Thursday’s Headlines: Anti-Columbus Day Edition

It’s not a local story — not yet, at least! — but anti-police-brutality protesters have started pulling down statues of Christopher Columbus, first with a beheading in Boston, then full topplings in Richmond and Minneapolis (below).

Is New York next? Well, we’d need the help of the mayor for two reasons: 1. The Columbus statue in Manhattan is really high and 2. because the mayor created a statue commission that ended up deciding to keep the ultimate symbol of colonial oppression in its place at the southwest corner of Central Park.

Anyone got a very long rope?

In other news:

• Gothamist’s Jake Offenhartz exposed another of Dermot Shea’s lies.
• The Post did a hit piece on Lorraine Cortes-Vazquez, one of Mayor de Blasio’s MTA board members, but the news was that she and Victor Calise were finally approved to take their posts, finally giving the city its full representation on the crucial transportation panel for the first time since last April.
• Why does the Post allow Rudy Giuliani to change the narrative about the movement to get cops out of the city’s schools? Why does he get to say that the move would “teach children to hate cops” when, in fact, the opposite is probably true?
• More police reforms passed in Albany on Tuesday. (NY Post)
• Gotham Gazette took a deep look at the NYPD budget (that is, what we know of it).
• People are loving the clean subway system. (NY Times)
• The executive directors of TransAlt and Brooklyn Movement Center are calling for NYPD to be removed from traffic enforcement. (Gotham Gazette)
• Big Dog Excelsior Cop Guy got to cut his LaGuardia ribbon (NY Times). Guse from the Newsuh took the bus to the event, but Gov. Cuomo declined the invitation (he prefers to build a $2-billion wrong-way monorail).