IN SPYING
Will curb snooping
COP KILLER Herman Bell’s upcoming date with freedom has been put on hold, officials said Thursday.
A judge in Albany has ordered the former Black Liberation Army member’s upcoming release from prison stopped until a new lawsuit from one of his victim’s widows can be reviewed.
Bell has been imprisoned for 39 years, after he and two accomplices, was convicted of assassinating NYPD Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones in 1971. He was expected to be released on April 17. Bell turned 70 in prison earlier this year.
On April 13, a hearing on the lawsuit filed by Piagentini’s widow will be held.
She claims the state Parole Board failed to follow procedural law and executive law when it ordered Bell’s release.
The board didn’t review the minutes from when Bell was sentenced in 1979, which is required by law before parole can be granted, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association members said.
“This parole board blew the call by making a decision to release this coldblooded assassin without having considered all of the facts as the law requires,” PBA President Patrick Lynch said ciations in New Jersey.
The monitoring included video surveillance, photographing license plates, community mapping, and infiltration by undercover officers and informants.
Through all of this work, the NYPD generated no leads on potential terrorists or terror plots.
A judge dismissed the suit in 2014 but the decision was reversed a year later.
Miller said the settlement will not bar the NYPD from continuing with its current terror investigations.
“There is nothing we were able to do before that we are not able to do now,” he said.
The plaintiffs disagreed, claiming the NYPD has agreed to “change their practices and conform them to the Constitution and agree to protocols that will bind them to this in the future.”
“We are proud that we stood up to the most powerful police force in the country and against the suspicion and ignorance that guided their discriminatory practices,” said lead plaintiff Farhaj Hassan.
Hassan said he isn’t surprised that the NYPD refused to admit any wrongdoing.
“A police department not acknowledging wrongdoing is akin to a congressman’s ‘No comment.’” Farhaj said.
“They know they did it and they won’t admit it. We knew from the get-go they are not going to acknowledge wrongdoing.” A SELFIE of a man wearing a scarf with the ISIS logo posing outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art that sparked terror fears is actually a doctored image of an unwitting Italian tourist, the FBI said Thursday. The feds suspected early on that the shot taken outside the museum was faked, with the ISIS logo superimposed on the scarf. FBI agents reviewed video surveillance and spotted the man inside the famed museum. They tracked him down to his native Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean, vetted and cleared him.