Bay Ridge (Brooklyn, NY)

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    A Swindled Immigrant Community in Brooklyn Gets a Housing Reprieve

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    One man wanted to find a home for his aging parents to retire. One young woman’s mother wanted to raise her family there. Three families wanted their children to go to good schools.The five-story building in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, erected on the site of a former Lutheran church, seemed to be the right fit for Asian families with modest incomes — they watched the construction with anticipation in the tight-knit neighborhood with a thriving Asian community. The developer, Xi Hui Wu, was a local whom neighbors recognized from the bank and the grocery store, and his then-wife, Xiao Rong Yang, was known as a prominent real estate agent in the area.For the next several years, tenants moved in and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy their apartments. Then in 2018, each unit received a thick envelope in the mail. Inside was a foreclosure notice, and the tenants came to a horrifying realization: It was all a sham.Promissory notes and handshakes were never going to turn into deeds. For years, Mr. Wu had failed to make payments to a lender. He owed millions of dollars to the bank. And he had never received authorization from the city to turn the building into condos.That could have been the end — 20 different households, $5 million lost between them, evicted by a bank. Mr. Wu’s whereabouts have been hard to pin down, with conflicting information among tenants and government officials as to whether he fled to China or remains in Brooklyn. (Neither Mr. Wu, nor his lawyer listed in court records, could be reached for comment.)But the tenants now stand to become homeowners when the building is eventually converted to co-ops, under a deal that will be announced at a news conference on Wednesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      NYPD Responded Aggressively to Protests After Promises to Change

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      Violent responses to pro-Palestinian activists follow a sweeping agreement aimed at striking an equilibrium between preserving public safety and the rights of protesters.Last September, the New York Police Department signed a sweeping agreement in federal court that was meant to end overwhelming responses to protests that often led to violent clashes, large-scale arrests and expensive civil rights lawsuits.The sight of hundreds of officers in tactical gear moving in on pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on Saturday suggested to civil libertarians that the department might not abide by the agreement when it is fully implemented. At least two officers wearing the white shirts of commanders were filmed punching three protesters who were prone in the middle of a crosswalk.And film clips of recent campus protests showed some officers pushing and dragging students, a handful of whom later said they had been injured by the police, though many officers appeared to show restraint during the arrests.“I think members of the public are very concerned that the police will be unwilling or unable to meet their end of the bargain,” said Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney with Legal Aid, which, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit against the city over the department’s response to protests in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd.That lawsuit was later combined with a complaint filed by Letitia James, the state attorney general, over what she called widespread abuses during the Black Lives Matter protests. Last fall, police officials and Ms. James reached the agreement in federal court, intended to strike a new equilibrium between the department’s need to preserve public safety and the rights of protesters.The city, along with two major police unions, agreed to develop policies and training that would teach the department to respond gradually to demonstrations, rather than sending in large numbers of officers immediately, and to emphasize de-escalation over an immediate show of force. The implementation was expected to take three years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Critics Fault ‘Aggressive’ N.Y.P.D. Response to Pro-Palestinian Rally

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      Officers were filmed punching three demonstrators at the protest in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The police said protesters were blocking the streets.Violent confrontations at a pro-Palestinian rally in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on Saturday reflected what some local officials and protest organizers called an unexpectedly aggressive Police Department response, with officers flooding the neighborhood and using force against protesters.At the rally, which drew hundreds of demonstrators, at least two officers wearing the white shirts of commanders were filmed punching three protesters who were prone in the middle of a crosswalk. One officer had pinned a man to the ground and repeatedly punched him in the ribs, a 50-second video clip shows. Another officer punched the left side of a man’s face as he held his head to the asphalt.The police arrested around 40 people who were “unlawfully blocking roadways,” Kaz Daughtry, the department’s deputy commissioner of operations, said on social media on Sunday.Mr. Daughtry shared drone footage of one person who climbed on a city bus, “putting himself and others in danger.” The Police Department, he wrote, “proudly protects everyone’s right to protest, but lawlessness will never be tolerated.”Neither Mr. Daughtry nor the police commented on the use of force by officers. A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the police response. The Police Department’s patrol guide states that officers must use “only the reasonable force necessary to gain control or custody of a subject.”Bay Ridge has a significant Arab American population and hosts demonstrations in mid-May every year to commemorate what Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe” — when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israel’s founding in 1948.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More