Finest playing tag
Target graffiti vandals as merchants get hit
The NYPD said Wednesday it’s putting together a massive graffiti cleanup initiative to address the pandemic spike in tags that’ve defaced buildings around the city.
But it comes too late for Ryan Chadwick.
The owner of the seafood eatery Grey Lady at Delancey and Allen Sts. on the Lower East Side said he’ll shell out up to $5,000 to remove tags on his pandemic-shuttered corner business to get it up and running.
“We can’t reopen until we get this [cleaned up],” Chadwick said. “We have to take care of the graffiti ourselves. It costs money.”
According to Chadwick, his restaurant’s insurance company isn’t helping, and a city program to assist graffiti victims is out of money.
He’s not alone.
The NYPD logged more than 6,000 graffiti complaints last year and has a current caseload of about 300.
“I’ll almost throw the statistics out,” NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said at a press conference unveiling the new cleanup effort about a block from Chadwick’s tag-filled eatery.
“We all see the same thing.” For Chadwick, the first sign of trouble came last summer when a tagger spray-painted “Go back to Nantucket” on the sidewalk outside the restaurant; the business has a sister restaurant in Massachusetts.
Chadwick said he reported the incident to police, and learned the tagger had been identified. But he said the hoodie and surgical mask the culprit wore in a video viewed by police made an arrest impossible.
The new year brought two more incidents, Chadwick said: a tag Jan. 2, and another on Feb. 2, when video showed a tagger talking on his cell phone while he defaces the restaurant.
“After that, the floodgates opened,” Chadwick said. “Now, we’ve got 10 to 12 tags. All the pressures from the pandemic — and now we have to deal with this.”
Police officials who spoke at the news conference in front of Moscot, an Orchard St. eyewear shop that also looks like a graffiti canvas, announced that beginning April 10, the NYPD will coordinate with community groups and volunteers to paint over graffiti around the city.
Under terms of the cleanup — supplies for which local businesses have donated paint and other materials — hate graffiti or markings with offensive slogans will be dealt with first, with special attention paid to gangbangers’ tags.
Shea and other police officials disputed the suggestion that soaring gun violence should be more of a concern for the NYPD, arguing the graffiti initiative will give officers a chance to improve relations in communities around the city.
“We often speak about that,” Chief of Patrol Juanita Holmes said. “We speak about reform and reinvention.”
“This is a huge part of it.”
Taxpayers earning more than $80,000 a year will not receive any stimulus checks as part of the next coronavirus relief bill because President Biden has agreed to put tighter restrictions on the popular payments in a bid to sway moderate members of his party, a Democratic source familiar with the matter said Wednesday.
The source told the Daily News that the latest restriction was requested by a group of centrist Democratic senators that includes Joe Manchin of West Virginia who are hesitant about some of the most sweeping provisions baked into the $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed by the House last week.
The concession from Biden does not touch the component of the bill that bankrolls $1,400 stimulus checks to individuals earning less than $75,000 and $2,800 checks for married couples earning less than $150,000.
Rather, it speeds up the phaseout of checks for those earning more than that, the source said.
Under the House version, the dollar amount of checks decrease for every $100 earned above $75,000 until eligibility completely caps at $100,000 for individuals and $200,000 for couples.
Under the new Biden-backed Senate provision, however, eligibility caps already at $80,000 for individuals and $160,000 for couples, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door negotiations.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to outright confirm Biden is onboard with watering down the eligibility requirements.
But she said Biden is “comfortable with where the negotiations stand.”
“He has been very clear that the threshold should be at 75K and 150K for families, but he also knows that the sausage-making machine sometimes spits out a different package,” Psaki said.
Senate Democratic leaders are hoping to pass Biden’s relief plan by the end of this week, and they’ll be able to do so without GOP support thanks to a budgetary process known as reconciliation.
But Republican senators are gearing up to do their damnedest to put spokes in the wheels.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, one of the chamber’s most conservative members, said Wednesday that he would insist on having the full stimulus bill read out loud — a formality that will likely add another 10 hours to the process.
Johnson and other Republicans are also expected to force votes on a variety of amendments to grind the gears before the bill is expected to eventually pass, potentially as late as Sunday.
Biden’s cave on stimulus checks underscores the outsized influence the moderates of his party hold during relief talks in the Senate, where Democrats likely cannot afford to lose the support of a single member because of unanimous GOP opposition to appropriating another major round of relief for pandemic-ravaged workers, businesses and states.
Still, Democratic progressives — already angry with Biden for agreeing to scrap a stimulus provision that would’ve boosted the federal minimum wage — took sharp aim at the president over moving the goalposts on checks.
“I don’t understand the political or economic wisdom in allowing Trump to give more people relief checks than a Dem admin,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Queens, Bronx) told The News, referring to the direct checks issued as part of the first two relief bills last year. “If anything we should be more generous, not more stingy. It’s also an insensitive compromise for the roughly 80% of Americans who live in urban areas, which are known for higher costs of living.”
While the stimulus check provision is getting a shave, the Democratic Senate moderates have agreed to keep the $400-a-week unemployment aid bonus intact in the stimulus package and let it run through August as proposed by the House, the source said.
Any adjustments made to the stimulus bill by the Senate will ultimately need to be reapproved by the House before Biden can give his final signature.