Jews across the nation and world are preparing for their New Year.
Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown.
It's followed by a 10 day period of reflection and repentance that ends on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.
Rosh Hashanah is also a celebration of new beginnings and a time to set goals for the new year.
Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the NYPD will look at a complaint that an officer wrongly used pepper spray at a demonstration last week.
Kelly says internal affairs will look into the claim made by a 25-year-old woman and others.
Video from Saturday's Union Square incident shows an officer blasting a cluster of women with pepper spray. Two of the women crumple on the sidewalk in pain. One screams. The officer's white shirt indicates a rank of lieutenant or above.
Kelly says the video leaves out tumultuous conduct by protesters who illegally tried to block streets.
About 80 people were arrested as the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators marched through lower Manhattan.
The women have also filed a complaint with the civilian complaint review board.
A double shooting in the Bronx early Saturday morning left one man dead and another person wounded.
It happened shortly before 2:30 a.m. at the intersection of Cedar and Sedgwick Avenues in Morris Heights.
Police say they responded to a 911 call and found a 20-year-old and a 56-year-old with gunshot wounds.
The 20-year-old, identified as John Vasquez of the Bronx, was pronounced dead.
The older victim was taken to Lincoln Hospital.
He is listed in stable condition.
Police are still investigating the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
Anyone with information about the case is being asked to contact Crime Stoppers by calling 1-800-577-TIPS, by texting TIP577 to CRIMES, or by going toNYPDCrimeStoppers.com.
A man was arrested and accused of traveling with a barrage of weapons at John F. Kennedy International Airport Friday.
Transportation Security officers found a stun gun, three stun batons, a stun pen and a can of pepper spray during a routine baggage check on Thursday.
Mohamed Hefni, 54, told officials he was taking them home to Saudi Arabia to protect his family.
The screeners didn't buy his story and called the Port Authority Police.
Hefni now faces weapons possession charges.
A Staten Island neighborhood hit hard by Irene got a case of déjà vu Friday.
Dongan Hills between Haven and Hunter Avenues turned into a small pond.
Residents said most of the houses in the area were built over the past six years, but no one ever expanded the drainage system, so there is no place for the water to go.
"They say that the pipe is small to handle all the water, and it's really the only drain pipe available. If you look at the pipe over there, it doesn't work," said one resident.
"Everything is sinking. Cars come through here, they wash the soil away. Everything is getting rotten over here from the waters," said another.
Residents say they have been petitioning the city to widen the area's catch basins and improve the drainage system, but their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
The heavy rains also caused travel delays at area airports.
Travelers heading to Newark, LaGuardia or John F. Kennedy Airports were advised to call their carriers ahead of time. As some rain is also expected this weekend, further delays might be possible.
The weather also led to a postponement of Friday's Yankees versus Red Sox game. It will be made up as the second game of a day-night doubleheader on Sunday.
A Brooklyn man was arrested Friday after a police-involved shooting in Brooklyn.
The incident happened on Linden Boulevard and East 49th Street in East Flatbush early in the morning.
Plainclothes officers say they approached Jerry Benoit, 30, who appeared to have a gun.
Police say Benoit fired his weapon, leading to a shootout and a chase.
Benoit was hit several times and rushed to the hospital in critical condition.
He is facing charges of attempted murder and assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon.
Benoit was also wearing a bullet-proof vest.
The officers were not seriously hurt.
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly (
Kelly's Operations Order landed on the desk of police supervisors this week, and a copy of it was provided to WNYC.
In the order, Kelly stated at the outset: "Questions have been raised about the processing of certain marihuana arrests. At issue is whether the circumstances under which uniformed members of the service recover small amounts of marihuana ... from subjects in a public place support the charge of Criminal Possession of Marihuana in the Fifth Degree."
NYPD sources tell WNYC it's the first time Kelly internally addressed the issue of improper marijuana arrests to the entire department since a WNYC investigation in April found police officers may have been recovering marijuana on people through illegal searches.
In New York, possession of small amounts of marijuana is only a criminal offense if it is displayed in public. Kelly's order reminds officers that if marijuana comes into public view at the direction of an officer — either when an officer pulls the drug out of a person's clothes or a person is ordered by an officer to empty out his pockets — it's not a misdemeanor, and instead should only be treated as a violation, which is a ticketable offense.
More than 85 percent of those arrested for marijuana in New York City are blacks and Latinos in the poorest neighborhoods where the highest rates of stop-and-frisk occur. National studies show young whites smoke pot more than blacks and Latinos of the same age.
Kelly's directive arrives just as City Council members and legislators in Albany are calling for an end to improper marijuana arrests. A bipartisan bill has been introduced in the state legislature that would decriminalize small amounts of marijuana possession in public view. Bill sponsors Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and State Senator Mark Grisanti said they hope the proposed law will reduce incentives for police to improperly recover marijuana from people to make misdemeanor arrests.
Three men have been killed and two other injured in separate shooting incidents in New York City.
A 27-year-old man was found just after 11 p.m. Saturday on Batchelder Street in Brooklyn, with several gunshots to his torso. He was pronounced dead at Coney Island Hospital.
Police said another man was killed and two others were wounded in a shooting on Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn shortly after 3 a.m. Sunday. The injured men were hospitalized in stable condition.
In Queens, a man was killed after being shot multiple times on 107 Avenue around 4 a.m. Sunday.
No names for the victims have been released.
According to a report there was an increase in crime last year in six of the nine major crime categories.
The report also stated that response times to crimes in progress increased by a minute.
Murder, forcible rape, robbery and felonious assault went up in the 2011 fiscal year, which ended on June 30. Major felony crimes increased in both the transit system and the NYC Housing Authority.
Response times rose from an average 7.5 to 8.4 minutes, continuing the pattern since 2007, when cops rushed to emergencies in just 6.9 minutes.
Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne however disputes some of the findings in the report and says the newspaper accounts reflect outdated information.
Browne said murder is currently down 7% and says the increase in felony assault is attributed primarily to a new definition of what defines a felony assault. According to Browne, that definition became effective last November which also made choking a felony assault for the first time.
Browne says if the definition remained the same, assaults would be down. As for rapes, Browne said 90% of the victims knew their assailants as either acquaintances or relatives and added that led to a welcome willingness by victims to report assailants even when they were acquaintances or relatives.
The report stated forcible rapes had showed the steepest increase of any major crime, from 860 to 1,138.
Overall, officials downplayed the numbers for individual categories stating the long-term overall trend was "strongly positive" and that the total number of felonies was down slightly, from 105,702 to 105,496.
"Even as New York City is emerging from the most difficult fiscal crisis in a generation, the data show that city agencies continue to provide the high-quality services that New Yorkers have rightly come to expect," said Mayor Bloomberg in a statement.
Browne added that response times are still 20 percent faster than they were in 2000, when it took an average 10.7 minutes to get to a crime at a time when the NYPD had 6,000 more officers than it does today.
NYPD response times
Year----Minutes
2011: 8.4
2010: 7.5
2009: 7.3
2008: 7.3
2007: 6.9
2003: 7.1*
* Mayor Bloomberg's 1st year
Source: Mayor's Management Report
READ MORE: NY POST
A New York City couple got a terrific scare when a thief drove off in their SUV with their 2-year-old son still in the back seat.
The theft happened in the Bronx on Saturday morning. Police say the child's mother was loading groceries into the vehicle outside a supermarket when a man jumped into the driver's seat and hit the gas.
Police say the thief apparently realized what happened right away, stopped the car, took the boy out of his car seat and left him in the street.
The boy's father ran up the block to retrieve him as the SUV sped off.
Police were still looking for the SUV Saturday afternoon.
