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Hate Crimes Decrease In The Bronx Through Education

Hate crimes rose by 52 percent against blacks and 35 percent against Jews in New York City last year, according to statistics provided by police at a Bronx forum Tuesday.

In the lone bit of positive news, anti-gay crimes dropped, though only by 2 percent.

Experts attributed the increase in part to the economic downturn and to racial unrest following last summer’s Jena Six incident, as well as recent events such as the Howard Beach assaults and the Sean Bell shooting.

However, police and prosecutors emphasized their efforts to combat bias attacks. “We want to make sure we send a message that if you commit a hate crime in the city of New York, you will be prosecuted,” said Sgt. Ronald Lynch of the NYPD hate crimes task force.

He spoke at a forum sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which brought together community activists, social workers and educators to discuss ways of combating hate crimes in everyday life. A hate crime is defined as a crime committed explicitly because the victim is of a particular race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity.

“It is always your actions, coupled with your thoughts or your words,” said Michael Cooper, a Bronx assistant district attorney who heads an anti-hate crime unit. These crimes have become “more prevalent,” he said.

Indeed, the city saw 144 anti-Semitic crimes in 2007, up from 107 in 2006. Racially motivated attacks against blacks rose from 23 in 2006 to 35 in 2007. Hate crimes against whites increased from six incidents in 2006 to eight last year, while attacks motivated by sexual or gender identity dropped from 51 to 50.

Noah Feldman, representing Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, said that his borough is the only of the five to report a decrease in hate crimes; he said there has been a 43-percent drop since 2003. The reasons, he said, included after school programs that preach tolerance and interaction between groups. Carrion, trying to model that behavior, is currently in Israel learning about Jewish culture.

Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson, who created the first bias crime unit in New York State, stressed education and prevention. The attitudes that underlie hate crimes, he said, begin in the home. Only education and interaction between communities can bring progress.

“Our time, our dollars are better spent dealing in the area of prevention rather than prosecution,” he said.

SOURCE: AMNY.com

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 Lost In The Paperwork? Banks Can’t Prove They Own Homes

Joe Lents hasn’t made a payment on his $1.5 million mortgage since 2002.

That’s when Washington Mutual Inc. first tried to foreclose on his home in Boca Raton, Florida. The Seattle-based lender failed to prove that it owned Lents’s mortgage note and dropped attempts to take his house. Subsequent efforts to foreclose have stalled because no one has produced the paperwork.

“If you’re going to take my house away from me, you better own the note,” said Lents, 63, the former chief executive officer of a now-defunct voice recognition software company.

Judges in at least five states have stopped foreclosure proceedings because the banks that pool mortgages into securities and the companies that collect monthly payments haven’t been able to prove they own the mortgages. The confusion is another headache for U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as he revises rules for packaging mortgages into securities.

“I think it’s going to become pretty hairy,” said Josh Rosner, managing director at the New York-based investment research firm Graham Fisher & Co. “Regulators appear to have ignored this, given the size and scope of the problem.”

More than $2.1 trillion, or 19 percent, of outstanding mortgages have been bundled into securities by private banks, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a Bethesda, Maryland-based industry newsletter. Those loans may be sold several times before they land in a security. Mortgage servicers, who collect monthly payments and distribute them to securities investors, can buy and sell the home loans many times.

Housing Boom

Each time the mortgages change hands, the sellers are required to sign over the mortgage notes to the buyers. In the rush to originate more loans during the U.S. mortgage boom, from 2003 to 2006, that assignment of ownership wasn’t always properly completed, said Alan White, assistant professor at Valparaiso University School of Law in Valparaiso, Indiana.

“Loans were mass produced and short cuts were taken,” White said. “A lot of the paperwork is done in the name of the original lender and a lot of the original lenders aren’t around anymore.”

More than 100 mortgage companies stopped making loans, closed or were sold last year, according to Bloomberg data.

The foreclosure rate, at 1.69 percent of all U.S. homeowners, is the highest since the Mortgage Bankers Association began tracking it in 1993. The foreclosure rate for subprime borrowers, who have bad or incomplete credit and whose mortgages typically are securitized by private banks rather than government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is at a four-year high, according to the mortgage bankers.

750,000 Homeowners

More than 1.5 million homeowners will enter the foreclosure process this year, said Rick Sharga, executive vice president for marketing at RealtyTrac Inc., the Irvine, California-based seller of foreclosure information. About half of them, 750,000, will have their homes repossessed, Sharga said.

Borrower advocates, including Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, have seized upon the issue of missing mortgage notes as a way to stem foreclosures.

“The best thing to do is to keep people in their homes and for everybody to take steps necessary to make that happen,” said Chris Geidner, an attorney in Dann’s office. “These trusts are purchasing these notes, and before they even get the paperwork, they foreclose on people. They become foreclosure machines.”

Lost-Note Affidavits

When the mortgage servicers and securitizing banks that act as trustees of the securities fail to present proof that they own a mortgage, they sometimes file what’s called a lost-note affidavit, said April Charney, a lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid in Florida.

Nobody knows how widespread the use of lost-note affidavits are, Charney said. She’s had foreclosure proceedings for 300 clients dismissed or postponed in the past year, with about 80 percent of them involving lost-note affidavits, she said.

“They raise the issue of whether the trusts own the loans at all,” Charney said. “Lost-note affidavits are pattern and practice in the industry. They are not exceptions. They are the rule.”

State laws generally make it difficult to foreclose because they favor the homeowner, said Stuart Saft, a real estate lawyer and partner at the New York firm Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP.

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Rollings students (mostly on the left side of photo) stand at the Riverside Church in Manhattan beside kids from the Bronx. The groups came together for a Heritage and Diversity Concert.

Rollings Middle School of the Arts students and faculty Nicholas Loe, William Wallace, Lonnie Russell, Anna Ridenour, Shanae Praileau, Jamaal Singleton, Jessie Hethcox, Jensen Stauffer, Sara Grant, Colleen West, Rebecca Bruffey, Jacobi Brooker, Candice Walker, Peyton Lehew, Eric vander Meyden, Clark Boykin, Assistant Principal Camilla Pinckney and Olivia Kline gather around the bull statue on Wall Street in New York City.

The kids from the Bronx and the youths from Summerville came from different backgrounds. But when they got together earlier this month, they quickly found a common key.

“Music is the universal language,” said Tim Thompson, music director at Rollings Middle School of the Arts, after leading a group of piano core students on a Presidents Day weekend bus trip to The Big Apple.

While visiting New York, 15 eighth-graders and a dozen chaperons saw the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Wall Street, Rockefeller Center and ground zero. They took in a Broadway performance of “Mary Poppins” and feasted on New York-style pizza.

It was an amazing experience, said the students, some of whom have relatives in the New York area.

While the sights were phenomenal and educational, the real purpose for the trip was not tourism, but a cultural exchange, Thompson said.

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Christopher Keogan was forced out as principal of Cardinal Hays HS after inappropriate images were allegedly found on his computer.

 

 The ‘Hayes Man’ Removed A Principal From School

The principal at a prominent Catholic boys’ high school in the Bronx was ousted late last week after photos of nude men were discovered on his computer, a law enforcement official confirmed on Wednesday.

No criminal charges were filed against the principal, Christopher Keogan of Cardinal Hayes High School, because the photos were of adults.

The dismissal, reported in The New York Post on Wednesday, deeply shook morale at the school, which prides itself on upholding strict codes of discipline and ethics, and sees its mission as plucking boys from struggling city neighborhoods and shaping them into ambitious young men. Among the school’s alumni, who refer to themselves as “Hayes Men,” are Regis Philbin, Martin Scorsese and the novelist Don DeLillo. George Carlin, the comedian, lasted three semesters at Cardinal Hayes before getting kicked out.

“I’m sad for the school, because it drags the school down, and there’s so much good that comes out of a place like that,” said Robert Budelman, who was the director of development at Cardinal Hayes from December 2000 until last September. “It’s got a tremendous reputation for educating the poorest kids from the poorest neighborhoods, and getting them into college and going on to achieve amazing things with their lives.”

Calls to Mr. Keogan’s cellphone were not returned on Wednesday, and the Rev. Joseph F. Tierney, the school’s president, would not comment. Jacqueline LoFaro, a spokeswoman for schools at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which oversees Cardinal Hayes, confirmed Mr. Keogan’s dismissal, but not the reasons behind it.

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Completed in 1914, the Bronx Borough Courthouse on 161st Street and Third Avenue has served as home to the borough government and a courthouse. The Beaux Arts-style building features a granite exterior, marble interiors, and a statue of Justice above the south entrance. The building was abandoned in 1978, but later designated as a historic landmark by the city. It has been refurbished and was home to various community groups, but today it sits empty. Without an owner or use, preservation groups worry that the building is again falling into neglect and disrepair. Source..

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New Bronx Academy Gets Promise From Department of Education

The Department of Education has approved plans for a new charter school to be placed inside the landmark courthouse on Third Avenue and 161st Street.

“That charter school process is not easy,” said Reverend Wendy Calderon-Payne of the Urban Youth Alliance. “They make you prove that you have the ability to run a charter school.”

For three years, religious leaders in the South Bronx worked and prayed to bring a charter school to the courthouse, which has been closed since 1978. The Virginia-based organization Imagine Schools was granted the charter, but the facility will be run by the Bronx organization Urban Youth Alliance and will be called the Bronx Academy of Promise.

The theme of the school will be career education. Along with learning the core subjects, students will be taught what jobs are associated with those subjects and how to get into the various fields.

“We are promising the young people here something very, very special,” said Reverend Timothy Birkett of the Church Alive community church. “We are going to give them an opportunity to look forward to their future, and we are promising things are going to be better than they are today.”

For 30 years, various groups have been unsuccessful in developing the property. Although the charter has been granted, there are still millions of dollars in construction that needs to be done.

While construction is going on, community leaders are going to have to pay close attention to security at the site. Over the years, there have been a number of break-ins, where fixtures and electrical wiring have been stolen.

Leaders say new copper pipes already been put in for heating have been stolen. The building was also steam cleaned, but someone tagged it with graffiti.

“We are asking the community to support us; don’t tear us down,” said Calderon-Payne. “Let the building go up so that our children, their children, their nieces and nephews can come and get a great education.”

Currently Boriqua College is building a campus next to the courthouse. The charter school will go from kindergarten to the eighth grade.

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