Policing Graffiti

When the police remove graffiti, it is not about beautifying the neighborhood. It is not even really about crime, either. It is about control.

It is remarkable how often the NYPD publicizes its graffiti cleanups, and troubling how disappointingly ugly the results often turn out. My first reaction is to feel like that is a petty complaint. They are volunteering their time, after all, to do something for the community, right? The thing is, what they are doing is trying to maintain their control over the neighborhood.

Graffiti is a crime and removing the traces of crime makes the neighborhood feel more safe, so the story goes. Often they will throw in the fear of gangs, too. Yet when they remove the graffiti, they often do not actually remove the traces of "crime."

Consider these photos recently tweeted by the NYPD:

Crudely covering over the tags leaves the walls with a mangy appearance. It is still "unsightly," and anybody who glances at it can plainly see that somebody's tags have been covered over. There is a two-part dynamic in these unsightly displays: it symbolically demonstrates the power of the police to remove competing claims to public space, and it preserves a sense of disorder that justifies the need for strong policing. Ugliness is a tool to produce fear, and the police use it to foster a sense of dependence on them for protection.

If there is any doubt that the effect is to exercise control, rather than to create an environment that communicates respect for the law, consider this tweet:

Cleaning up the neighborhood bit by bit. #graffitiremoval pic.twitter.com/s9vEpCwoot

— NYPD 5th Precinct (@NYPD5Pct) August 15, 2020

In both sets of photos, there were illegally parked NYPD vehicles blocking the fire hydrant and the crosswalk. What these images show is that they have little concern about the actual safety or appearance of the law. Instead, they just show that they removed a challenge to their power.

The NYPD has even gone as far as removing a legal mural when they did not like the way they were being portrayed. They called that censorship "broken windows policing," too.

So it really is not surprising that the "Blue Lives Matter" teenager who traveled across state lines to confront protesters, and murdered two of them, was out removing anti-police graffiti before he went on his killing spree.

Claim to the Sidewalk

Last night, the @placardabuse Twitter account posted an observation that a burning police van was parked on the sidewalk. It got me thinking. Streets are famously the contested spaces of protest and revolution, so it may be worth looking more closely at how those struggles are being fought within our public right-of-way. In the conflict over who controls our public space, there is a hierarchy within the streetscape driven by tactical considerations as well as the issue of who occupies the image of the street.

The first thing the NYPD seems to do when trying to "control" a protest is to keep the protesters out of the roadbeds. This has strategic aspects, as well as the potential for abuse.

Often this appeals to a traffic management justification. The transportation rationale implicitly prioritizes the movement of people cutting through the area in cars over anybody using the sidewalk, who becomes trapped on the overcrowded sidewalks. It sets the privileged minority who own cars in New York City above the majority who live car-free. It does also keep the roadways open for emergency vehicles to get through quickly.

Rapid responses may be critical to provide medical assistance for anybody who may be injured by a confrontation or stampeding from the crowd.  It also allows the police to mobilize their own resources, enabling them to respond with overwhelming force, both in terms of bodies and weaponry.

NYPD are keeping people on the sidewalk #GeorgeFloydProtest pic.twitter.com/uDSuCYhe9M

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) May 29, 2020

Former Mayor Giuliani once expressed this rather concisely:

I have a zero tolerance for riots. I, you know, took over a city that had two riots in four years and I had none. And they knew they couldn’t riot on me. And when I saw the people on the street in New York City, I said to myself, you’re breaking Giuliani’s rules. You don’t take my streets. You can have my sidewalks, but you don’t take my streets, because ambulances have to get through there, fire trucks have to get through there. People die when you crowd the streets of New York City with protesters. You can do plenty of protesting on the sidewalk.

As the statement by Giuliani shows, there is a hierarchy here between the "streets" and the "sidewalks." There is also a power of ownership ("my streets") at work here, and the protesters are merely allowed use of the lower status portion of the public space by those in power.

Not-So-Safe Streets

During the current global pandemic, there has been a precipitous drop in driving. Traffic has all but evaporated on New York City's streets. Meanwhile, sidewalks and parks are not providing enough space for people to walk for essential trips, including some basic exercise. Repurposing the residual street space for walking is an obvious solution, and one that is increasingly pursued in cities around the world. New York has been slow to follow, with the Mayor resisting the very idea until continuing to refuse to open streets became politically untenable. Under order of the Governor to do something, he initially opened a few random streets and posted lots of police officers on every block. Shortly thereafter, he pulled it, claiming the police costs were too high.

Public and political pressure continued to mount, expecially as examples continued to come in from other cities. Photo after photo of from other cities closing streets with simple barriers without a heavy police presence made it untenable to continue insisting that New York City was so unique that we could not open our streets too. Finally, another small number of short street segments were announced for an initial opening this past weekend.

The charitable way to greet this is that ... it's only a start. They risk making destinations of these streets with slow ramp-ups, though. You can have my street! pic.twitter.com/HQ03v3p4sJ

— Nicole Alone of Silent West Midtown 🌸🐿💐🌺🌹☔️🐥 (@nicolegelinas) May 1, 2020

The first day at the Oval only had a small hiccup. The barriers were placed at Reservoir Oval itself, stopping traffic after it had turned onto the inlet streets, with no good way to turn back around. When the street openings were announced with their mileages, I wondered why DOT had not taken credit for the additional mileage from those side streets. The day before the street opened, my 8-year-old son was even thinking out loud on his own about where the barriers would need to be placed for these streets. Just a couple hours after the Safe Street opening, the NYPD recognized and corrected the situation by bringing out additional barriers to intercept the drivers before turning onto those streets. Still, it was an inexplicable mistake for professionals to make.

The Oval seems to be working well as an open street today. pic.twitter.com/PjPjd1vc54

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) May 2, 2020

Chronicles of Stolen Space - Pedestrianized Pine Street

This is a designated pedestrian street in Lower Manhattan

The quality of our public spaces in New York City is so much worse than they should be. By all appearances, this is due to a negligent municipal government that has failed to shoulder its responsibilities to safeguard these spaces for public use.

Take for example the case of a pedestrianized block of Pine Street between South and Front Streets. This street was pedestrianized in 1978, yet in recent memory, it has increasingly been used for car parking. It seems that the permission for "service vehicles," clearly intended originally to allow for garbage pickup, provided a foothold for parcel services to use the street for their parking needs. Gradually, others followed suit until the whole space has now become filled with cars.

Two Sides of the Same Woods

On one side of the road, you have tourists reading plaques about trees. On the other, gay men circle the woods looking for potential hookups. The Bronx River Forest is one of the few remaining sections of the great woodland that once covered the New York region. While we tend to consider the plants and animals that populate wooded areas like this as "wild," this landscape is highly shaped by the physical interventions and social activities of humans. It is easy to overlook how much human action can shape the "natural" environment, but the differences created by separate jurisdictional control over trails winding through the woods along the Bronx River on each side of Allerton Avenue create a stark contrast.

People duck under a fallen tree (covered in poison ivy) on the Blue Trail north of 204th Street in the Bronx Forest managed by the Department of Parks and Recreation

Tourists stop along the trail in the Thain Family Forest in the New York Botanical Garden to read facts about the trees 

South of Allerton Avenue, the Bronx River flows through the New York Botanical Garden. Since the 1890s, this land has been City parkland, part of Bronx Park, which is administered by a private institution specifically charged with the development and maintenance of a great living museum. To the north, the parkland is under conventional control of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

There are some physical differences in terrain between the two sections. To the north, the river passes through a floodplain. After flowing into the garden, it quickly drops into a ravine with some moderately steep slopes down to the river. Nonetheless, the main distinctions between these two sections is how the land is managed and access is controlled.

Chronicles of Stolen Space: Fake Enforcement

After closing the Privately-Owned Public Space for months of reconstruction to fix subsurface problems, the Millennium Hilton is now reopening its POPS with the same non-compliant design and illegal operations that degrade our public realm. And as before, despite some pretense that they are responding to complaints, the enforcement agencies empowered and entrusted to safeguard our public space are allowing the owners to shirk their responsibilities and steal space from the public:

• Required public seating and other features were not installed
• The parking garage has resumed using an area that is supposed to be public seating to temporarily park vehicles
• The parking garage continues to illegally encroach on the sidewalk and park an extra vehicle that blocks an egress door.

The Department of Buildings, after an insanely prolonged battle, did finally issue a violation for the missing public space amenities. That turned out that was only a token gesture. They listed a demerit and issued a small one-time fine. Then they let the building's owners continue with business as usual. If the Department of Buildings were serious, they would require the owners to meet their obligations under the Special Permit or revoke their Certificate of Occupancy. By all appearances, the Department of Buildings is still siding with unscrupulous building owners against the public.

After @NYC_Buildings closed out 10 earlier complaints over 11-month period saying there was no problem...https://t.co/uK2pXFFdI1

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) April 3, 2017

While it was nice to hear "DOB is aware of this issue and has been monitoring the site," issuing a small fine and letting them resume using the public space as a parking spot is not sufficient. pic.twitter.com/ivlYYTcEqn

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) March 27, 2018

Meanwhile, the New York Police Department is still letting the parking garage operator break the law and possibly endanger lives. In response to 311 complaints, they have claimed to go out in an attempt to take care of the problem, but those responses are obvious falsifications.

I understand that the parking garage is using the space in front of the hotel's emergency egress door and part of the sidewalk as a parking space, @NYPD1Pct. That's the problem! pic.twitter.com/L7jUCBxLqu

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) March 31, 2018

The result is a poor pedestrian experience for the city's residents, workers, and visitors due to wealthy business owners abusing our public space and possibly even putting the lives of their own paying guests in danger.

Previous chronicles in this saga:
http://urbanresidue.blogspot.com/2016/09/chronicles-of-stolen-space-new-york.html

http://urbanresidue.blogspot.com/2016/11/chronicles-of-stolen-space-department.html

http://urbanresidue.blogspot.com/2017/03/chronicles-of-stolen-space-department.html

When Broken Windows Aren't Towed

The car was set ablaze by some arsonist for reasons that aren't generally known. Then it just sat there. The windshield was cracked. Portions of the body were melted and puddled on the ground. A camouflage duffel bag sitting in the back seat was visible from outside the car. After remaining there for a couple days, neighbors started submitting 311 reports to have it removed. It continued to sit there anyway.

The area where this car was torched is considered a "high crime" precinct. Despite this reputation, burned out or abandoned cars have long been a rarity as all of New York City has become safer and more orderly over the past several decades. Looking closely at this rare case is interesting, especially given the ongoing debates around the "Broken Windows" theory of policing.

Chronicles of Stolen Space - Department of Buildings

This is the second in a series of posts about the failures of city agencies to protect New York City's public spaces, using the example of the Millenium Hilton. This post examines the role of the Department of Buildings (DOB).

Whose interest served by a sidewalk like this?https://t.co/yH7JPmVThb
NYC must do better @NYC_Buildings @NYPDnews pic.twitter.com/kZaI3FTQiO

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) April 30, 2016

DOB is the primary agency responsible for protecting the public's interest in Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS). A POPS is created when a developer dedicates space for permanent public use in exchange for extra development rights. The City Planning Commission issues a Special Permit, which is enforced by DOB. Signs denoting the status of the public space are supposed to be installed, and they inform people that complaints about the space can be directed to the Department of City Planning or DOB.

Chronicles of Stolen Space - New York Police Department

This is the first in a series of posts about the failures of city agencies to protect New York City's public spaces, using the example of the Millennium Hilton. This post examines the role of the New York Police Department (NYPD).

The NYPD was ok with the parking garage taking over a busy sidewalk

In New York City, as in any other civilized city, it is illegal to drive or park on a sidewalk. It is the responsibility of the NYPD to enforce these laws, which were enacted by our elected representatives to protect the safety and convenience of pedestrians. Title 34, Chapter 4, Rules of the City of New York is quite clear:

When the Wealthy Steal Public Space

When the City allows a developer to construct a larger building in exchange for public space, you expect there to be a real benefit to the public. At the very least, you would expect the space to be minimally usable by the public. Nevertheless, at the Millenium Hilton Hotel, a "privately owned public space" is nothing more than a parking lot outside the hotel's garage, and it uses the public sidewalk as its driveway. As we will see, this is just a small part of a larger pattern of wealthy business owners padding their profits by stealing from the masses in New York City.

Of course, the privately owned public space at the Millenium Hilton is nothing short of a swindle. No space has been provided to ease pedestrian circulation. Instead, pedestrians remain confined to the original sidewalk, where they now have to contend with cars driving back and forth. Meanwhile, the private interests are able to eek out even more profit through the illicit revenue-generating use of this space.

There are unintended consequences, and there is negligence. It is not clear if this case quite crosses the line, but the City could clearly do much more to protect the public's interest in this property.

Barricading Sidewalks

This week, the Pope came to New York City, and the NYPD worked hard to keep him safe, along with all those who came to see him. They planned ahead for the challenging logistics of moving perhaps the most high-profile person in the world through one of the world's densest cities, along with all the UN dignitaries who gathered to hear him, together with thousands of visitors hoping to catch a glimpse.

When the NYPD puts effort into something, it gets the job done. There is no question of hard work or commitment to results. The question is the priorities that get the NYPD's attention. While Christian love and police dedication were both on prominent display, the Pope's visit also demonstrated some of the important things the NYPD does not focus on enough. In the face of recurring traffic congestion in New York City, the NYPD is surprisingly nimble at closing entire roadways to keep motorcades secure while avoiding extensive delays for other motorists. As they describe it, they have it "down to a science." What they don't do well, despite decades of increasing attention by the engineering profession, is planning for pedestrians. In fact, most of the people who are affected in every corner of the city are really treated as an afterthought by the NYPD.

For the NYPD, when it comes to major events, pedestrians often seem like little more than obstacles to the motorcades. When the NYPD does turn its attention to the people trying to walk around, they seem to be taken into consideration only as crowds to be "controlled," or as "security threats" to be surveilled or excluded. If only a fraction of the attention paid to moving concrete blocks for cars and placing snipers on roofs was applied to maintaining appropriate sidewalk widths, the city would probably be safer. It would certainly be more orderly and comfortable.

Let's consider how NYPD leadership discussed its preparations. Posing for photos in front of a vast lot filled with parked police cars, the Police Commissioner bragged about "1,173 police cars, 818 tons of concrete barriers and 39 miles of metal and wood barricades" that were prepared for the Pope's visit to New York City. The department's twitter account followed up, highlighting the massive amounts of material they stockpiled around town. This neatly summarizes the NYPD's priorities: setting up barriers and moving motor vehicles.

Coming up on @CBSThisMorning, the latest on the Pope's visit to New York pic.twitter.com/EsICnzN4SH

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) September 22, 2015

Did You Know? 409 concrete barriers used citywide. That's 3,900lbs each, totaling 818 tons http://t.co/GJbbjYQzAU pic.twitter.com/HyQhbEN5wp

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) September 25, 2015

Did You Know? The NYPD will use 1,200 cones during the visit from @Pontifex. More: http://t.co/WFyEDN9PNh #PopeinNYC pic.twitter.com/uokgVhbH7T

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) September 25, 2015

Where Do Nuisances Go?

This weekend, I walked by a home in a residential district that has been illegally converted into a security system business. The side yard is now a poorly designed parking lot for commercial vehicles. As far as non-conforming uses go, it is relatively benign. It's visually obtrusive, and contributes a little extra noise, but otherwise has little tangible impact. Its illegal status contributes to a sense of disorder, though, and this would never be allowed in "better" neighborhoods.


Although this particular business has relatively little impact, many other uses encroaching on residential neighborhoods are greater nuisances. A couple weeks ago, I passed a vacant lot that has been used as a junk yard for an auto shop for decades.
 

When repair businesses are forced out of manufacturing areas that are rezoned to open them up for residential development, the activity often finds new illicit locations in disadvantaged communities. There is a certain irony in efforts to provide more affordable housing as part of a progressive agenda focused on social equity resulting in environmental impacts in disadvantaged communities.

With the longtime trend of declining urban manufacturing, areas zoned for industrial uses have been coming under pressure for conversion for residential development as city populations have started increasing again. As light-industrial businesses are cleared out, there are ever fewer places for them to relocate. Pressure mounts for the support services that underpin the city's economy to crowd into working-class and low-income neighborhoods. Illegal commercial uses gain a foothold for two reasons: they have less influence and they're somewhat sympathetic toward the workers. These are communities that do not have the influence and power to ensure a Department of Buildings that is not fully competent (and questionably honest) actually address problems in their neighborhoods. And the residents aren't always so sure they want the codes enforced. Their friends or neighbors may depend on the jobs, or they may simply feel that the interest of the workers to earn a living is more important than the problems the businesses bring with them.

These outcomes are not inevitable. Increasing the supply of housing is critical, but it is also important to accommodate the support functions that keep the city running in a manner that is efficient, sustainable, and equitable. As we continue to ignore these marginalized jobs and fail to provide for them intelligently and with dignity, they are forced into marginalized communities, along with their impacts.

What we have now is the gentrification of blue collar job sites and passive environmental injustice by turning a blind eye toward the displacement of nuisances into less affluent neighborhoods. What we need is progressive, comprehensive planning that looks at more than numerical housing targets.

The Tremont Crash Zone

A passenger waits for the bus at a stop where the sign has
been wiped out by an out-of-control vehicle. Apparently
crashes are so common here, extra protection has been
added around the posts for the traffic signals

When New York City reduced the citywide speed limit from 30 to 25 mph, some arterial streets kept the higher speed limits. Among those was a portion of East Tremont Avenue. On recent visits, it looks like an outright crash zone. An entire stretch of the street east of Morris Park Avenue has been rendered a sprawling residual space by the combined impacts of out-of-control cars, shallow properties bordering the railroad, and the proliferation of auto-related land uses. Given the conditions confronting pedestrians, the speed limit warrants a revisit.

This sign encourages higher speeds 

when driving past the bus stop

Filling the Void, Maintaining Sight Lines

When cars park too close to the corner, drivers and pedestrians often cannot see each other well enough to make safe decisions. To correct the problem, parking is frequently prohibited near intersections to improve sight lines, a practice sometimes referred to as "daylighting." Nevertheless, regulations cannot actually prevent the hazardous conditions from continuing. The public and even some enforcement agencies seem to have a low level of awareness or appreciation for the need to keep these locations clear, and the residual nature of these spaces continues to be problematic.


In an effort to improve the situation, enhanced markings are often used to reinforce the regulatory signage. Even with this effort to emphasize the regulations and create some illusion of occupancy, the space continues to feel unused. In an active urban environment, a space marked off for the sole purpose of a sight line really is, in practice, underutilized. The demand to make more intense use of it is probably inevitable.

The solution to these residual spaces is to provide them with uses that do not compromise the sight lines. To be effective and persuasive enough to continue installing them elsewhere, treatments must embrace uses that are appealing to the community.

The classic response is to install a curb extension, sometimes called a "neckdown." These rely on the curb as a physical barrier that effectively discourages parking. They also provide benefits for traffic calming and shortening crossing distances for pedestrians. A curb extension is an expansion of the sidewalk, creating more usable space for pedestrians, although they may recognize relatively little value in the extra panels of concrete. This solution is often complicated, though, by mundane engineering details like drainage or even traffic signal location. Capital costs can discourage or delay construction.

Public Space through Practice

Space becomes public, and can really only remain public, through the practice of collective power. The government can exercise its power on behalf of the people to acquire property, forcing unwilling private owners to surrender their land if necessary. Private property can also become public through adverse possession as a result of continual use. To avoid becoming dedicated to public use, some properties like Rockefeller Center that welcome the public famously close periodically to assert their private rights.

Yet the process can work in reverse as well. In the absence of collective power, property can stop being public, even if it is still ostensibly publicly owned. This happens frequently enough in cases of abandonment, when fences or signage prohibit the public from using a space the government no longer wants to pay to maintain. Uglier cases entail the appropriation of public space by private interests without resistance from the appropriate authorities.

That is precisely what happened at 3059 Bainbridge for far too many years. The adjacent homeowners blatantly enclosed a section of the public sidewalk to create more private parking for themselves. This was reported to the City at least as early as 2008, but it was not removed until a couple weeks ago. For more than six years, parents with strollers and others were inconvenienced as they squeezed through an ugly and uncomfortably narrow space between a utility box and a cyclone fence.

The Residue Clogging the Bus Lanes

Creating a dedicated bus lane requires the displacement/destruction of the pre-existing uses within that right-of-way. Those uses almost always have a lower social value than a bus lane, and often so much so that those uses can actually be detrimental to the quality of life in a neighborhood. Nonetheless, the existing uses are fully enmeshed in the daily lives and habits of the community. That's why change can be so very hard, even when the results may be so clearly beneficial.

When the change in use prevails, it is rarely an immediate, complete transformation. Residues of former uses remain. An examination of those residues can be quite enlightening. Change exposes hidden sources of power. While illicit exploitation of street space has occurred in these locations for a very long time, the new conflicts created by the bus lanes bring the activities new exposure. Part of what becomes exposed is the accommodation of the City's enforcement apparatus. Far from random occurrences or oversights by busy departments, the pattern of enforcement demonstrates a set of cultural priorities. In the case of the bus lanes, what shows through is the prioritization of a car culture above the rule of law or the needs of the citizens who rely on transit.

The consistent failure to address violations by commercial businesses that encroach on the bus lanes demonstrates an informal policy that accepts the appropriation of public space by these businesses as a supposedly reasonable practice to provide what is viewed as an important service on constrained, urban sites. This is a value judgment that puts the interests of a car culture (which is the minority in New York City) above the needs and rights of the residents who take transit and walk in the area.

This car wash blocks the bus lane all day, every day

At the Vision Zero town hall meeting at the Bronx Library Center on April 1, there were repeated complaints about problems with NYPD's uneven enforcement on our streets. Among the specific complaints were auto drivers using the bus lanes, and commercial businesses taking over portions of streets and sidewalks. High-level NYPD officials were there and assured the audience that these problems would be taken seriously. Unfortunately, there has been little sign of improvement.

Legally Blocking the Crosswalk?

The first question on anybody's mind is surely: What kind of jerk parks in the crosswalk?

The more important question is: Why would New York City, a place that relies so heavily on walking, enact regulations to make it legal?

In 2008, the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) quietly changed the parking rules to allow drivers to block unmarked crosswalks at T-intersections.

According to the New York City Department of Transportation
it is legal to park in the locations indicated with red circles.
Source: NYC DOT

Conflicted Crosswalks: The Grand Concourse

You know it's bad when they put up the You're-gonna-die signage.

Getting across the Grand Concourse in one piece can be a challenge. The combination of long crossing distances and multiple conflicting movements from split side streets gives turning drivers seemingly endless possibilities to take a shot at you. And virtually every car on the cross streets are turning (through traffic bypasses the intersection by passing below the Grand Concourse).

Even with the challenging physical conditions presented by these intersections, there seem to be some easy improvements that might help pedestrians. High-visibility crosswalk markings are one example. There may be opportunities to make the yield signage more visible to motorists and locate it to better influence behavior before drivers make their decisions. The signal timing should also be reviewed to give pedestrians a head start.

Leading by Example

Recent news has been worrisome:

• "Three off-duty NYPD cops busted for DWI in span of 27 hours"

• "NYPD detectives reportedly drank for hours prior to wrist-shooting incident"

• "Two NYPD cops shoot guns while drunk & off-duty" 

Clearly there are some problems in the NYPD. Apologists will claim that these are just "a few bad apples." They're right, too, as far as that goes. These certainly are outliers, and the extreme hazards they pose to public safety are not characteristic of the vast majority of the men and women who serve in the NYPD. Nevertheless, they are a product of a culture of corruption that permeates the department.

In rare cases, there are people who suddenly go nuts without warning. More often, there are warning signs that have been ignored. If the NYPD had any basic level of discipline to hold its personnel responsible for obeying the law, many of these "bad apples" would be removed before their reckless behaviors escalated to a level that poses a serious risk to public safety. Increasingly, it appears that the failure to police the police is becoming a larger threat to safety and quality of life in the city.

As dire as all these news stories sound, there may be a reason for optimism. These problems are not really new. Cops have been getting drunk and driving for a very long time, so the fact these incidents are now making the news indicates progress in solving the problem. Instead of automatically driving the drunk drivers home after stopping them, more officers are now doing the right thing and arresting the criminals, even if they have a badge. Rather than trying to hide these incidents to protect the department's image, it appears the NYPD brass is releasing details to make an example and improve the department's integrity.

Commissioner Bratton has even voiced his concern publicly: “I personally am very disturbed about the number of incidents in recent weeks that are part of a longer-term problem of inappropriate use of alcohol by members of the department.”

Hopefully there is a genuine desire to address the problems with the NYPD's culture. Changing deeply ingrained habits and attitudes will not come easily, and even with a real effort, Bratton may have his work cut out for him. At the same time, the problems are so severe, there is a need for outside intervention. There must be a backstop to ensure that illegal activities do not continue to run rampant through the department entrusted with such great powers. 

To be successful, though, it is not enough to focus on the extreme cases like drunk driving, major theft, etc. Commissioner Bratton has been a strong proponent of "Broken Windows" policing, and if there is any place that it is truly necessary, it is the internal discipline of the police. When illegal activities are tolerated among the police, the impression that they don't have to obey the law quickly sets in. The petty forms of corruption open the door to attitudes that result in abusing prisoners, brutalizing civilians who challenge authority, and driving drunk.

Unfortunately, there is no indication that Bratton has any inclination of extending his "Broken Windows" zeal to policing his own department. His own history on the issue of illegal parking is not positive, and the uncontested stories that circulated when he changed command at the Internal Affairs Bureau suggest he is even reducing enforcement of petty corruption within his department. If nothing else, there is a real problem when the NYPD starts aggressively pursuing the churros lady in the subway while ignoring the fact their own personnel create serious safety hazards on our streets.

So let's take a little closer look at how the NYPD does sledding down the slippery slope. Officers come to believe they can get away with breaking the law because of something they call "professional courtesy." While they complain about the lack of cooperation from communities with a "no snitching" ethic, the NYPD has developed the same culture of maintaining silence about the illegal activities of their own. 

From the time they join the force, their daily experience demonstrates that they can break the law and their fellow officers will go out of their way to cover it up. Consider illegal parking. Off-duty officers throughout the city park not only in NO PARKING zones, but also at fire hydrants and in hazardous NO STANDING zones. Traffic Enforcement Agents aggressively ticket neighborhood residents for minor violations, yet neglect their duties by passing over these dangerous conditions all the time. Precincts receive complaints and file false reports to cover up the illegal activities.

The Department of Buildings as Obstacle to Livable Streets

The New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) has been negligent in its responses to complaints for a long time. This can be critical when they continue to ignore complaints about illegal conversions that become fire traps for residents and firefighters.* DOB's failures to respond to complaints also causes problems for public streets and sidewalks that seriously erode quality of life in some neighborhoods, and can even become safety hazards in some instances.

Hopefully the new mayoral administration will address this problem. It is a clear example of the "Tale of Two Cities" narrative that de Blasio pressed while campaigning; nobody would believe that the City would ever tolerate somebody fencing off part of a public sidewalk to create a parking space on the Upper East Side, yet far too often the City has done nothing about it in places like The Bronx. Below are a few clear examples that illustrate the types of problems DOB has been ignoring that are destroying the livability of streets in some neighborhoods.

Public Sidewalks Appropriated for Private Parking

Despite repeat complaints about outrageous takings of public sidewalks to create illegal parking spaces, DOB has done nothing to correct the problems. Instead, the records show that inspectors dismissed the complaints with bogus reports.