- NEW YORK (Reuters) - It's
the city where anything goes. Just don't sit on a milk crate, take up two
subway seats or have a loud conversation.
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- The Big Apple is hard up and the city's cops are writing
tickets to beat the band. Among the myriad offenses to be avoided: carrying
an open bottle of water onto a bus or being a man in a playground without
a child.
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- "This city has become a summons machine intent upon
picking the pockets it is supposed to serve," Patrolmen's Benevolent
Association spokesman Al O'Leary said in an interview.
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- The so-called ticketing blitz has kept the city's tabloids
busy. The Daily News has made it an almost daily routine to highlight the
preposterous ticketing policies of the city's men and women in blue.
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- Among the gems lately are the man fined for sitting on
a milk crate, enforcing a transit rule forbidding riders to use more than
one seat on a bus or subway and a Queens woman who was ticketed for talking
loudly to her neighbor.
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- "I couldn't leave the food on the stove," Noris
Lopez, the criminally loud talker, told the newspaper. "So I opened
my door and my friend opened her door and we stood in front of our apartments
talking."
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- The result? A $25 ticket from a cop who had just responded
to a nearby disturbance.
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- "Is there a ticket blitz?" Jordan Barowitz,
a City Hall spokesman asked rhetorically. "There are millions of summonses
given out by the city every year. This year, compared to last year, fewer
tickets are being given out."
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- That may be the case, but with the city facing a massive
budget crunch, all manner of fines have skyrocketed, most notably parking
fines, which now often run at more than $100 a pop. Even free Sunday parking
has been outlawed in most of Manhattan in an effort to fill dwindling city
coffers.
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- Even if there is a ticketing blitz, city officials insist
quality of life summonses are nothing new. In 1996, an amusement park was
fined $250 for having a coin operated game three feet (one meter) onto
the sidewalk, Barowitz said, citing several other wacky examples of yesteryear.
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- Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he has not ordered
police to go on a ticketing tear, even in the face of a multibillion dollar
budget deficit.
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- "There is no ticketing blitz," he said in a
radio interview on Friday. "Maybe there should be, but there is none.
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- "If you want to have great quality of life, the
way to have it is giving tickets to people when they break the law,"
he said.
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- "We don't make money on these things," he added.
"Quite the contrary. It costs more to write the summons than we get
in revenue. The purpose is to get people to comply with the law."
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- But one police advocacy group has run full page advertisements
in local papers insisting that cops are also unhappy about the high number
of quality of life tickets.
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