The local paper for the Upper East Side
WEEK OF MAY NATIVE INNOVATION ◄ P.12
24-30 2018
IN COMMAND AT THE 19TH PRECINCT LAW ENFORCEMENT Deputy Inspector Kathleen Walsh talks to Our Town about traffic and bike issues — and what it’s like for women at the NYPD
“Tom Wolfe and I covered many assignments together in 1964 when we were at The New York Herald Tribune,” photographer Jill Krementz recalled. “I was a staff photographer and he was a reporter. One day Tom was assigned to go to Paris with a just-married couple who were taking their friends on their honeymoon. Tom got to go to Paris. I got to go as far as the airport. I took this photograph of Tom on the chartered bus provided by the lovebirds.” Photo: © by Jill Krementz / All rights reserved
HOW TOM WOLFE WOOED AND WOWED MANHATTAN LIVES ... Even as he savaged its literati, artistes, architects, critics, elites, eggheads, liberals, Darwinians — and just about everybody else BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
When he peacocked into a room, or penned a flamboyant sentence, or skewered a nemesis, or hatched an outlandish thesis, or reveled in an old-
fashioned literary feud, you knew at once: This was a true original. He was, in his own phrase, a “neopretentious” dandy who unmasked the pretensions of others. He loved culture, then tossed hand grenades into its temples. He sought status, then mocked the “status-sphere.” Exuberant and adrenalized and iconoclastic, gleeful foe of the pompous and nonsensical, scourge of the upper-crust vanities and ex-
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It was a homecoming of sorts when Deputy Inspector Kathleen Walsh became commanding officer of the 19th Precinct in January this year. An 18year veteran of the NYPD, Walsh had been a sergeant at the 19th from 2005 to 2010. She moved up in supervisory roles in Chelsea and the Upper West Side before going to the 25th Precinct in East Harlem, where she became commander in May 2016. “It’s good to be back,” Walsh said in her East Side office last week. “I never thought I would be sitting here.” Walsh was born in Yonkers, N.Y. but moved to Galway — both her parents are from the Irish city — when she was a child. She returned to NYC in September 1993 and said she tries “to get home once a year” to Ireland. Walsh met with Our Town last Friday to discuss issues in the community, the role of women in the NYPD and policing in an age of cellphones and social media. Excerpts:
Commanding Officer Kathleen Walsh notes the zeroes in homicide and rape categories. Photo: Straus News “Bicyclists do come pretty fast and they don’t always obey the rules of the road.” But, she added, “We’re not up significantly in pedestrians getting hit by bicyclists than when I was here in 2006. But it is a complaint.”
On what has changed in the 19th precinct from then to now.
Complaints about e-bikes.
“There are a lot of familiar faces which … made it easier for me to come back and actually gave [me] an advantage,” said Walsh. “I have familiarity with the building, and the community, the community council. “[I see] lot of the same issues. Traffic was an issue when I was here as a sergeant, bicyclists [were] an issue. Bicyclists and traffic were probably on everybody’s radar ... And maybe more so now,” she said, mentioning the increase in bike lanes since her earlier tenure. Most of the complaints, she said, are of the variety, “I almost got hit.”
“Officers have been going to restaurants, alerting them about new enforcement on those vehicles,” said Walsh. She noted that summonses go to businesses, rather than e-bike riders, although there is a gray area since some are third-party freelancers, like internet food-delivery services. Walsh said that’s among the issues that need to be addressed by lawmakers rather than the police. “Some of that is legislation. It’s out of our hands a little bit.” The increase in the use of e-bikes, she said, has become more of a concern for the community and is mentioned
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at nearly every community council meeting.
Communicating with residents in the age of social media and cellphones. “It’s good,” said Walsh. “They tell you what their issues and problems are and they’ll see that we’re addressing them because we’ll put up operations on Twitter.” She noted that the NYPD gets feedback that way, both positive and negative, and added that the precinct would be setting up a Facebook account this fall.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 5 Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday, May 25 – 7:57 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com
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