NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Instead, for the last (at least) 40 years, the parking scheme has been a way for NYPD officers to get paid. They'd sell their placards to tenants in the buildings on my street, effectively providing guaranteed on-street parking to the wealthy residents of my street.
Something like 3-4 companies own all of the parking garages in NYC. New York should spend its time removing the grift from parking and parking enforcement. It should also adjust the zoning so that landlords don't cheat the system (all Sunnyside Queens buildings are under 8 floors so that they don't have to build in parking spaces, etc).
Guaranteed NYC will never do this.
In reality, crime in New York City is at record lows: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm
> It's also difficult for street-level cameras to track people.
And that's another good thing.
You may have seen on TV recently talk about Trump inflating the size and value of his real estate holdings in NYC but that's _EVERY_ NYC landlord. There's massive tax advantages (write down opportunities) for them to do so.
And NYC gets to pretend that they have more tax money coming in than they really do to justify those billion dollar budgets that they always have a shortfall for.
Calling this a grift is doing a disservice, IMO. This is straight up corruption. And it's rampant.
I would love citizen cell apps to enable enforcement, but I'm not hopeful. I would think that more cops would remove license plates and harass those trying to hold them to account. I truly don't know how it is possible to make NYPD accountable, maybe a federal intervention.
[0] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/death-threats-follow-...
> In a statement, an NYPD spokesperson expressed concerns that the proposed law could lead to violent conflicts between drivers and civilians reporting illegally parked cars
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-c...
If there will always be a shortage of space, we should encourage the activity that uses that space more efficiently. That means bikes over cars.
I'm sure you can find some small counter examples, but by and large the US has never had a history of augmenting law enforcement by way of private citizens. We are not a country of snitches.
Well not a small counter example, but a very large organization with origins in the KKK. [0]
In fact, snitching on fellow Americans has become so common we created an internet meme when, specifically, white women of a certain social class do it. [1]
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/abortion-law-regulatio...
In the pharmacy now there's plastic casing protecting almost everything - even toothpaste requires a bell and an assistant. Then there are now private security guards that didn't exist before. You can smoke or drink on the subway now and no one will stop you. You can certainly jump the turnstile and no one will stop you (not for a few years). You can rob someone with a threat of violence and you won't end up in jail, not at all.
Again, citizens are expected to police each other. Or, if you're a victim of something it's your fault (and the on that committed the crime needs to be considered in light of inequality, or some other external circumstance).
A bit of a tangent: "De-policing" doesn't actually de police, it just privatizes it, and feed inequality, because the rich will always afford private security (as they always had and will use more of).
Back from the tangent: this is more of the same - normally the state goes around issuing parking tickets and even enforcing traffic laws. Normally. However no one seems to be doing either lately. Especially moving vehicles. Should the citizens be policing each other too?
The suggestion in this thread to "smash car windows in" is part of that Zeitgeist I'm talking about.
Anyone else looking to move to a rural area?
Why do we need to vigilantize the populace? Just enforce the laws!
Every police officer and every department is going to decide that there are some crimes and infractions that they care about, assign people to enforce, and promote people for working on. Pedestrian and bike safety often isn't one of them - especially when the majority of the officers don't see that as a problem to begin with and see enforcement against cars as a bad thing for them and their family/friends.
In any organization, the top only has so much power. If you work in software, the CEO might say "we want to do X," but if engineering managers and individual engineers aren't enthusiastic about X, it's going to be a struggle. Sure, they'll maybe create some team and assign engineers they don't consider that great to the team (since they don't care to see X done). Those engineers might be told things like "you should really spend 20-50% of your time doing things that will impact the whole org rather than focusing on X" or maybe those engineers see that their managers aren't really interested in X and try to transfer off the team or find ways of doing something else while still on the team that their managers do care about.
Yes, the CEO can fire people, but it's also easy to make it seem like progress is happening without progress really happening. Ok, the mayor or city council wants to see progress on ticketing these evil cars. Well, the police often have the option of going into low-income or minority neighborhoods and ticketing there, probably for infractions that aren't actually what the mayor or council see as the problem. But they still report that ticketing bad cars is up 20% and give just enough detail and just enough obfuscation that the mayor/council doesn't really know what's going on.
Maybe the city wants to create a new organization outside the NYPD to take on this task. Well, now you're fighting the NYPD (and likely the unions) which probably has more power than you do.
I agree: just enforce the laws. However, that's easier said than done when the people tasked with enforcing the laws might be a big part of the problem.
Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War
Yeah. Don't solve the problem, just cause more pain.