It seems the City Council’s move to defund the NYPD also managed to shield a particularly well-connected brand of lawbreaker — namely, the municipal employees and other insiders who abuse their parking placards.
This, even as the new budget also boosts enforcement against all other drivers in a blatant bid to fund city government with excessive law enforcement.
That’s right: The budget axed all 116 positions dedicated to placard enforcement and zeroes out the unit’s $5.4 million annual budget. This is at least the second time a vaunted Mayor Bill de Blasio effort to crack down has come to nothing.
Meanwhile, the budget also reassigns 165 traffic-enforcement agents to the Department of Transportation, expecting them to bring in $42 million in added revenue.
Council Speaker Corey Johnson says it’ll mean more “tickets for cars blocking bus lanes or double-parking in a bike lane.”
Really? Seems to us that CoJo is ignoring a key lesson of Ferguson, Mo. — where the 2014 death of Michael Brown sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Obama Justice Department’s investigation found that the town of Ferguson had come to depend heavily on revenue generated by fines and other charges generated by police enforcement — an oppressive policy that hit the black community hard.
Fines, plus late fees and the arrests generated for failure to pay created serious tension between civilians and law enforcement.
New York City drivers have long complained of ticketing blitzes. Whistleblowing cops and traffic agents have cited productivity quotas as well as pressure from supervisors to write more tickets.
Yet city leaders just decided to gouge the public more in this divisive way — even as they (again) protected insider motorists who abuse their privileges.
That’s a lot of squalor snuck through in the name of “defunding the police.”
Read More:What new NYC budget does under cover of ‘defunding the NYPD’
