Now that New York’s police force has returned to enforcing the laws at a pace closer to normal, city officials are calculating the costs of its protracted slowdown. Their best guess so far is that the tally will be no more than several million dollars.
The biggest loss will come from all of the parking tickets that went unwritten, particularly in the three weeks after two police officers were shot to death in a patrol car in Brooklyn on Dec. 20. Parking fines account for most of the revenue the city receives from summonses issued by police officers or traffic enforcement agents, who are Police Department employees.
In each of the first two weeks after the killings of those officers — Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu — the number of parking tickets issued was down over 90 percent from the same period the year before. Last week, the number of parking tickets rose to 5,550 from just 1,191 the week before, but that total was still only about a quarter of the total a year ago.
The “no more than several million dollars” line is some precious spin. Had the revenue loss come for political reasons that the Times didn’t endorse you can bet it would be screaming for weeks on the front page about the MILLIONS lost.
During the slowdown there was no shortage of idiots proclaiming that crime was down when it was merely arrests that had been greatly reduced.
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