By Liz Goff, Queens GazetteCity cops and traffic agents are under order to immediately begin writing tickets for vehicles on streets where parking rules have been changed, despite a five-day grace period at the changed spots and notes on new parking signs indicating when the changes take effect, law enforcement sources said.
Department of Transportation officials have sent crews to the streets to post small notices on all newly changed parking signs indicating the date the revisions took place, the sources said. But instructions in a recently released NYPD memo give police a green light to issue tickets, regardless of what the stickers say.
“Since it is the obligation of the motorist to offer an allowable defense, members of the service (police, traffic agents) may continue to issue summonses to vehicles that are illegally parked, even if the signage has a posted notice of a parking restriction change and it is within the five-day allowable period,” the August 23 memo states.
The memo also advises officers and traffic agents to “use discretion” and make special notation on summonses to help motorists challenge the tickets.
Sources said the officers would make the notation if they think the vehicle was parked legally in the space before the sign was changed, or if the vehicle was observed pulling into a space that was recently changed.
Comments by reader: "That seems honestly un-American. Knowingly ticketing an innocent party, effectively creating a "guilty unless proven innocent" situation, while realizing that a significant percentage of those ticketed will just pay the fine rather than lose a day at work. I understand the concept of an "affirmative defense" that a criminal defendant must prove, such as self-defense, but all that assumes that the police believe he's guilty in the first place. That is not the case here. The NYPD's attitude is patently offensive."
Gotta make quotas!
9 comments:
We have illegal immigrants that have to be treated as legal. Now we have legal parking spaces that have to be treated as illegal.
This notion of "allowable defense" is nonsense. On that basis, anyone can be summonsed or arrested for anything because, after all, there's an "allowable defense" for it.
Eh, ticket away!
Thanks to the NYPD the consitution of the greatest nation in the history of mankind, is now the most irrelevant and useless document to ever exist.
Ray Kelly, criminal extraordinaire.
It's all about numbers,not safety,not people.Remember this when you go to vote on tuesday.What have the current crop of pls have to say about this? Nothing!
Don't blame this on the Police Commissioner. This is the D.O.T. undermining the Police Department. They're not being allowed to do their jobs. Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan are creating this chaos.
Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan are creating ALL the chaos.
I want to thank the police officers or traffic enforcement employees who went public with this. If it starts with parking tickets, who knows where it is going to end?
The midget pc is the blame.The traffic agents are part of the nypd.They have nothing to do with dot,and neither is that memo.It's from somewhere in the traffic division of the nypd.......ask Chief Tuller...........
"This notion of "allowable defense" is nonsense. On that basis, anyone can be summonsed or arrested for anything because, after all, there's an "allowable defense" for it."
I second this.. it's nonsense also to a point that when you do go fight for it, you are basically 'guilty until really proven innocent'... so the advantage of you winning the case is still small. Overall, this is a rigged bet.
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