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.

Comments

Ignorance of the law

[Locke2005]

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?

Re:Ignorance of the law

[shawn2772]

This is a huge problem in North America; so many layers of laws and regulations and by-laws no one knows what the law is, not Joe public, not the cops, not the courts.

I'm assuming this is by design. When things are so complicated that it takes a lawyer many billable hours to figure out where you can legally park, it stacks the odds heavily in the citys favor and turns anything they want into an easy revenue stream.

I think Hanlon's Razor favors a different explanation, namely that the people who make the laws don't really understand them either. They make changes in a reactive manner when they see something that's a problem or doesn't make sense, and they apply a minimal patch to the law (avoiding refactoring) that appears to resolve the problem they're trying to address, in their jurisdiction. They also don't coordinate with higher or lower jurisdictions, and indeed don't necessarily even pay any attention to what those other jurisdictions are doing.

That sort of a process creates spaghetti law, just the way doing the same thing in software creates spaghetti code. Without careful attention to modularization, separation of concerns, without a willingness to refactor when necessary, and without extensive tests to validate that changes don't cause regressions, what you get is a mess.

Democracy

[CauseBy]

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.