Public Safety

MIDTOWN EAST, NY – An East Side police precinct cut the ribbon Wednesday on a new, state-of-the-art mobile command center, replacing the beaten-up van that the cops had formerly relied on.

The 17th Precinct, which patrols much of Midtown East between East 30th and 59th Streets, purchased the enormous vehicle thanks to a $500,000 allocation from City Councilmember Ben Kallos.

In a ceremony Wednesday morning, Kallos said he secured the funding for the 2019 city budget after the precinct's former commanding officer complained about their former command center: a run-down contraption that Kallos called "basically an over-glorified Winnebago, with chairs and not much else."

"My hope is that it will offer folks the tools they need for modern policing, to keep all of us safe," Kallos said, pointing to the 17th Precinct's recent responsibilities during the high-security UN General Assembly.

In response to The News’ story, the NYPD, the Department of Homeless Services and local pols zeroed in. Councilman Ben Kallos said Monday that DHS would be sending an outreach team to try to persuade the man to accept additional services.

City Councilmember Ben Kallos called out the shed at 1772 Second Ave. on Twitter this week, part of a weeklong series in which he plans to draw attention to sidewalk sheds across the city that have overstayed their welcome.

It is a signature issue for Kallos, who since 2016 has been pushing for legislation that would require building owners to make repairs within 180 days of reporting an unsafe condition. The bill has stalled in the City Council, amid opposition from real estate groups.

"New Yorkers need to demand it at this point," Kallos said of his bill. "Landlords don't want to do the work, they don't want to take care of their buildings."

Kallos said he has tried to persuade the city to offer decent, temporary apartments to the residents of 1772 Second Ave., where they could stay while much-needed repairs are carried out.

Still, Councilman Ben Kallos, who represents the Upper East Side, said he is concerned.

“We need the Department of Environmental Protection, which manages our water supply, Con Ed working together to find any leaks underground, making sure that we’re not having any compromised spaces, and make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Kallos said.

Con Edison said gas and electric were not impacted in the area.

Kallos told CBS2 the DEP believes a 12-inch water main — or a 6-inch sewer main — may be the cause.

The pavement on East 89th Street between York and East End avenues caved in around 8:30 a.m. Thursday. Initially measuring about 20 feet deep and 8 by 8 feet in diameter, workers later widened it by about 7 feet to perform repairs, City Councilmember Ben Kallos said on Monday.

"They went all the way to the sidewalk because that's how compromised it was," he said.

An investigation into the cause is ongoing and no conclusions have been reached yet, a spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Protection said Monday.

Kallos, though, said investigators told him that the five-foot-wide sewer line had likely been leaking, triggering the collapse.

Within 24 hours of Thursday's collapse, workers had rerouted a sewer line that had been affected by the sinkhole and covered up the site with dirt. Over the weekend, crews expanded the hole to expose more utilities nearby, the DEP spokesperson said.

Monday and Tuesday, the city planned to bring in materials from out of state to continue cleaning out and replacing the damaged sewer line, Kallos said.

Two buildings that lost running water for a few hours had it restored later on Thursday.

Sinkholes often appear after heavy rainfall, like the storms that swept the city in recent weeks, and are not necessarily a sign of infrastructure problems, a city official told the New York Times on Friday.

Still, it triggered fears that the city is unprepared for extreme weather triggered by climate change, having come on the heels of another sinkhole on the Upper West Side and a thunderstorm that flooded subway stations. Kallos told Patch last week that "I don't want to see a Miami building collapse happen in New York City."

“New Yorkers are used to seeing potholes - this is on another level,” UES Council Member Ben Kallos told Our Town, noting that the hole was 20 feet deep and 15 by 15 feet. “We’ve never seen sinkholes in New York City, let alone sinkholes this big.”

The size of the hole grew throughout the day as crews worked to survey how much of the earth below had eroded and other possible damage. Water was shut off to two buildings on the street while crews worked, but service was restored by Thursday night. Con Edison also sent representatives to the scene to ensure the gas line stayed intact.

Though the city has massive rainfall and flash flood warnings in recent weeks, Kallos said the apparent cause of this particular sinkhole was related to a 12-inch water main and a six-inch sewer line. The Council member said he introduced legislation in May that could prevent sinkholes such as these from happening in the future.

“If we had smart meters on our water supply and on our gas, the city would have noticed the gallons and gallons of water that was missing between the building and the distribution point,” said Kallos. “We need to catch water and the gas leaks before buildings explode and sidewalks crumble, and God forbid, something like what happened to Miami happens here in New York City.”

The two sinkholes forming in the span of a few days represent an urgent problem that won’t be solved by simply repaving streets, Kallos said.

Critics say the machine illustrated the unnecessary militarization of the police

The New York Police Department has canceled its trial of a robot dog made by US firm Boston Dynamics after receiving fierce criticism regarding the “dystopian” technology.

“The contract has been terminated and the dog will be returned,” a spokesperson for the NYPD told the New York Post. John Miller, the department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told The New York Times that the machine was “a casualty of politics, bad information and cheap sound bytes.” Said Miller: “People had figured out the catchphrases and the language to somehow make this evil.”

The NYPD began leasing the machine nicknamed Digidog last year. “This dog is going to save lives, protect people, and protect officers and that’s our goal,” said the NYPD’s Frank Digiacomo in an interview with ABC7. The robot was deployed roughly half a dozen times during its tenure, mostly acting as a mobile camera in potentially hostile environments.

THE ROBOT DOG WAS DEPLOYED ROUGHLY HALF A DOZEN TIMES, MOSTLY AS MOBILE SURVEILLANCE

“The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents,” said the department in February. “This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad.”

Many, though, saw the robot as a symbol of both wasteful police spending and increasingly aggressive tactics being deployed by law enforcement. “Now robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of color with under-resourced schools,” tweeted NYC Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in February.

In response to outcry over the machine, New York City Council Member Ben Kallos proposed a law that would ban the police from owning or operating weaponized robots. “I don’t think anyone was anticipating that they’d actually be used by the NYPD right now,” Kallos told Wired earlier this year. ”I have no problem with using a robot to defuse a bomb, but it has to be the right use of a tool and the right type of circumstance.”

Kallos told the Times this week that deploying Digidog on the streets of New York City highlighted the ongoing “militarization of the police.” Said Kallos: “At a time where we should be having more beat cops on the street, building relationships with residents, they’re actually headed in another direction in trying to replace them with robots.”

AROUND 500 SPOT UNITS ARE IN USE, MAINLY IN INDUSTRIAL SETTINGS

Spot, as the machine is called by creators Boston Dynamics, has never been weaponized, and doing so would break the company’s terms of service. But it is being deployed in increasingly controversial situations. Although the company has currently sold or leases around 500 Spot units, with most of the robots being used in commercial and industrial settings, such machines are of increasing interest to both law enforcement and military users.

Earlier this month, it emerged that the French military has been testing Spot in combat exercises. Boston Dynamics told The Verge at the time that while it knew the robot was being leased to the army, it was unaware it was being used in these exact scenarios. Spot was not weaponized in these exercises but used by soldiers for forward surveillance.

Speaking to The New York Times, a spokesperson for Boston Dynamics said, “We support local communities reviewing the allocation of public funds, and believe Spot is a cost-effective tool comparable to historical robotic devices used by public safety to inspect hazardous environments.”

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Kallos, who has proposed legislation to ban NYPD from using any weaponized robots or drones, told the Times that the dog underscored what he called the “militarization of the police.”

“At a time where we should be having more beat cops on the street, building relationships with residents, they’re actually headed in another direction in trying to replace them with robots,” the Manhattan rep said.

Kallos — who issued a subpoena to learn that the NYPD leased Digidog at $7,850 a month for 12 months, with a minimum payment of $94,200 — cheered the robot’s return to its maker.

“Our city needs more community policing, officers connecting to residents, not scary military-style gadgets that scare folks,” the Upper East Side Democrat said. “We did the work to find out how much was spent on this and we put pressure on the city to adjust priorities. I am glad the robot dog has been put down and we can use the money that would have gone to buying more of these to invest in communities and building better relationships with residents.”

Mr. Kallos, a Democrat who represents the Upper East Side, took a different position, saying the device’s presence in New York underscored what he called the “militarization of the police.” He said the robotic dogs resembled those featured in the 2017 “Metalhead” episode of the television show “Black Mirror.”

“At a time where we should be having more beat cops on the street, building relationships with residents, they’re actually headed in another direction in trying to replace them with robots,” he said.