he's in my book and he loves the picture.” Bob Davin is the cop on the right.Davin says that things started to get more efficient. They had hub sites in the late ‘80s or ‘90s, so precincts in the north of Manhattan could bring their prisoners there, and you wouldn't have to take a car out of service to go back to Central Booking and deal with traffic. They started collecting prisoners and bringing them en masse on a small school bus, and that would cut into overtime. Then moving to electronic scan fingerprints drastically saves time waiting for those to come back.These improvements were made, but some of them involve collective bargaining with unions, to limit overtime and arrests that are made for the pure purpose of overtime. You want cops making arrests for the right reason and not simply to make money. But boy, there was a lot of money made in arrests.In 1991, you have the infamous Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn. Racial tensions kick off. It's a nightmare for the mayor, there's this sense that he has lost control. The following year, you have this infamous police protest at City Hall where it becomes clear the relationship between the cops and the mayor has totally evaporated. How does all that play into the mayoral race between Dinkins and Giuliani?It was unintentional, but a lot of the blame for Crown Heights falls on the police department. The part of the story that is better known is that there was a procession for a Hasidic rabbi that was led by a police car. He would go to his wife's grave, and he got a little three-car motorcade. At some point, the police look at this and go "Why are we doing this? We're going to change it." The man who made the deal said ‘I"m retiring in a couple weeks, can we just leave it till then? Because I gave him my word." They're like, "Alright, whatever."This motor car procession is then involved in a car crash, and a young child named Gavin Cato is killed, and another girl is severely injured. The volunteer, Jewish-run ambulance shows up and decides they don't have the equipment: they call for a professional city ambulance. Once that ambulance is on the way, they take the mildly-injured Jewish people to the hospital. The rumor starts that the Jewish ambulance abandoned the black children to die.This isn't the first incident. There's long been strife over property and who the landlord is. But this was the spark that set off riots. A young Jewish man was randomly attacked on the street and was killed.As an aside, he also shouldn't have died, but at the hospital they missed internal bleeding.Meanwhile, the police department has no real leadership at the time. One chief is going to retire, another is on vacation, a third doesn't know what he's doing, and basically everyone is afraid to do anything. So police do nothing. They pull back, and you have three days of very anti-Semitic riots. Crowds chanting "Kill the Jews" and marching on the Lubavitch Hasidic Headquarters. Al Sharpton shows up. The riots are blamed on Dinkins, which is partly fair, but a lot of that's on the NYPD. Finally, the mayor and the police commissioner go to see what's going on and they get attacked. It's the only time in New York City history that there's ever been an emergency call from the police commissioner's car. People are throwing rocks at it.It took three days to realise this, but that's when they say “We have to do something here,” and they gather a group of officers who later become many of Bratton's main chiefs at the time [Bill Bratton was Commissioner of the NYPD from 1994-1996, under Giuliani]: Mike Julian, Louis Anemone, Ray Kelly, and [John] Timoney. They end the unrest in a day. They allow people to march, they get the police department to set rules. It still goes on for a bit, but no one gets hurt after that, and that's it.It was a huge, national story at the time, but a lot of the details were not covered. Reporters were taken from their car and beaten and stripped. The significance was downplayed at the time, especially by the New York Times, I would say.That's followed by the Washington Heights riots, which is a different story. A drug dealer was shot and killed by cops. There were rumors, which were proven to be false, that he was executed and unarmed. Then there were three days of rioting there. It wasn't quite as severe, but 53 cops were hurt, 120 stores were set on fire, and Mayor Dinkins paid for the victim's family to go to the Dominican Republic for the funeral. The police perspective again was, “You're picking the wrong side here.”Then there's the so-called Police Riot at City Hall. Nominally, it was about the CCRB, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and setting up an accountability mechanism to control cops. But really it was just an anti-Dinkins protest. It was drunken and unruly. The cops stormed the steps of City Hall. I have the account of one of the cops who was on the top of those steps looking at this mob of cops storming to him, and he's getting worried he's going to be killed in a crush. There were racist chants from off-duty cops in the crowd. It did not reflect well on police officers. But it showed this hatred of David Dinkins, who was seen as siding with criminals and being anti-police. The irony is that Dinkins is the one who ends up hiring all the cops that Giuliani gets credit for.In the “Safe Streets, Safe City” program?Yes. That was because a white tourist, Brian Watkins, was killed in a subway station protecting his parents who were getting robbed. That led to the famous headline [in the New York Post] of “Dave, do something! Crime-ravaged city cries out for help.” He, with City Council President Peter Vallone, Sr., drafted and pushed through this massive hiring of police officers, “Safe Streets, Safe City.”The hiring wasn't fast-tracked. It might be because Dinkins's people didn't really want more cops. But it was a Dinkins push that got a massive hiring of cops. When the first huge class of police officers graduated, Bill Bratton was there and not David Dinkins.Some interviewees in your book talk about how there's physically not enough room in the police academies at this time, so they have to run classes 24/7. You cycle cohorts in and out of the same classroom, because there are too many new cops for the facilities.You have thousands of cops going through it at once. Everyone describes it as quite a chaotic scene. But it would have been hard to do what the NYPD did without those cops. Ray Kelly, who was police commissioner under Dinkins at the end [from 1992 to 1994] before he became police commissioner for 12 years under Bloomberg [from 2002 to 2013] probably could have done something with those cops too, but he never had the chance, because the mayoral leadership at the time was much more limiting in what they wanted cops to do.Crime starts declining slowly in the first few years of the ‘90s under Dinkins, and then in ‘93 Giuliani wins a squeaker of a mayoral election against Dinkins.One of the major issues was the then-notorious “squeegee men” of New York City. These were guys who would go to cars stopped at bridges and tunnel entrances and would rub a squeegee over the windshield asking for money. It was unpleasant, intimidating, and unwanted, and it was seen as one of those things that were just inevitable. Like graffiti on the subway in the ‘80s. Nothing we can do about it because these poor people don't have jobs or housing or whatever.The irony is that Bratton and Giuliani were happy to take credit for that, and it was an issue in the mayoral campaign, but it was solved under David Dinkins and Ray Kelly and Mike Julian with the help of George Kelling [who, with James Wilson, came up with broken windows theory]. But they never got credit for it. One wonders if, had they done that just a few months earlier, it would have shifted the entire campaign and we'd have a different course of history in New York City.It's a great example of a couple of things that several people in your book talk about. One is that disorder is often caused by a very small set of individuals. There's only like 70 squeegee men, yet everybody sees them, because they're posted up at the main tunnel and bridge entrances to Manhattan. And getting them off the streets solves the problem entirely.Another emphasis in the book is how perceptions of crime are central. You quote Jack Maple, the father of Compstat, as saying, “A murder on the subway counts as a multiple murder up on the street, because everybody feels like that's their subway.” The particular locations of crimes really affect public perception.Absolutely. Perception is reality for a lot of these things, because most people aren't victimized by crime. But when people perceive that no one is in control they feel less safe. It's not that this perception is false, it just might not be directly related to an actual criminal act.The other thing I try to show is that it's not just saying, “We've got to get rid of squeegee men. How do you do it?” They had tried before, but this is why you need smart cops and good leadership, because it's a problem-solving technique, and the way to get rid of graffiti is different to the way you get rid of squeegee men.This book is in opposition to those who just say, “We can't police our way out of this problem.” No, we can. We can't police our way out of every problem. But if you define the problem as, we don't want people at intersections with squeegees, of course we can police our way out of the problem, using legal constitutional tools. You need the political will. And then the hard work starts, because you have to figure out how to actually do it.Will you describe how they tackle the squeegee men problem?Mike Julian was behind it. They hired George Kelling, who's known for broken windows. They said, “These people are here to make money. So to just go there and make a few arrests isn't going to solve the problem.” First of all, he had to figure out what legal authority [to use], and he used Traffic Reg 44 [which prohibits pedestrians from soliciting vehicle occupants]. He talked to Norm Siegel of the NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union] about this, who did not want this crackdown to happen. But Norman said, “Okay, this is the law, I can't fight that one. You're doing it legally. It's all in the books.” And So that took away that opposition.But the relentless part of it is key. First they filmed people. Then, when it came to enforcement, they warned people. Then they cited people, and anybody that was left they arrested. They did not have to arrest many people, because the key is they did this every four hours. It was that that changed behavior, because even a simple arrest isn't going to necessarily deter someone if it's a productive way to make money. But being out there every four hours for a couple of weeks or months was enough to get people to do something else. What that something else is, we still don't know, but we solved the squeegee problem.So in 93, Giuliani is elected by something like 50,000 votes overall. Just as an aside, in Prince of the City, Fred Siegel describes something I had no idea about. There's a Puerto Rican Democratic Councilman who flips and supports Giuliani. Mayor Eric Adams, who at the time was the head of a nonprofit for black men in law enforcement, calls him a race traitor for doing that and for being married to a white woman. There was a remarkable level of racial vitriol in that race that I totally missed.10 years ago when I started this, I asked if I could interview then-Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, and he said yes, and the interview kept getting rescheduled, and I said, “Eh, I don't need him.” It's a regret of mine. I should have pursued that, but coulda, woulda, shoulda.Giuliani is elected, and he campaigns very explicitly on a reducing crime and disorder platform. And he hires Bill Bratton. Tell me about Bratton coming on board as NYPD commissioner.Bratton grew up in Boston, was a police officer there, became head of the New York City Transit Police when that was a separate police department. Right before he becomes NYPD Commissioner, he's back in Boston, as the Chief of Police there, and there is a movement among certain people to get Bratton the NYC job. They succeed in that, and Bratton is a very confident man. He very much took a broken windows approach and said, “We are going to focus on crime.” He has a right-hand man by the name of Jack Maple who he knows from the Transit Police. Maple is just a lieutenant in transit, and Bratton makes him the de facto number two man in the police department.Jack Maple passed away in 2001 and I didn't know what I was going to do, because it's hard to interview a man who's no longer alive. Chris Mitchell co-wrote Jack Maple's autobiography called Crime Fighter and he graciously gave me all the micro-cassettes of the original interviews he conducted with Maple around 1998. Everyone has a Jack Maple story. He's probably the most important character in Back from the Brink.Jack Maple comes in, no one really knows who he is, no one respects him because he was just a lieutenant in Transit. He goes around and asks a basic question — this is 1994 — he says, “How many people were shot in New York City in 1993?” And nobody knows. That is the state of crime-fighting in New York City before this era. There might have been 7,000 people shot in New York City in 1990 and we just don't know, even to this day.One citation from your book: in 1993, an average of 16 people were shot every day. Which is just remarkable.And remember, shootings have been declining for two or three years before that! But nobody knew, because they weren't keeping track of shootings, because it's not one of the FBI Uniform Crime Report [which tracks crime data nationally] index crimes. But wouldn't you be curious? It took Jack Maple to be curious, so he made people count, and it was findable, but you had to go through every aggravated assault and see if a gun was involved. You had to go through every murder from the previous year and see if it was a shooting. He did this. So we only have shooting data in New York City going back to 1993. It's just a simple process of caring.The super-short version of Back from the Brink is it was a change in mission statement: “We're going to care about crime.” Because they hadn't before. They cared about corruption, racial unrest, brutality, and scandal. They cared about the clearance rate for robbery a bit. You were supposed to make three arrests for every ten robberies. It didn't matter so much that you were stopping a pattern or arresting the right person, as long as you had three arrests for every ten reported crimes, that was fine.This is a story about people who cared. They're from this city — Bratton wasn't, but most of the rest are. They understood the trauma of violence and the fact that people with families were afraid to go outside, and nobody in the power structure seemed to care. So they made the NYPD care about this. Suddenly, the mid-level police executives, the precinct commanders, had to care. and the meetings weren't about keeping overtime down, instead they were about ”What are you doing to stop this shooting?”Tell listeners a little bit more about Jack Maple, because he's a remarkable character, and folks may not know what a kook he was.I think he was a little less kooky than he liked to present. His public persona was wearing a snazzy cat and spats and dressing like a fictional cartoon detective from his own mind, but he's a working-class guy from Queens who becomes a transit cop.When Bratton takes over, he writes a letter up the chain of command saying this is what we should do. Bratton read it and said, “This guy is smart.” Listening to 80 hours of Jack Maple, everyone correctly says he was a smart guy, but he had a very working-class demeanor and took to the elite lifestyle. He loved hanging out and getting fancy drinks at the Plaza Hotel. He was the idea man of the NYPD. Everyone has a Jack Maple imitation. “You're talking to the Jackster,” he'd say. He had smart people working under him who were supportive of this. But it was very much trying to figure out as they went along, because the city doesn't stop nor does it sleep.He was a bulls***er, but he's the one who came up with the basic outline of the strategy of crime reduction in New York City. He famously wrote it on a napkin at Elaine's, and it said, “First, we need to gather accurate and timely intelligence.” And that was, in essence, CompStat. “Then, we need to deploy our cops to where they need to be.” That was a big thing. He found out that cops weren't working: specialized units weren't working weekends and nights when the actual crime was happening. They had their excuses, but basically they wanted a cushy schedule. He changed that. Then, of course, you have to figure out what you're doing, what the effective tactics are. Then, constant follow up and assessment.You can't give up. You can't say “Problem solved.” A lot of people say it wasn't so much if your plan didn't work, you just needed a Plan B. It was the idea that throwing your hands in the air and saying, “What are you going to do?” that became notoriously unacceptable under Chief Anemone's stern demeanor at CompStat. These were not pleasant meetings. Those are the meetings that both propagated policies that work and held officers accountable. There was some humiliation going on, so CompStat was feared.Lots of folks hear CompStat and think about better tracking of crime locations and incidents. But as you flesh out, the meat on the bones of CompStat was this relentless follow-up. You'd have these weekly meetings early in the morning with all the precinct heads. There were relentless asks from the bosses, “What's going on in your district or in your precinct? Can you explain why this is happening? What are you doing to get these numbers down?” And follow-ups the following week or month. It was constant.CompStat is often thought of as high-tech computer stuff. It wasn't. There was nothing that couldn't have been done with old overhead projectors. It's just that no one had done it before. Billy Gorta says it's a glorified accountability system at a time when nobody knew anything about computers. Everyone now has access to crime maps on a computer. It was about actually gathering accurate, timely data.Bratton was very concerned that these numbers had to be right. It was getting everyone in the same room and saying, “This is what our focus is going to be now.” And getting people to care about crime victims, especially when those crime victims might be unsympathetic because of their demeanor, criminal activity, or a long arrest record. “We're going to care about every shooting, we're going to care about every murder.”Part of it was cracking down on illegal guns. There were hundreds of tactics. The federal prosecutors also played a key role. It was getting this cooperation. Once it started working and Giuliani made it a major part of claiming success as mayor, suddenly everyone wanted to be part of this, and you had other city agencies trying to figure it out. So it was a very positive feedback loop, once it was seen as a success.When Bratton came on the job, he said, “I'm going to bring down crime 15%.” No police commissioner had ever said that before. In the history of policing before 1994, no police commissioner ever promised a double-digit reduction in crime or even talked about it. People said “That's crazy.” It was done, and then year after year. That's the type of confidence that they had. They were surprised it worked as well as it did, but they all had the sense that there's a new captain on this ship, and we're trying new things. It was an age of ideas and experiment.And it was a very short time.That's the other thing that surprised me. Giuliani fired Bratton in the middle of ‘96.It's remarkable. Bratton comes in ‘94, and August 1994 is where you see crime drop off a cliff. You have this massive beginning of the reduction that continues.That inflection point is important for historical knowledge. I don't address alternatives that other people have proposed [to explain the fall in crime] — For example, the reduction in lead [in gasoline, paint, and water pipes] or legalized abortion with Roe v. Wade [proposed by Stephen Dubner].Reasonable people can differ. Back from the Brink focuses on the police part of the equation. Today, almost nobody, except for a few academics, says that police had nothing to do with the crime drop. That August inflection is key, because there is nothing in a lagged time analysis going back 20 years that is going to say that is the magic month where things happened. Yet if you look at what happened in CompStat, that's the month they started getting individual officer data, and noticing that most cops made zero arrests, and said, “Let's get them in the game as well.” And that seemed to be the key; that's when crime fell off the table. The meetings started in April, I believe, but August is really when the massive crime drop began.To your point about the confidence that crime could be driven down double digits year over year, there's a great quote you have from Jack Maple, where he says to a fellow cop, “This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. As long as we have absolute control, we can absolutely drive this number into the floor.”One detail I enjoyed was that Jack Maple, when he was a transit cop, would camp out under a big refrigerator box with little holes cut out for eyes and sit on the subway platform waiting for crooks.For people who are interested in Jack Maple, it is worth reading his autobiography, Crime Fighter. Mike Daly wrote New York's Finest, which uses the same tapes that I had access to, and he is much more focused on that. He's actually the godfather of Jack Maple's son, who is currently a New York City police officer. But Maple and co were confident, and it turned out they were right.As well as having changes in tactics and approach and accountability across the NYPD, you also have a series of specific location cleanups. You have a specific initiative focused on the Port Authority, which is a cesspool at the time, an initiative in Times Square, the Bryant Park cleanup, and then Giuliani also focuses on organized crime on the Fulton Fish Market, and this open-air market in Harlem.I was struck that there was both this general accountability push in the NYPD through CompStat, and a relentless focus on cleaning up individual places that were hubs of disorder.I'm not certain the crime drop would have happened without reclamation of public spaces and business improvement districts. Bryant Park's a fascinating story because Dan Biederman, who heads the Corporation, said, “People just thought it was like a lost cause, this park can't be saved. The city is in a spiral of decline.” He uses Jane Jacobs' “eyes on the street” theory and then George Kelling and James Q. Wilson's broken windows theory. The park has money — not city money, but from local property owners — and it reopens in 1991 to great acclaim and is still a fabulous place to be. It showed for the first time that public space was worth saving and could be saved. New York City at the time needed that lesson. It's interesting that today, Bryant Park has no permanent police presence and less crime. Back in the ‘80s, Bryant Park had an active police presence and a lot more crime.The first class I ever taught when I started at John Jay College in 2004, I was talking about broken windows. A student in the class named Jeff Marshall, who is in my book, told me about Operation Alternatives at the Port Authority. He had been a Port Authority police officer at the time, and I had not heard of this. People are just unaware of this part of history. It very much has lessons for today, because in policing often there's nothing new under the sun. It's just repackaged, dusted off, and done again. The issue was, how do we make the Port Authority safe for passengers? How do we both help and get rid of people living in the bus terminal? It's a semi-public space, so it makes it difficult. There was a social services element about it, that was Operational Alternatives. A lot of people took advantage of that and got help. But the flip side was, you don't have to take services, but you can't stay here.I interviewed the manager of the bus terminal. He was so proud of what he did. He's a bureaucrat, a high-ranking one, but a port authority manager. He came from the George Washington Bridge, which he loved. And he wonders, what the hell am I going to do with this bus terminal? But the Port Authority cared, because they're a huge organization and that's the only thing with their name on it — They also control JFK Airport and bridges and tunnels and all the airports, but people call the bus terminal Port Authority.They gave him almost unlimited money and power and said, “Fix it please, do what you've got to do,” and he did. It was environmental design, giving police overtime so they'd be part of this, a big part of it was having a social service element so it wasn't just kicking people out with nowhere to go.Some of it was also setting up rules. This also helped Bratton in the subway, because this happened at the same time. The court ruled that you can enforce certain rules in the semi-public spaces. It was not clear until this moment whether it was constitutional or not. To be specific, you have a constitutional right to beg on the street, but you do not have a constitutional right to beg on the subway. That came down to a court decision. Had that not happened, I don't know if in the long run the crime drop would have happened.That court decision comes down to the specific point that it's not a free-speech right on the subway to panhandle, because people can't leave, because you've got them trapped in that space.You can't cross the street to get away from it. But it also recognized that it wasn't pure begging, that there was a gray area between aggressive begging and extortion and robbery.You note that in the early 1990s, one-third of subway commuters said they consciously avoided certain stations because of safety, and two thirds felt coerced to give money by aggressive panhandling.The folks in your book talk a lot about the 80/20 rule applying all over the place. That something like 20% of the people you catch are committing 80% of the crimes.There's a similar dynamic that you talk about on the subways, both in the book and in your commentary over the past couple years about disorder in New York. You say approximately 2,000 people with serious mental illness are at risk for street homelessness, and these people cycle through the cities, streets, subways, jails, and hospitals.What lessons from the ‘90s can be applied today for both helping those people and stopping them being a threat to others?Before the ‘80s and Reagan budget cuts there had been a psychiatric system that could help people. That largely got defunded. [Deinstitutionalization began in New York State earlier, in the 1960s.] We did not solve the problem of mental health or homelessness in the ‘90s, but we solved the problem of behavior. George Kelling [of broken windows theory] emphasized this repeatedly, and people would ignore it. We are not criminalizing homelessness or poverty. We're focusing on behavior that we are trying to change. People who willfully ignore that distinction almost assume that poor people are naturally disorderly or criminal, or that all homeless people are twitching and threatening other people. Even people with mental illness can behave in a public space.Times have changed a bit. I think there are different drugs now that make things arguably a bit worse. I am not a mental health expert, but we do need more involuntary commitment, not just for our sake, but for theirs, people who need help. I pass people daily, often the same person, basically decomposing on a subway stop in the cold. They are offered help by social services, and they say no. They should not be allowed to make that choice because they're literally dying on the street in front of us. Basic humanity demands that we be a little more aggressive in forcing people who are not making rational decisions, because now you have to be an imminent threat to yourself or others. That standard does need to change. But there also need to be mental health beds available for people in this condition.I don't know what the solution is to homelessness or mental health. But I do know the solution to public disorder on the subway and that's, regardless of your mental state or housing status, enforcing legal, constitutional rules, policing behavior. It does not involve locking everybody up. It involves drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It's amazing how much people will comply with those rules.That presents the idea that someone's in charge, it's not a free-for-all. You get that virtuous loop, which New York had achieved in 2014–2016, when crime was at an all-time low in the city. Then the politicians decided public order wasn't worth preserving anymore. These are political choices.I had a similar version of this conversation with a friend who was shocked that there were zero murders on the subway in 2017 and that that number was stable: you had one or two a year for several years in the mid-2010s.It was five or fewer a year from 1997 to 2019, and often one or two. Then you have zero in 2017. There were [ten in 2022]. It coincides perfectly with an order from [Mayor] de Blasio's office and the homeless czar [Director of Homeless Services Steven] Banks [which] told police to stop enforcing subway rules against loitering. The subways became — once again — a de facto homeless shelter. Getting rule-violating homeless people out of the subway in the late ‘80s was such a difficult and major accomplishment at the time, and to be fair it's not as bad as it was.The alternative was that homeless outreach was supposed to offer people services. When they decline, which 95% of people do, you're to leave them be. I would argue again, I don't think that's a more humane stance to take. But it's not just about them, it's about subway riders.There's one story that I think was relevant for you to tell. You were attacked this fall on a subway platform by a guy threatening to kill you. It turns out he's had a number of run-ins with the criminal justice system. Can you tell us where that guy is now?I believe he's in prison now. The only reason I know who it is is because I said, one day I'm going to see his picture in the New York Post because he's going to hurt somebody. Am I 100 percent certain it's Michael Blount who attacked me? No, but I'm willing to call him out by name because I believe it is. He was out of prison for raping a child, and he slashed his ex-girlfriend and pushed her on the subway tracks. And then was on the lam for a while. I look at him and the shape of his face, his height, age, build, complexion, and I go, that's got to be him.I wasn't hurt, but he gave me a sucker punch trying to knock me out and then chased me a bit threatening to kill me, and I believe he wanted to. It's the only time I ever was confronted by a person who I really believe wanted to kill me, and this includes policing in the Eastern District in Baltimore. It was an attempted misdemeanor assault in the long run. But I knew it wasn't about me. It was him. I assume he's going to stay in prison longer for what he did to his ex-girlfriend. But I never thought it would happen to me. I was lucky the punch didn't connect.Peter Moskos's new book is Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop.My reading listEssays:Johnny Hirschauer's reporting, including “A Failed 'Solution' to 'America's Mental Health Crisis',“ “Return to the Roots,” and “The Last Institutions.” “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. ​“It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem,” Charles Lehman.Books:Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, Jill Leovy.​Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life, Fred Siegel.​ Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, Peter Moskos.​Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, Sam Quinones.​Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Jacob Laval (The Unbreakable Boy, John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch) and Amanda Warren (The Night Agent, East New York) headline a Sicilian tale about sowing the seeds of kindness, compassion and crocuses.

On The Gate! A podcast hosted by two jailbird/recovering drug addicts and active comedians Geo Perez and Derek Drescher, who talk each week about their times in jail, what they learned, what you should know, and how they are improving their life or slipping into recidivism each day! This week we have Gastor Almonte! They talk about Dereks health, relationship advice, being from East New York, Brooklyn rap and much more. ON THE GATE! ENJOY!Original air date: 3.12.25WATCH THE LIVESTREAM 2 PM EST MONDAYS and EXCLUSIVE EPISODES 2 PM EST THURSDAYS on gasdigital.com. Use promo code OTG for a discount on your membership. Watch the free livestream here at 12 AM EST FRIDAYS. FOLLOWGeo PerezInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/geoperez86/Derek DrescherInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/derekdrescher/Gastor AlmonteInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/gastoralmonte/-See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dave Ortiz is an artist. Dave is influenced by his Hispanic heritage, grew up in East New York in the 70s and 80s, andwas swept up in the graffiti zeitgeist but eventually decided to turn to fine art and painting.I know of Dave as Zoo York's first employee, Crazy Dave, DQM, Dave's Wear House, Little Camera Big Picture, ANOTHERWHIP, and OUR/NEWYORK.How do you know Dave?Please welcome Dave Ortiz to Wear Many Hats.⁠⁠instagram.com/123dortiz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/wearmanyhatswmh⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/rashadrastam⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠rashadrastam.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wearmanyhats.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

A new public plaza is in the works for East New York's Broadway Junction, but residents fear being priced out. And finally, WNYC's Michael Hill talks with Bart Chezar, a chestnut expert, about an effort to bring the trees back to Brooklyn.

Learn more at TheCityLife.org

A new book posits that the roots of the rise in crime in East New York, Brooklyn, can be linked directly to a subprime mortgage scandal decades earlier. Author Stacy Horn discusses her new book, The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood.This segment is guest-hosted by Tiffany Hansen.

The FDNY suffered line of duty deaths at two separate fire operations on January 23, 2005, “Black Sunday.”  Firefighter Richard Scalfani of Ladder Co. 103 was killed in the performance of his duties while operating a private dwelling fire on Jerome St. in the East New York section of Brooklyn.  Just hours prior, six members of Ladder Co. 27 and Rescue Co. 3 jumped from the top floor of a 4-story apartment building on E. 178th St in the Bronx.  Lieutenant Curt Meyran, FF John Bellew, and Lieutenant Joseph DiBernardo succumbed to their injuries.      Firefighter Brendan Cawley is a survivor of the 178th St fire. Nearly three years after the fire, Brendan returned to full duty status following a grueling and miraculous recovery from the physical and mental injuries that he sustained after exiting the top floor.  The interview you will hear in this episode was recorded in 2019 at a LUF Human Performance Summit devoted to the concept of resilience and the question, “what happens when we compete to win and lose?”  The LUF team remembers those members who lost their lives on Black Sunday.  The LUF team is inspired by the resilience that the survivors have displayed in the years since, survivors including sons of members killed and critically injured who have recently joined the ranks of the FDNY. 

Show Notes provided by Joe Peluso Unlike the New York Yankees in this year's World Series, New Year's at 12:00AM is the only time it is acceptable to drop the "ball".    Ringing in the new year is always accompanied with a "sober" look back at the highlights of the past dozen months. But with your ever faithful Mint crew of James, Chris and Joe, the recollections are dialed down to the world of Pop Culture. And by dialed down we don't mean insignificant or trivial. Quite the contrary, we shout from the highest spires in fabled Asgaerd the accomplishments of men and women who strive to entertain, educate and amuse us within the confines ofpure, unadulterated fantasy!     With gusto, and a magnum of Dom Perignon 1995 in hand (We're kidding, it's more like a Welch's Grape Juice Box), the boys list their favorite pop offerings from the previous year. "Deadpool and Wolverine", "Absolute Batman", "Only Murders in the Building" (sounds like my old East New York neighborhood), and X-Men'97 are but a few oftheir prodigious picks for 2024.  But the list, like the beat, goes on. So stick around for the fullhour and see if your favorite pop culture choices made our enormous enumerations!   Oh, and when that ball drops in Times Square at midnight lets hope the are no Yankee ball players responsible for catching it! What a mess that would be!   HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OUR MINT FRIENDS AND FAITHFUL! May you find peace, health, and prosperity in 2025!

The All Local Morning for Tuesday, December 17 2024

In this episode, Cherise is joined by Stacie Wong, Principal at GLUCK+ in New York. They discuss the Van Sinderen Plaza Project in Brooklyn.You can see the project here as you listen along.Van Sinderen Plaza is a model of transformation and opportunity in Brooklyn, serving a neighborhood where the need for affordable housing is urgent. Located on the border between East New York and Brownsville, where over half the residents live below the poverty line, the development turns long-abandoned land into a vibrant community asset. The project incorporates green building practices, featuring a ventilated rain-screen system on the facade built from fiber cement panels, using fully recyclable and mostly natural materials.If you enjoy this episode, visit arcat.com/podcast for more. If you're a frequent listener of Detailed, you might enjoy similar content at Gābl Media. Mentioned in this episode:ARCAT Detailed on Youtube

Celebrate the gay high holiday that is BRUNCH with Lea DeLaria once a month at 54 Below! Today Sarah chats with Lea about her incredible career, her background in jazz, Brunch is Gay (Lea's fabulous monthly series), our mutual hatred of T****, and so much more! Lea DeLaria brings you a fat, fast, and funny Sunday filled with her trademark comedy and musical chops in Brunch Is Gay. Let's face it, brunch is a Gay high holiday, so come and spend it with the highest, gayest human on the planet. Be prepared to hear music from some of her favorite repertoire, including Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, and LaChiusa, as well as classic jazz standards. Emmy Award winner Lea DeLaria was the first openly gay comic on television in America, and is an accomplished Jazz performer who has performed in concert venues all over the world. She is best known as ‘Big Boo' from “Orange is the New Black” (3 SAG Awards). Lea can currently be seen in the indie feature film Potato Dreams of America, and in the Indigo Girls jukebox feature film, Glitter & Doom. She recently starred in the Off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' play, The Night of the Iguana, directed by Emily Mann. TV credits include “East New York,” “The Blacklist,” “Physical,” “Reprisal,” “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness,” “Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts,” “Shameless,” and “Broad City.” Film credits include Cars 3, Support The Girls, and First Wives Club. Broadway credits, POTUS Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive (Bernadette), The Rocky Horror Show (Eddie/Dr. Scott) and On The Town (Hildy), Obie and Theatre World Awards. 54below.org for more info Connect with Lea DeLaria Instagram: @realleadelaria Connect with GOOD SHOW! Instagram: @goodshowpodcast  Tik Tok: @goodshowpodcast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this compelling episode of the Stuck In My Mind Podcast, host Wize El Jefe welcomes the inspiring Terry Fossum for a profound discussion on mastering goal-setting and personal transformation. Titled "From Struggles to Success: Terry Fossum's Journey and Goal Setting Insights" the episode delves into key life lessons, touching on motivation, resilience, and the journey from adversity to success. Terry Fossum, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and influencer with a top TED Talk, brings his rich background and genuine experience to the table. Growing up in McAllen, Texas, a region marked by crime and violence, Terry faced immense challenges, including the death of his father during his high school years. Despite a low point following his father's death and discouragement from a neighbor, Terry used these adversities as catalysts for motivation, eventually emerging as a beacon of success and personal growth. His story underscores the importance of resilience and effective goal-setting strategies, which he shares with the audience. Fossum and Wize El Jefe explore a range of topics, starting with the value of helping others as a source of joy. Terry advises listeners to engage in activities such as visiting pet shelters or nursing homes, emphasizing how these simple acts can uplift spirits and enrich personal well-being. They also discuss the importance of removing toxic relationships from one's life, stressing the need to surround oneself with supportive and positive individuals to foster a conducive environment for personal growth. The episode highlights the crucial role of self-improvement, a theme close to Wize El Jefe's heart as he recounts his journey of personal growth and the joy of sharing impactful stories through his podcast. A poignant anecdote enlivened the conversation, as Wize recounts releasing a podcast episode a year late, which miraculously had a timely impact on a guest grappling with self-discovery. This story emphasizes the power of storytelling in creating a ripple effect that can motivate and guide listeners toward finding their purpose. Terry introduces his renowned "Oxcart Technique," a practical and emotionally-driven approach to goal-setting that consists of three distinct steps: the "Failure Scenario," which outlines the consequences of failing to achieve goals; the "Daily Actions," which involves committing to SMART goals; and the "Success Scenario," which provides positive visualization to generate emotional motivation. By encouraging listeners to read these scenarios in the morning and night, Terry provides a clear blueprint for maintaining focus and enthusiasm toward achieving personal goals. The conversation takes a reflective turn as both speakers acknowledge the acceptance of imperfection. They express that everyone is on a learning curve, and mistakes are part of the journey. Terry underscores the importance of using time constructively by engaging with positive content, such as uplifting podcasts, to remain motivated. He also shares his experiences on a survival reality show, revealing how his Oxcart Technique aided him in preparation and ultimate victory, offering listeners a firsthand account of its effectiveness. Wize El Jefe adds depth to the conversation by sharing his personal narrative of overcoming adversity. Growing up in East New York, Brooklyn, Wize faced his own set of challenges, including the loss of significant loved ones, which left him feeling angry and lost. Determined to change his life, Wize sought therapy, learned about goal-setting and financial literacy, rebuilt his life, and eventually started the podcast to inspire others by sharing stories of overcoming hardships. Both Terry and Wize openly discuss the misconceptions surrounding goal-setting, debunking myths such as the fallacy of the Harvard goal-setting study and the mistaken belief that mere visualization can lead to success. They emphasize that tangible action is as crucial as positive thinking, ensuring the audience understands that real progress requires effort and persistence. The episode also touches on the concept of comfort zones and how fears—ranging from failure to success—can restrict personal growth. Through Terry's insights on the Prospect Theory by Kahneman and Tversky, listeners learn the psychological aspects of motivation, particularly how the desire to avoid pain often outweighs the pursuit of pleasure. In a heartfelt segment, the duo discusses the impact of small, positive interactions and the importance of kindness. Terry shares a poignant story about a housekeeper struggling with addiction whom he chose to help rather than prosecute, leading to her 14 years of sobriety. This story, included in Terry's book, exemplifies the power of compassion and its ripple effect on people's lives. As the episode draws to a close, Wize El Jefe reflects on the enriching experience of the conversation, expressing gratitude for Terry's valuable insights. The episode leaves listeners with a wealth of practical advice, inspiring stories, and a call to action—motivate yourself from within, take decisive action daily, and help others through kindness and support. Terry's promotion of his podcasts, including "The Comeback Chronicles" and resources like "comebackchroniclespodcast.com" and "terrylfossum.com," provide additional avenues for listeners seeking continued growth and inspiration. This episode of the Stuck In My Mind Podcast is more than just a conversation; it is a rallying cry for those at crossroads in life, encouraging them to embrace challenges, discard negativity, and create their own extraordinary paths to success.

DAPHNE RUBIN-VEGA BIO  Daphne Rubin-Vega can currently be seen on Hulu's hit series ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING. She can also be heard voicing the role of 'CARMILLA CARMINE' in the hugely popular A24/Prime Video R-rated animated musical comedy series HAZBIN HOTEL. She can be seen in the David Duchovny-directed feature BUCKY F*CKING DENT. She was seen in the Tony Goldwyn-directed feature EZRA, in the Apple TV+ series THE CHANGELING opposite Lakeith Stanfield, and as a guest lead on FOX's anthology series ACCUSED directed by Marlee Matlin.Rubin-Vega starred in the Jon Chu-directed Warner Brothers feature IN THE HEIGHTS as 'Daniela.' During the pandemic, she shot the Netflix series SOCIAL DISTANCE, produced by Jenji Kohan and Tara Hermann, and SAME STORM, the newest Peter Hedges film. Additional TV credits include THE HORROR OF DOLORES ROACH (Prime Video), which Rubin-Vega developed into both scripted podcast and TV iterations, KATY KEENE (CW) and TALES OF THE CITY (Netflix).  A staple of the New York theatre community, Daphne earned a Tony nomination for her portrayal of 'Mimi' in the original cast of RENT, and another for ANNA IN THE TROPICS. She was most recently seen starring in the Signature Theatre's NIGHT OF THE IGUANA opposite Tim Daly and Lea DeLaria. She starred in the musical MISS YOU LIKE HELL at The Public Theatre and in the one-woman show EMPANADA LOCA, which was written for her. She helped adapt the play into the scripted podcast, THE HORROR OF DOLORES ROACH, which was then adapted into a TV series for Amazon. Additional theater credits include Broadway revivals of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, and LES MIS; TWO SISTERS AND A PIANO and F*CKING A at The Public; ROMEO & JULIET at Classic Stage; and JACK GOES BOATING opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman.  ELIZABETH RODRIGUEZ BIO  An award-winning actress who crosses seamlessly from studio films to independent, from the stage to television, Elizabeth Rodriguez played the emotionally complex Aleida Diaz on the groundbreaking Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black" for which she received three consecutive Screen Actors Guild Awards. Most recently, she was seen as a series regular in the CBS drama "East New York". She was also a series regular in the role of Liza Ortiz on AMC's "Fear the Walking Dead", NBC's "Prime Suspect", and Cinemax's "Blanco". Rodriguez recurred as Paz Valdez on Starz' "Power", in Showtime's "Shameless", Hulu's "Chance', "Devious Maids", "Grimm", "The Shield", "ER", and "Six Feet Under.  Rodriguez's film credits include co-starring in the blockbuster film "LOGAN" opposite Hugh Jackman, Michael Mann's "Miami Vice", "The Drop", "Tio Papi" (for which she garnered an Imagen Award Nomination), "Making Babies", "Skate Kitchen", "11:55", "Return to Paradise", and "Jack Goes Boating." Most recently, she completed a starring role in the feature film "Allswell in New York", which she also co-wrote and co-produced. Rodriguez received an Obie Award, as well as a Drama Desk Award nomination, for her performance in "Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven" at the Atlantic Theater, and a Tony Award nomination, and won the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Theatre World Award, for her performance in the role of "Veronica" on Broadway in Stephen Adly Guirgis' "The Motherfu**er With The Hat". Additional theater includes three world premieres at NYC's acclaimed Public Theater in "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot" (directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman), "Unconditional" and "A View from 151st Street". Other notable plays include "Beauty of the Father" (MTC) and "The Power of Duff" (Geffen). Rodriguez is a native New Yorker and member of Labyrinth Theater Company.  ABOUT ALLSWELL IN NEW YORK, AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL NOVEMBER 15th  Three sisters navigate the daunting life challenges of single motherhood, career, and family, all while finding humor and solace within the bond of sisterhood.  Here's the trailer:   Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb8CKBdXK70 Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-refocused-radio--2671113/support.

Joanne Mariano is a firefighter with the FDNY assigned to L136 in Elmhurst, Queens, and formerly assigned to E225 in East New York, Brooklyn. Prior to joining the fire department, she was a lighting technician with IATSE Local 52 Motion Picture Studio Mechanics. She holds a bachelor's degree in Film Production from Hunter College and is currently pursuing a master's degree in Sport and Performance Psychology with a concentration in applied practice at the University of Western States. Joanne is working towards becoming a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC) through the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP).

This episode we are in Brooklyn behind the stage talking with various old school artist. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kev-stone3/support

In today's episode, I dive deep with Danny Tejada, who shares his journey from growing up in a tough NYC neighborhood to becoming a key figure in college access and admissions. Danny emphasizes the importance of understanding education's return on investment and how he helps students navigate college finance and career planning. Tune in to hear his impactful insights and experiences.BioDanny Tejada grew up in public housing in East New York, Brooklyn. He is a first-generation high school and college graduate. He attended Skidmore College. He also holds a certificate in College Advising from Teachers College, Columbia University. He co-authored a book with his mentee called Different Families, Still Brothers.  Danny has been in college counseling for over ten years, working in public, private, charter schools, non-profits, and his own consulting company, We Go To College, LLC. In his consulting, he works with non-profits and high schools on their college counseling programming, colleges on their recruitment of historically disadvantaged students, and individual families on the college application process. In addition to his consulting work, he works at an independent school in Manhattan and reads applications for the University of California, San Diego.  Danny sits on the boards of Stony Brook University's Counselor Advisory, Uprooted Academy, and Puerto Rican Family Institute, Inc. Previously, he was on Common App's Counselor Advisory Committee and College Access Consortium of New York's board. Throughout his college counseling career, he has presented at state and national conferences and been featured on NewsNation, in The New York Times, NPR, Forbes, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, and Money.com, discussing college access issues for historically disadvantaged students.  Danny's mission is to expand college access for low-income, Black, and Brown students so they can achieve upward mobility and break their generational curse. Follow Danny on LinkedIn.Access free resources and learn more about Sheila and her team at Signet Education at signeteducation.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilaakbar/.

A correction officer at a Brooklyn federal jail is facing up to 10 years in prison for allegedly chasing a civilian vehicle in a bureau-issued minivan, firing multiple shots, and injuring a passenger last year. Meanwhile, some East New York residents, part of Mayor Eric Adams' voting base, express disappointment over his indictment for allegedly taking bribes from the Turkish government. Plus, fall marks cranberry season. WNYC's Michael Hill talks with Stephen Lee IV, a 6th-generation cranberry farmer from New Jersey, about the upcoming harvest. Finally, WNYC's Ryan Kalaith shares free activities for October

Host Jason Blitman talks to Rumaan Alam (Entitlement) about the intricate themes of his novel, focusing on class, money, and societal values. They also delve into the significance of the book's title and how it reflects broader societal issues. Featured in this episode is Guest Gay Reader, Lea DeLaria, who discusses her work in theater, her desire to play iconic Shakespearean clowns, and her passion for classic literature. Rumaan Alam is the author of the New York Timesbestselling novel Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and adapted into a major motion picture, as well as two other novels. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.Lea DeLaria was the first openly gay comic on television in America, and is an accomplished Jazz performer who has performed in concert venues all over the world. She is best known as ‘Big Boo' from Orange is the New Black (3 SAG Awards). Lea can currently be seen in the indie feature film Potato Dreams of America, and in the  Indigo Girls jukebox feature film, Glitter & Doom. Lea recently starred in the Off-Broadway Revival of Tennessee Williams' play, The Night of the Iguana, directed by Emily Mann. TV credits include Girls5Eva, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, East New York,The Blacklist, Physical, Reprisal, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Shameless, and Broad City. Film credits include Cars 3, Support The Girls, and First Wives Club. Broadway credits, POTUS Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive (Bernadette), The Rocky Horror Show (Eddie/Dr. Scott) and On The Town (Hildy), Obie and Theatre World Awards. @realleadelaria www.leadelaria.comGays Reading is sponsored by Audible. Get a FREE 30-day trial by visiting audibletrial.com/gaysreadingBOOK CLUB!Use code GAYSREADING at checkout to get first book for only $4 + free shipping! Restrictions apply.http://aardvarkbookclub.comWATCH!https://youtube.com/@gaysreadingBOOKS!Check out the list of books discussed on each episode on our Bookshop page: https://bookshop.org/shop/gaysreading MERCH!Purchase your Gays Reading podcast merchandise HERE! https://gaysreading.myspreadshop.com/ FOLLOW!@gaysreading | @jasonblitman CONTACT!hello@gaysreading.com

Welcome back to Dear Multi-Hyphenate! It is Season Two and let's kick it off with superstar multi-hyphenate Lea Delaria. In this episode we discuss all about how and when to identify as a certain type of artist, unheard stories of working with Lea's idols, hysterical and inspiring stories about projects like POTUS and Orange is the New Black, and of course Lea's new brunch show at 54 Below… Brunch is Gay, currently running one Sunday a month at 54 Below.  Lea was the first openly gay comic on television in America, and is an accomplished Jazz performer who has performed in concert venues all over the world. She is best known as ‘Big Boo' from Orange is the New Black (3 SAG Awards). Lea can currently be seen in the indie feature film Potato Dreams of America, and in the Indigo Girls jukebox feature film, Glitter & Doom. Lea recently starred in the Off-Broadway Revival of Tennessee Williams' play, The Night of the Iguana, directed by Emily Mann. TV credits include Girls5Eva, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, East New York,The Blacklist, Physical, Reprisal, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Shameless, and Broad City. Film credits include Cars 3, Support The Girls, and First Wives Club. Broadway credits, POTUS Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive (Bernadette), The Rocky Horror Show (Eddie/Dr. Scott) and On The Town (Hildy), Obie and Theatre World Awards. @realleadelaria www.leadelaria.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get up and get informed! Here's all the local news you need to start your day: NYPD brass are touting a lower-than-usual homicide rate for August. WNYC's Brittany Kriegstein reports. Meanwhile, transit advocates canvassed 23 subway stations on Sunday, where they say elevator improvements for disabled riders have been delayed due to the pause in congestion pricing. Also, Mayor Eric Adams visited two churches in East New York on Sunday amid federal investigations over his administration.

Gastor drops insane knowledge on the Asian Friends, starting with how to impress your wife. Mic has a very very big announcement and needs a hug. Jenny drops a new version of herself.C O M E S E E U S L I V E https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hack-city-comedy-with-mic-nguyen-and-jenny-arimoto-tickets-914169043217?aff=erelexpmltF O L L O W U Shttps://www.instagram.com/asiannotasianpodhttps://www.instagram.com/nicepantsbrohttps://www.instagram.com/jennyarimoto/P A T R E O Nhttps://www.patreon.com/asiannotasianpod P A R T N E R S - Thanks to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services for making this episode happen visit vaccines.gov-Experience Magic mind, use code "asian20" to get 40% off at magicmind.co/asian- BETTER HELP: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/asian and get on your way to being your best self. Get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/asian- EXPRESS VPN: 3 Months free at expressvpn.com/asian- EARNIN - Download the Earnin app today in the Google Play or Apple App store. Be sure to write in "Asian" under PODCAST when you sign up. - Helix Sleep Mattress: $125 off ALL mattress orders for ANALs at helixsleep.com/asian - Hawthorne.co is offering 10% off of your first purchase! Visit hawthorne.co and use PROMO CODE “NOTASIAN” - TUSHY Bidets: Go to hellotushy.com/ANA for 10% off!- THE SCRIPPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE: www.joinallofus.org/asiannotasian- HBO MAX: http://hbom.ax/ana2- FUNDRISE: Fundrise.com/asian- SANZO: DrinkSanzo.com and use promo code “ASIANNOTASIAN”- TruBill: Truebill.com/Asian- Quip: GetQuip.com/Asian- Athletic Greens: Athleticgreens.com/asiannotasian - Shopify: Shopify.com/asian - Manscaped: Get 20% Off and Free Shipping with the code ASIAN- Big Brother Big Sister: https://bit.ly/30zQZan- Nutrafol: www.nutrafol.com (Promo code: Asian)- Sesanood: www.sesanood.com (Promo code: AsianNotAsian)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Want to join the podcast? Come together with other listeners in a deep dive into this summer's episodes, discussing ideas, asking questions, and sharing your experiences about issues brought up in our interviews. Perfect for writers at every level. Only a few spots available. Email 7amnovelist@substack.com for more info.Today, we hear from Desmond Hall whose newest novel, BETTER MUST COME, was released on June 4. I'll be interviewing Des with a whole lot of other questions about this book live at GrubStreet in the Boston Seaport on June 13, so I hope to see people there where you can buy your own copy and get it signed. Today, however, we'll be talking about how to manage dramatic irony—which is basically about when to reveal what info and where in terms of what a character versus a reader knows—while writing multiple points of view.Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.To find Hall's latest and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He has worked as a high school biology and English teacher in East New York, Brooklyn; counseled teenage ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee's creative director at Spike DDB. Desmond has served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the Advertising Council and judged the One Show, the American Advertising Awards, and the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival. He's also been named one of Variety magazine's Top 50 Creatives to Watch. In addition to his latest, Better Must Come, Desmond is also the author of the gritty YA novel Your Corner Dark which confronts the harsh realities of gang life in Jamaica and how far a teen is willing to go for family. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com

Scott is a recognizable face from is work on TV, movies and Broadway. He has been seen in such projects as Gilmore Girls, The Fix, Jacob's Ladder, The Girls on the Bus, East New York, The Resident, Billions, The Americans, Allegiance, The Carrie Diaries, Necessary Roughness, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and many more.

Single-handedly redefining the term “character actor,” the accomplished Richard Kind is surely one of the hardest working people in show business. His resume is unfathomably wide and deep, with over 270 film and television credits, spanning roles that exploit his killer comedic timing, like sitcoms “Spin City” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and those that exercise his dramatic chops, like HBO's “Luck” and the CBS procedural “East New York.” He's an actor just as likely to appear in an Oscar-winning feature film as an animated one, to scene-steal a sketch comedy series as to star in an indie short. Kind is also a Tony-nominated stage actor, having appeared on Broadway in “The Producers,” “Funny Girl” and “The Big Knife,” among many others. Richard Kind speaks with host Alec Baldwin about the type of comedians that raised him, how he found his way to the profession after almost attending law school – and why he believes he is the “Costco of acting,”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a preview of a special bonus episode for Patreon supporters of The War on Cars!   In the last episode of the podcast we spent some time with Baruch, Shawon, and their battery-swapping startup company, PopWheels. When I started working on that episode, I figured I was going to learn a lot about e-bikes, batteries, and the delivery app business. And I did. But over the course of more than a half dozen interviews and conversations between May and December 2023, I also learned a lot about Bangladeshi politics, immigration, and life in New York City as an e-bike delivery worker.   One of my favorite interviews for this episode took place on a crisp, sunny, Tuesday morning last October. I biked out to East New York, Brooklyn to meet Shawon and his friend Fokhrul, a Bangladeshi delivery worker who uses PopWheels battery-swapping network. (Shawon and Fokhrul asked me not to use their last names because they have asylum-seeker cases working their way through the legal system). We found a park bench and spent the morning talking about the political oppression they faced in Bangladesh, their arduous, months-long journey to the United States, and what their lives are like here in New York City. It was super interesting and I enjoyed it a lot. But, as often happens with these things, only tiny bits of this conversation made it into Episode 118. So, for this special bonus episode I wanted to share more of my interview with Shawon and Fokhrul with you. I also had some fun additional bits and pieces of tape with Baruch that never made it into the last episode. So, you'll find some of that woven in here too. I hope you enjoy hanging with Shawon, Fokhrul and Baruch as much as I did.   You can join us as a Patreon supporter to listen to the whole thing. -- Aaron

Chris Banks, New York City Council member (District 42, East New York, Starrett City, Brownsville, Canarsie, Remsen Village, and East Flatbush), talks about his district and his priorities as one of four new members of the City Council.

This week on Dopey! We are joined by infamous corrupt New York City police officer, Michael Dowd. We hear about his rise in East New York's legendary 75th precinct. We learn about how Michael Dowd broke bad and get the story on what happened after teaming up with nefarious Dominican drug kingpin Adam Diaz. PLUS how Dowd's alcoholism and addiction to action(and cocaine) drove him ultimately to 12 years in prison. EMAILS! VOICEMAILS, The Return of Ask Erin! and much more on this brand new super gritty corrupt morally shaky episode of that good old Dopey show. Also a short homage to friend of the show and Los Angeles legend - Mike Martt. More About Dopey: Dopey Podcast is the world's greatest podcast on drugs, addiction and dumb shit. Chris and I were two IV heroin addicts who loved to talk about all the coke we smoked, snorted and shot, all the pills we ate, smoked, all the weed we smoked and ate, all the booze we consumed and all the consequences we suffered. After making the show for 2 and a half years, Chris tragically relapsed and died from a fentanyl overdose. Dopey continued on, at first to mourn the horrible loss of Chris, but then to continue our mission - which was at its core, to keep addicts and alcoholics company. Whether to laugh at our time in rehab, or cry at the worst missteps we made, Dopey tells the truth about drugs, addiction and recovery. We continually mine the universe for stories rife with debauchery and highlight serious drug taking and alcoholism. We also examine different paths toward addiction recovery. We shine a light on harm reduction and medication assisted treatment. We talk with celebrities and nobodies and stockpile stories to be the greatest one stop shop podcast on all things drugs, addiction, recovery and comedy pathfinding the route to the heart of the opioid epidemic.

Ariel J. Luna has been serving veterans in higher education and government for more than 18 years. Luna is originally from Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Starrett City section of East New York. AJ's mother is from the Dominican Republic and his father is from Argentina. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at the start of 2000 and he was stationed as a communication soldier in Fort Gordon, Georgia, South Korea, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After he left the Army in 2002, he joined the NY National Guard where he was deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004-2005. While serving in the National Guard, Luna was pursing his bachelor's degree at Brooklyn College. He completed his master's in administrative science with a concentration in Non-Profit Organizational Development, Human Resource Administration, and Global Leadership from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2012.After a successful tenure at FDU, Luna has recently appointed by Bergen County's new County Executive, James Tedesco III, as the new Director of Veteran Services for Bergen County. Luna plans to bring his experience and expertise to serve the 30,000 resident veterans of Bergen County. Luna focused his efforts on housing, employment opportunities, and good service referral providers. Luna also served as the Deputy Director for the Office of Government and Community Relations for the NJ Department of Transportation from 2021-2022. He is also one of the founders of the NJ SOS Veteran Stakeholders Group.  A Northern NJ non-profit that hosts quarterly county meetings throughout the Northern part of the State that gives organizations an opportunity to network and refer veterans to various services in the community.  He assists in putting together Suicide Awareness Seminars to educate the community about resources available to veterans in crisis.  There have been successful events in Elmwood Park, Newark, and Trenton.  He is married to his wife, Shevonne Murray-Luna, and has 2 beautiful daughters, Mariah Angel Luna, 10, and AJ Luna, 7. Find The AJ LunaCatholic Charities NJ SOS VetsNJ SOS on FacebookFind The Suffering PodcastThe Suffering Podcast InstagramKevin Donaldson InstagramMike Failace InstagramBuzzsproutApple PodcastSpotifyFacebookTikTokYouTubeMake your brain your friend with Better Help. Go to BetterHelp.Com/Suffering for 10% off your first monthSupport the showThe Suffering Podcast Instagram Kevin Donaldson Instagram TikTok YouTube

New Guest Gastor Almonte joins KATG to talk about Black names vs. White names, explaining White people to Black children, being a landlord in East New York, and when it's okay to zone out on your kids. Also, John Stamos reignites the Lori Loughlin college admissions scandal and the trio covers the airline pilot who claims that psychedelic mushrooms caused him to try to down a flight midair.