It’s time to hang up the paint pen and screwdriver.
I’ve been biking around town for about three months fixing intentionally defaced license plates, peeling off tape that’s obscuring a number or letter, and removing illegal covers — and garnered lots of media attention for my (apparently) life-threatening exploits: Gothamist, NY1, the New York Times and even the vaunted New Yorker have found my campaign to rein in reckless drivers worthy of attention.
Yet from City Hall and at 1 Police Plaza? Crickets.
And that’s embarrassing — for the mayor and the police commissioner. Since my first “criminal mischief” video on Nov. 15, I’ve now caught 59 police officers, firefighters and other law enforcement personnel doctoring their plate to avoid speed or toll cameras (here’s a list of all the miscreants with links to my videos). The NYPD has long said it disciplines officers who misuse their department-issued placard or deface their plates, but the agency declined to comment when I sent it a list of defaced plates I caught (I’ve submitted a Freedom of Information Law request for the disciplinary records — see FOIL-2023-056-01709 — so we’ll see what happens).
(...) But I couldn’t let it. At Streetsblog, we’ve obviously been covering vehicular malfeasance by public officials for years, but it wasn’t until lawyer Adam White was arrested (and charged with “criminal mischief”) for repairing an intentionally damaged plate that our movement for safety merged with social media to create a made-for-Twitter juggernaut (plus, the catchy theme song I wrote for Jimmy and the Jaywalkers didn’t hurt, either).
Like all great ideas, this one started with something dumb: I figured if Adam White could get arrested and charged with “criminal mischief” for literally doing the opposite of causing damage to someone’s property, I should probably fan out all over town and try to get arrested, too! And maybe more people would do it, and then, as Arlo Guthrie said, we’d have a movement. (It’s ultimately unclear if White and I have committed any crimes — I was never arrested and his case was dropped by the Brooklyn District Attorney. But Streetsblog freelancer Joseph Tedeschi, who is a lawyer, did some research and found plenty of legal eagles who think it is a crime to take matters into one’s own hands, even though license plates are definitely state property, not the car owner’s property.)
(...) No one video tells the full story, but taken together, the videos reveal a pattern of low-level corruption that continues simply because so little is done to stop it.In 2021, the NYPD issued just 7,781 tickets between Jan. 1 and Oct. 30 for covering, defacing or sullying a plate so that it could not be read. Last year over the same period, that number dropped to 6,209 tickets, or a 20-percent decline. That decline is especially alarming given that the number of people defacing plates seems to be on the rise.According to a seminal report by Reuven Blau in The City, Department of Transportation speed cameras typically could not read about 1 percent of the license plates that passed them by. But starting in late 2019 — when the number of speed camera systems expanded for the first time — and again in mid-2020 when the number of camera systems reached 750, the number of plates that were unreadable jumped to nearly 5 percent. (The City’s numbers were complete through the end of 2021; the Department of Transportation has not provided Streetsblog with the updated numbers, despite numerous requests.)
(...) On social media, of course, people are quick to threaten violence … and issue other threats that make no sense or were outright contradictory. But the cognitive dissonance on the Right still amazes: Some accused me of being a Nazi, while others openly hoped that the Nazis would take me out (images include jackboot lollipops and nooses). Everyone, apparently, is for law and order … unless a Jewish liberal from New York is trying to bust the lawbreakers.