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Sounds like madness to me.
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Mayor Bloomberg thought the truth would be just the ticket... it wasn't
Gary Younge in New York
Wednesday June 11, 2003
The Guardian
In a week when they lost domestic diva Martha Stewart to the Feds, the editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, to a scandal and Senator Hillary Clinton to the talk-show circuit, New Yorkers are no strangers to distinguishing between perception and reality. But when it comes to Mayor Michael Bloomberg they seem to prefer the former to the latter.
The reality is bad enough. First of all there was Jesse Taveras, who was fined for sitting on a milk crate outside a shop in the Bronx. "What did I do?" he asked. The official citation was "unauthorised use of a crate".
Then there was Yoav Kashida, the Israeli tourist fined $50 for taking up two seats on the subway when he fell asleep. Worst of all there was Crystal Rivera, 18 years old and six months pregnant, who was slapped with a $50 fine for sitting on the subway steps and blocking the stairway. These are the high-profile cases. We'll not dwell on the octogenarian fined $50 for feeding pigeons in the park or the shop owner who had to shell out $400 because there were too many words on his shop awning.
You get the message. There seems no end to the recent litany of tickets that New York's finest will issue for the pettiest of infractions: crimes that most New Yorkers did not even know they were able to commit. On its own it would be little more than an annoyance. Overzealous, underemployed cops being heavy-handed in a city where the really bad policemen end up killing innocent people - an everyday tale of ordinary uniformed folk.
But along with the fines comes the allegation that the tickets are less to do with the criminal than the political; that Bloomberg himself has ordered the police to get slap-happy with the fines because New York city hall needs the money to plug its $4bn budget gap.
When you think of how many milk-crate-sitters and pigeon- feeders it would take to even make a dent in the city's huge deficit, the accusation seems preposterous. Bloomberg, a multi-millionaire businessman, could probably find more cash down the back of his sofa than he will collect by harassing - and possibly alienating - potential voters.
The reality (another, different, less convenient reality unlikely to grab headlines) is that it costs more money to issue the tickets, process the infractions and pursue the non-payers than the fines are actually worth, and that the city actually issued far fewer of them this year than it did last. "If we relied on tickets to balance our budget, the city would have gone out of business a long time ago," says Bloomberg's press secretary, Edward Skyler.
The trouble for Bloomberg is not that the accusations of him nickel-and-diming the people who elected him are false; it is that even after he has said they are false, and explained why they must be false, just about everybody wants to believe the accusations anyway.
The press certainly want to believe them. "Ticket Madness", "Another Fine Mess" and "Sitting Bull" (over the milk crate) are just three of the Daily News headlines in the past couple of weeks and may soon be followed by a city-wide campaign.
But Bloomberg's protestations that this is just media hype are confounded by the fact that many policemen say it's true. The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the policemen's union, has taken out ads on the radio and in the press blaming the mayor and asking the public not to take out their frustrations over the ticketing blitz on the policemen because they are only following orders.
"We have to make our daily quota," Taveras claims the cop told him at the time. "Don't blame me, blame Bloomberg."
Which is the point. The budget crisis has left the city in a mess. Everybody is affected, from policemen and firefighters (there were 20 arrests and a near riot a couple of weeks ago when the city went to close down one fire station) to schoolchildren and homeowners, hit with a huge hike in property taxes.
And everybody blames Bloomberg, also referred to as "Mike the Knife" and "Gloomberg" whose best case scenario for rectifying the budget would inflict the biggest number of redundancies on the city in 10 years.
The very thing that made him attractive to many - that as a wealthy individual he was in hock to no special interest groups - now makes him weak. There are no special interest groups to support him. The perception worked to his benefit; the reality, however, is far more bleak.
Gary Younge in New York
Wednesday June 11, 2003
The Guardian
In a week when they lost domestic diva Martha Stewart to the Feds, the editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, to a scandal and Senator Hillary Clinton to the talk-show circuit, New Yorkers are no strangers to distinguishing between perception and reality. But when it comes to Mayor Michael Bloomberg they seem to prefer the former to the latter.
The reality is bad enough. First of all there was Jesse Taveras, who was fined for sitting on a milk crate outside a shop in the Bronx. "What did I do?" he asked. The official citation was "unauthorised use of a crate".
Then there was Yoav Kashida, the Israeli tourist fined $50 for taking up two seats on the subway when he fell asleep. Worst of all there was Crystal Rivera, 18 years old and six months pregnant, who was slapped with a $50 fine for sitting on the subway steps and blocking the stairway. These are the high-profile cases. We'll not dwell on the octogenarian fined $50 for feeding pigeons in the park or the shop owner who had to shell out $400 because there were too many words on his shop awning.
You get the message. There seems no end to the recent litany of tickets that New York's finest will issue for the pettiest of infractions: crimes that most New Yorkers did not even know they were able to commit. On its own it would be little more than an annoyance. Overzealous, underemployed cops being heavy-handed in a city where the really bad policemen end up killing innocent people - an everyday tale of ordinary uniformed folk.
But along with the fines comes the allegation that the tickets are less to do with the criminal than the political; that Bloomberg himself has ordered the police to get slap-happy with the fines because New York city hall needs the money to plug its $4bn budget gap.
When you think of how many milk-crate-sitters and pigeon- feeders it would take to even make a dent in the city's huge deficit, the accusation seems preposterous. Bloomberg, a multi-millionaire businessman, could probably find more cash down the back of his sofa than he will collect by harassing - and possibly alienating - potential voters.
The reality (another, different, less convenient reality unlikely to grab headlines) is that it costs more money to issue the tickets, process the infractions and pursue the non-payers than the fines are actually worth, and that the city actually issued far fewer of them this year than it did last. "If we relied on tickets to balance our budget, the city would have gone out of business a long time ago," says Bloomberg's press secretary, Edward Skyler.
The trouble for Bloomberg is not that the accusations of him nickel-and-diming the people who elected him are false; it is that even after he has said they are false, and explained why they must be false, just about everybody wants to believe the accusations anyway.
The press certainly want to believe them. "Ticket Madness", "Another Fine Mess" and "Sitting Bull" (over the milk crate) are just three of the Daily News headlines in the past couple of weeks and may soon be followed by a city-wide campaign.
But Bloomberg's protestations that this is just media hype are confounded by the fact that many policemen say it's true. The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the policemen's union, has taken out ads on the radio and in the press blaming the mayor and asking the public not to take out their frustrations over the ticketing blitz on the policemen because they are only following orders.
"We have to make our daily quota," Taveras claims the cop told him at the time. "Don't blame me, blame Bloomberg."
Which is the point. The budget crisis has left the city in a mess. Everybody is affected, from policemen and firefighters (there were 20 arrests and a near riot a couple of weeks ago when the city went to close down one fire station) to schoolchildren and homeowners, hit with a huge hike in property taxes.
And everybody blames Bloomberg, also referred to as "Mike the Knife" and "Gloomberg" whose best case scenario for rectifying the budget would inflict the biggest number of redundancies on the city in 10 years.
The very thing that made him attractive to many - that as a wealthy individual he was in hock to no special interest groups - now makes him weak. There are no special interest groups to support him. The perception worked to his benefit; the reality, however, is far more bleak.
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