The MTA has suspended four fare checkers involved in a violent incident in Brooklyn pending an investigation into how an effort to check on potential fare evasion turned into a physical clash, transit officials said Thursday.

“[NYC Transit President] Demetrius [Crichlow] and the team at Transit have elected to put those inspectors on the bench,” MTA chariman Janno Lieber told reporters. “They’re out of service, pending the investigation.”

Lieber said that he had reviewed the surveillance footage — first reported by the Daily News — showing members of the MTA’s Evasion and Graffiti Lawlessness Eradication (EAGLE) team pressing Brooklyn school aide Kyle Taylor up against a bus-stop shelter following a fare dispute that had turned physical.

“We are concerned about some of what we saw,” Lieber said.

The four fare-checkers have been suspended and were not on desk duty, a source briefed on the MTA’s internal investigation told the Daily News.

Taylor had been confronted by members of the team as he was getting off a B14 bus at Pitkin and Rockaway Aves. in Brownsville by agents charged with stopping rampant fare evasion on NYC buses, Taylor told the Daily News that the team asked him how he had paid his fare. When he said that it wouldn’t show up since he’d made a free transfer from a B15 bus, Taylor said the fare inspectors asked him for his ID. He refused.

“One of them said, ‘Give me your ID,’” Taylor said. “I said ‘I paid my fare. Why do you want my ID? Can I please get off the bus?’

They said, ‘You’re not getting off this bus.’”

Taylor said he then tried to “squeeze” past the agents and a physical clash ensued.

Surveillance footage from a nearby deli shows Taylor was then pinned against the outside of the bus and against the bus stop shelter by multiple EAGLE team members. One member of the team can be heard telling Taylor “You can not push an officer,” to which Taylor responds, “You’re not an officer.”

Comprised of unarmed transit employees, the MTA’s EAGLE teams have been tasked with combating fare evasion on the agency’s bus system, Since the switch to tap-to-pay fares on city buses, the EAGLE teams have been equipped with hand-held readers designed to verify that a debit card, credit card, OMNY card or phone has in fact been used to pay for the bus. Nearly half of the city’s bus riders don’t pay their fare, according to MTA data.

While members of the EAGLE teams are allowed to issue tickets for fare evasion, they are not members of the MTA’s police department, nor are they recognized by the state as peace officers. The video shows Taylor and a few of the EAGLE team members struggle at the bus shelter before falling to the ground.

“It is our expectation that we should be able to deal with our customers in a respectful manner,” Crichlow said Thursday.

“This is not indicative of the level of professionalism that we see or expect from our employees,” he said. “We train them specifically on how to engage with customers, conflict resolution, how to de-escalate situations — and so it is unfortunate that this situation wound up escalating.”

The NYPD arrived at the scene but filed no charges.

Taylor’s lawyer, Benjamin Pinczewski, told The News that the MTA should disband the EAGLE teams following the incident.

“While we are pleased to see [Lieber] is taking the matter seriously and has removed the four Eagle team members from active duty we demand they be terminated along with the entire unit,” Pinczewski said. “People who must use and rely on the MTA buses cannot be subjected to this kind of abuse harassment and trauma.”

Lieber said that the MTA was working with the NYPD to determine how the fare enforcement stop turned physical.

“They’re given a lot of training, especially in de-escalation — to avoid physicality,” Lieber said.

“There’s apparently a disagreement about how the physical stuff started. We don’t know, that’s why we’re investigating,” he said.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mayor Mamdani — who was elected in part on a promise of fare-free buses — encouraged the MTA’s investigation, and said the issue raised “serious questions” about the EAGLE teams.

“While the City does not oversee MTA Eagle teams, we take any accusation of excessive force seriously and we strongly encourage the MTA to investigate this incident thoroughly,” Jeremy Edwards said in a statement. “This raises serious questions about the MTA’s current strategy for collecting bus fares—no New Yorker should be concerned for their safety over three bucks.”

Starts at 11 AM and heads south on Avenue B, from East 13th Street to East 7th Street at Tompkins Square Park. The festival block is on East 6th Street between Avenues B and C, 10 AM to 4 PM.

Clara Wu Tsai has a lot on her plate. She’s vice chair of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, the company behind the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty, and Barclays Center, and she serves as the Liberty’s governor.

She’s also a film producer: most recently of Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. She co-owns the National Lacrosse League’s San Diego Seals and is a trustee at Stanford, NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, and Lincoln Center.

But for one of Wu Tsai’s projects in Brooklyn, the return can’t be measured in dollars alone.

In August 2020, amid racial justice protests on the plaza outside Barclays Center, Wu Tsai and her husband, Alibaba cofounder Joe Tsai, pledged $50 million over 10 years to social justice and economic mobility initiatives, prioritizing Brooklyn. The result was the Social Justice Fund, which Wu Tsai directs. Six years in, its stated mission is to support economic mobility across the borough by funding programs that address gaps in education, health, and wealth.

Its latest plan may be its most ambitious. Some of the fund’s money is earmarked for a guaranteed income program for new mothers in Brownsville, a neighborhood where poverty has long outpaced the citywide rate, the New York Times reported this month. Guaranteed income, which means regular, no-strings cash payments to a targeted group, is different from universal basic income, which would go to everyone. 

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/13/clara-wu-tsai-liberty-guaranteed-income-brooklyn-moms/?utm_source=reddit/

The iconic hotel is closing for a much needed face-lift.

I'm all for expanding higher-level math in middle school and carefully adding some seats at the five newer specialized schools if they can handle it without dropping standards. But replacing the SHSAT or adding grades, recommendations, essays, or "background" to the admissions process is a nonstarter.

Both of my kids took the test. One of them, who is Latino, got in. The other didn't. The difference was that the one who got in studied hard for three years. The other only prepped for a year and not very seriously. The test rewards kids who put in the work, regardless of income. About half the students at these schools come from poverty or lower income households.

Changing the admissions rules just to force different racial numbers doesn't fix the real problem of uneven preparation in the earlier grades. It just weakens the schools that currently work for hardworking kids from every background.

The Knicks owner is urging New York’s business elite to abandon Gov. Kathy Hochul and has spent millions to back her opponent, Bruce Blakeman.

“Do you have a cool job and a big heart?,” read a sign taped to a New York City lightpole. “Let me shadow you. I’m 16 pls.”

The flyer is from high-school junior Avi Lichtenstein, who is so worried about his future that he’s asking strangers if he can follow them to work. 

“Every night I’m like, ‘What am I going to do with my life?,’” the curly-haired teen says. “I just couldn’t put my mind to rest.”

He came up with the plan last month. Using about $500 of his savings, he paid two guys he found on Craigslist to plaster the city with more than 300 flyers. His goal for the school year: follow one person a week to get a better idea of what he wants to do before he applies to colleges next year. 

It’s working. He’s shadowed a dog groomer, a radio show host and a ramen shop owner, and is reviewing requests from an airline captain and a tattoo artist. One went so well, he was offered a part-time job. 

We tried the new AI feature on 311 and found it lead into a maze of links and many dead ends that did not help the issue at hand (in this case, a backed up sewer driving a foul smell into the apartment building). The city says it needs the AI feature to keep up with demand and help people navigate 311 faster. But even with all the AI (instituted in December), a simple google search got to the right forms much more efficiently.

Have you used the AI 311 feature yet, and have you found it helpful at all? Interested to hear if others have found it helpful yet.