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The NYPD Was Ticketing Legally Parked Cars; Open Data Put an End to It (tumblr.com)
Data analyst Ben Wellington claims that that the NYPD has been systematically ticketing legally parked cars for years. Doing so, he says, helps NYPD collect millions of dollars every year. In a blog post, Wellington notes about a change of law in 2008 (PDF) which allowed one in New York City to park their car in front of a sidewalk pedestrian ramp -- provided it's not connected to a crosswalk. Despite this, the NYPD continues to ticket people. To check how many more people are falling for this, Wellington looked into NYC's Open Data portal, and his findings are startling. In front of 575 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, which is in the middle of the block, with no crosswalk, over $48,000 in parking fines were issued in the last 2.5 years. He writes: 1705 Canton Avenue in Brooklyn, 273 Tickets, $45,045: Legal. 270-05 76 Avenue in Queens, 256 Tickets ($42,440) Legal. 143-49 Cherry Ave, Queens, 246 Tickets, ($40,590). Legal. A spot in Battery Park, ranked #16 on my list and the top spot in Manhattan, had 116 tickets ($19,140) and turned out to be legal.Wellington wrote to the NYPD about this, and he got the following response: Mr. Wellington's analysis identified errors the department made in issuing parking summonses. It appears to be a misunderstanding by officers on patrol of a recent, abstruse change in the parking rules. We appreciate Mr. Wellington bringing this anomaly to our attention. The department's internal analysis found that patrol officers who are unfamiliar with the change have observed vehicles parked in front of pedestrian ramps and issued a summons in error. When the rule changed in 2009 to allow for certain pedestrian ramps to be blocked by parked vehicles, the department focused training on traffic agents, who write the majority of summonses.
Enough said.
I mean they could raise a fortune just ticketing double parked cars in Main St. Flushing, why be criminal about it all?
Will they refund people and wipe their record of the error?
Ignorance of the law is an accepted excuse for law enforcement's mistakes, but not an acceptable excuse for the mistakes of people being punished by law enforcement. That's fair, right?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So of course they gave all the money back and everyone lived happily every after. Goodnight John, sleep tight John.
They don't let us vote.
I'm sure they can make up the revenue with civil forfeiture.
I'm looking forward to autonomous cars driving a stake into the hearts of vampiric police departments... but only after proclaiming, "here are your 30 pieces of silver, you Judas!" and dumping a bag of silver coins on their searing flesh. It really is the most satisfying way to pay parking tickets.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Because they hate us.
Then the cop's probably don't either. They are not lawyers and the myriad of byzantine laws and exceptions in any jurisdiction can hardly be comprehended by the judges and lawyers whose job it is to adjudicate them. I would guess it would be a legitimate mistake with the only exception would be meter maids who are supposed to know the scope of parking laws they enforce.
Only government bureaucrats can claim that a one-sentence change in law back in 2008 is obscure and recent... and get away with it.
Imagine if the law had been changed in the reverse. Do you think that in 2016, claiming the law was "abstruse" or "recent" would get the ticket thrown out?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
NYPD parking enforcement is a joke. See https://twitter.com/placardabuse
NYPD is a joke.
So they didn't like the new law and decided to keep enforcing the old, no longer in effect version?
The government needs this revenue. Cutting it off will only cause problems. The missing money must be made up for from somewhere else. New Yorkers well-off enough to drive cars in the Big Apple can well afford these parking tickets.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This is democracy in action. It isn't perfect, but good luck trying to get a King to change like that.
I grew up in Anchorage in the 1990s. We were so fed up with overzealous parking enforcement that we disbanded the parking authority by referendum.
After that only uniformed police officers could write tickets. That was a much more tolerable and balanced level of enforcement.
Republicans lie constantly.
And beat people for trying.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, unless you're the government. There are so many laws the government can't even keep track of them all, how are regular people supposed to?
Combine this with the permission of police to lie as a matter of course, and we have a system that is way too top heavy.
Data analyst Ben Wellington is now on the Terrorist Watch List, is randomly stopped and frisked on a daily basis, and selected for state tax audits every quarter.
Bernie is the only remaining candidate that has a plan on how to fix this. After all, it is where he is from so he cares. He now longer wants to see our necks under the heels of those republicans.
They need to fix the law back, so they can be ticketed appropriately.....
It was kind of stupid gov't in action enacting laws that allow vehicles to interfere with pedestrian access.
the citation though, are they?
No, they aren't. They're going to keep all the money and leave it on their records.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If you're not angry about the current political situation, you're either *REALLY* not paying attention, or getting paid by it.
Either way, fuck off for being glad people were beaten.
You think that an autonomous car solves problems? Fat chance of that happening. The revenue stream will just move from "tickets" to "regulation". Start investing today in "autonomous test" companies. The next source of political bribery^H kickback money.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
For those who don't RTFA they won't know that ...
In this case, the NYPD acknowledged the mistake, is retraining its officers and is putting in monitoring to limit this type of erroneous ticketing from happening in the future. In doing so, they have shown that they are ready and willing to work with the people of the city. And what better gift can we get from Open Data than that.
Nope, no sig
For those who don't have a dictionary handy it means "hard to understand".
But the law isn't hard to understand. Here's the section that applies:
A person may stop, stand or park a vehicle alongside or in a manner which obstructs a pedestrian ramp not located within such crosswalk, unless otherwise prohibited.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Parking is prohibited within 15 feet of a fire hydrant. (1) The edge of the sidewalk is usually painted yellow, BUT IT MAY NOT BE 15 FEET! It's up to YOU to figure it out. (2) Except it's really up to the police or traffic wardens. You can be 25 feet away and get a ticket. When you complain, with a photo, they'll simply point out that you could have taken the photo after moving your car.
The question is, have they refunded the money? Will they claim "You settled when you paid, too bad.", even though they intentionally made the process of fighting it extremely expensive as compared to the cost of the ticket itself.
Doing so, he says, helps NYPD steal millions of dollars every year.
FTFY.
You're claiming the people who were getting beaten are the most violent ones... You have a distorted sense of reality.
I lived for a while in a place where car theft was legal - if you happened to own an impound lot. My car was stolen by such a lot owner from my reserved, paid, contract parking spot and the city wouldn't do shit to help me. I tried to report my car as stolen but the police would hear nothing of it. I had to pay a ransom to the thieves to get my car back, and the towing inspector refused to help as well. Being as the thieves had plenty of experience (and assistance) in the court system you can imagine how well that went as well...
Basically I would have much rather had a ticket. A ticket doesn't do front end damage to my car or force me to go through hell trying to pursue some semblance of justice. I've fought unjust traffic tickets before (and won) but the city wouldn't help me when my car was stolen by crooked bastards.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Which Republican was that? The same one that wanted to tax large bottles of soda, funds anti-gun legislation? That one? Yeah. Bloomberg is really popular among Republican circles.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Actually the city response was
So, hopefully an end to it, but perhaps not.
The city can paint a crosswalk if it wants the pedestrian ramp to not have cars parked against it. They can remove the paint when they change their mind. It's easy because it's just paint.
Bringing back the law would mean that undesirable pedestrian ramps need to be physically removed. (jackhammer it a bit, add a concrete form, pour concrete, wait, remove the form)
If you had a reserved, paid spot, did you try to recover from the entity who rented the spot to you. The towing company was likely a contractor to them. Not that it wouldn't still suck. I had my car towed once but I was parked wrong. It upset me terribly.
No, they most likely do not appreciate it.
More importantly, a fraction of ticketed car-owners must have appealed the summonses — and won. NYPD could — and therefor must — track the appeals and their results. Had they done so, they would've noticed the anomaly themselves.
Next in line — use FOIA to chart ticked-issuance per day of the month. This would finally establish — beyond doubt — whether or not police departments have ticket-quotas...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This doesn't happen because the rank and file drones got together and decided to do it. This happens because it was ordered from on high.
There should be arrests and independent investigations of these corrupt criminals, leading to public trials and prison sentences.
There was a sidewalk in Queens, NYC, NY with ramp in it for a driveway (well not a ramp but no curb so you could drive up it). The driveway was for a garage. The garage door had been walled up. The former garage was only a few feet from the street so a car could not pull up into the driveway anymore. If you parked in front of this non-garage you would get a parking ticket for blocking the non-driveway. Even if the front of your car extended over the non-driveway you would get a ticket for obstructing the non-driveway.
Make a law stating "anyone issuing a citation for a crime that has not occurred is guilty of a crime themselves. The crime they are guilty of is equivalent to the crime that they illegally charge the other person with."
I know that this will never happen but can you imagine a police officer being charged with a misdemeanor and facing a fine of ~$150-$200 plus court costs every time they did something like this.
I tried, but they wouldn't help either. Said owner of spot was my landlord when I lived in a large apartment complex. The towing company was not strictly a contractor to them but rather a sub-contractor as it was the "security" company who was a contractor to the landlord and the towing company was - in theory - a subcontractor to the security company. Even though the documentation showed the towing company was there - inside the secured-access garage - first, the landlord wouldn't touch the matter.
Besides, going after my landlord could have had negative consequences that I was not at the time prepared to deal with.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"It appears to be a misunderstanding by officers on patrol of a recent, abstruse change in the parking rules."
Really? A "misunderstanding by officers"? You gonna stick with that answer?
Because when *I* break the law I don't get a pass because I "misunderstood" something. I mean, isn't it the police and judges who are the first to exclaim that "ignorance of the law is no excuse"?
I'm sure they'll pay back all of the people they wrongly ticketed, and with interest too. (Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, who am I kidding!)
Call this what is is: naked, blatant revenue enhancement.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Seriously - exact same situation - link below of legal parking spot.
I submitted evidence for an online hearing that included the blog post from TFA (plus a screen grab of that street view, plus the appropriate legal stuffs).
I'd love to know when Mr. Quant NYC submitted his findings. I got my ticket three weeks ago (and this Slashdot post was a reminder for me to fight it).
https://www.google.com/maps/pl...
When a cop signs a ticket [summons] they are swearing they have observed the offense. Without sworn testimony, no default [missed appearance] judgement and punishment can be legally imposed. If a copy writes ticket s/he knows is bad, s/he's just committed perjury.
Unfortunately, prosecutors most places rely heavily on police to build their cases, so are extremely reluctant to prosecute police. When they must, they use clever ticks to sabotage their own cases (Rodney King). Clear corruption, albeit without bribes.
True errors are made in both directions -- when mistakes always run in the makers favor, it is something else.
Those fuckers stole my car twice when I lived there, so I got hit with bullshit tickets plus towing fees.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I would approve of vigilant justice in this situation against the facilities and personnel.
I lived for a while in a place where car theft was legal - if you happened to own an impound lot. My car was stolen by such a lot owner from my reserved, paid, contract parking spot and the city wouldn't do shit to help me. I tried to report my car as stolen but the police would hear nothing of it. I had to pay a ransom to the thieves to get my car back, and the towing inspector refused to help as well. Being as the thieves had plenty of experience (and assistance) in the court system you can imagine how well that went as well...
I would approve of vigilant justice in this situation against the facilities and personnel.
There is a reason why the place has security cameras all over the place, and bullet proof glass in front of their cashier. They also kept the cars they knew owners would most likely want back kept in a locked garage (which - you guessed it - was also monitored by security cameras).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Ridiculous conclusion. Look elsewhere in the threads where it is explained that paying the fine is less costly than fighting it. (mandatory court fees, even if you are not guilty plus time spent, and probably time off work.)
Just one more reason to avoid the cesspool that is NYC, and most major cities in this formerly great nation.
I agree with the other poster in that there should be some substantiation of that statement.
Yeah, I know, I'm rather lazy in providing them myself, but it's still true.
Sneaky little polices. Wicked, tricksy, false!
Why the hell is NYC allowing people to park in front of sidewalk ramps? I'm not sure how it is in the Big Apple, but most jurisdictions do not mark crosswalks at every crosswalk, even though it's a logical and safe place for a person to cross the street, like a street corner. (This is why one should be suspicious when reading about an accident in which "the victim was not in a crosswalk"; odds are decent that it's because there are insufficient pedestrian accommodations on the road.) If it's OK for an able-bodied pedestrian to cross somewhere, there should be curb cuts so that a person in a wheelchair can do the same, and there shouldn't be a vehicle blocking it.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Ticketing legally parked cars is how the city funds itself. It hasn't stopped, it won't stop. You've just stopped them from doing it by mistake.
Does anyone understand the amount of computational power is required to simulate the motion of 1 square yard of moving ocean water surface? It's a lot. On top of that light simulation(or simulating light hitting moving water, insane) makes surface simulation look crazy easy in comparison. Keep in mind CGI lighting/surfaces you see in games and movies is not a simulation(not in the least), as real light and the corresponding surfaces it would effect could NEVER be simulated by a computer as we know of them(chip or quantum). Ever. Period. This is why you should never ever ever ever expect "true to life" games, most of the advancements are in tricking your vision into thinking something is happening. The scale is purely too large. Essentially Neil is alluding to there being a God, but his pride will not allow him to admit that whatever he is seeing is actually leading to that conclusion, so he says 'simulation'. Kind of sad really.
I want my freakin' money back! I fought and lost a legally parked car violation! AND, pay for the wasted time and suffering!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
http://www.petition2congress.c...
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