Editorial
Ticket Blitz Is
Exercise In Absurdity

The list gets longer, day by day.

A man received a ticket for sitting on a milk crate in front of a Bronx grocery store.

A man who drove into New York City from New Jersey was ticketed for having a loose mirror on the passenger side of his car.

Another city resident was ticketed because the ink on his car inspection sticker faded three months after it was affixed to his windshield.

A Brooklyn man was cited for having an oven in front of his building. ("There’s nothing there but some tulips and a tree--I guess that looks like an oven to them," the victim said.)

A Bronx woman received a ticket for using outdated blue recycling bags to dispose of household trash.

We have always found this city an exciting and wonderful place to visit, work and live. One key factor in creating and sustaining a livable environment is the New York City police force. We yield to no one in our admiration and respect for the men and women who make their living trying to protect ordinary citizens and maintain law and order on our streets. They do heroic work every day and we salute them for it. It is said in some quarters, though, that there are "quotas" for summonses and woe to any officer who fails to meet them.

We do not know if the quota system is in effect or not and therefore make no comment and pass no judgement. Any way one looks at it, however, this ticket business has gotten out of hand. It is preposterous that in the capital city of the world a police officer tickets an 18-year-old woman for having the temerity to rest her six-months-pregnant self by sitting briefly on a subway staircase or that a tourist from out of town discovers that the perils of subway travel include being ticketed for falling asleep on a train.

Adding insult to injury is a hefty whack in the pocketbook--citations run from $50 on up. Most of the people who have received summonses during the current ticketing blitz simply can’t afford that kind of outlay, especially given sales and property tax hikes and the imposition of fees for many activities or licenses that were hitherto free of charge. A citation may mean the difference between paying a bill or falling behind for someone on a limited or fixed income.

Nor is the ticketing rampage likely to encourage tourism. If visitors from out of town have to add an extra couple of hundred dollars to their travel budgets to allow for citations for dropping a cigarette butt on a sidewalk or pausing too long at a hot dog cart on a city street (both would count as littering and loitering offenses, we don’t doubt), they aren’t likely to want to spend much time or money in the Big Apple. A major industry and source of revenue will dwindle markedly.

Our police are consummate professionals. We’re sure they would vastly prefer to be doing the jobs they were trained to do--bringing criminals to justice and making the streets of this city safer for all of us--rather than focusing on minutiae. Nor is the business climate likely to be enhanced if store owners are fined for having too many letters on their awnings. If this unhappy trend continues we are likely to see an even greater exodus of the working people who constitute most of the tax base of this city.

The really ironic part of all this is that the ticket blitz actually costs the city money. Only parking tickets really generate revenue for the city, according to a report from the Independent Budget Office. The IBO report, released last Thursday, finds that the city spent an average of $2.09 for every $1 collected for summonses other than parking violations. Parking tickets, which account for 80 percent of all summonses, cost the city only 22 cents for every $1 collected.

City agencies contend that the tickets are not intended so much to raise money as to improve the quality of life, another statement we find ironic in light of the fact that many quality of life offenses continue unchecked. The city may have a "pooper scooper" law on the books, but no one would know it from the state of many sidewalks. There’s a fine for littering? Some inconsiderate individuals drop napkins, cups and all manner of debris on subway platforms and sidewalks, often with trash receptacles an arm’s length away. If fines for littering have ever been imposed for these offenses we certainly haven’t heard about it.

A ticket blitz for picayune, trivial offenses will not solve New York City’s quality of life problems nor add substantially to its revenues. A city that could stand up to 9/11 deserves better than the fiscal equivalent of being nibbled to death by a moth.