Traffic Agents Thrown Under The Bus (Not Literally!)

Note that they wouldn’t need to sit down with merchants and “retrain” their agents if City Hall wasn’t trying to balance the budget on dubious double-parking tickets:

“New instructions have been given to our traffic agents. The way we issue summonses will be different and we ask our agents to be patient,” said Frank Sepulveda, the NYPD’s director of traffic enforcement for the city. “By the end of this month all our agents should have the new training. We will look at how we can handle difficult summons situations differently.”

. . .

On problems, businessman Dan Texeira led the complaint barrage. “I stopped my car to let off my son. Just then a traffic agent cut off in front of my car and gave me a ticket.

“That wasn’t right,” said Sepulveda.

Has The Bloomberg Administration Exacerbated The Threat Of Citywide Arborcide?

Top down trees, killer trees — maybe it’s simply a case of vigilante justice:

Dozens have been destroyed in the past few months — their roots torn up, branches snapped and trunks hacked.

God Also Hates Media Whores Who Try To Disrupt Bat Mitzvahs

But if we don’t pay attention to them, they don’t exist.

The Silent Majority Needs To Speak Up

First, set aside the inconvenient facts that owning a dog in a cramped city apartment is inherently cruel and that installing dog runs (i.e., red-light districts for dog defecation) constitutes a ludicrously generous surrender of precious public space. The big problem is that a vocal minority of dog owners are pushing public debate in favor of pets over humans, and we must give huge credit to the state parks department (and not the permissive city parks department, which was infiltrated by dog apologists when the agency’s animal policies were gutted) for putting an end to dog dominance; they are absolutely doing the right thing, and they absolutely deserve our support:

A grassy knoll is the latest territory causing friction between the state Parks Department and Long Island City dog owners after the agency barred canines from the area in Gantry Plaza State Park. Dogs were also banned from the old piers when the rest of the new, six-acre grass area opened up in July.

Rachel Gordon, a state Parks regional director, said the manager of Gantry Plaza saw the grass at the “knoll,” a small strip of grass with a picnic table next to an athletic field, had been turned brown by the effects of dogs relieving themselves there. The ban went into effect last week.

Dog owners can still walk their dogs on the cement areas or in the community garden.

But dog owners in the Queens West towers have not taken the situation lying down. After they said parks [employees] shooed them off the wooden piers in July, they formed DOG LIC to push for more pooch-friendly facilities in the rapidly evolving neighborhood.

. . .

There are three dog runs in the Hunters Point area of Long Island City: one near the now-defunct Tennisport on the site of what will become the Hunters Point South Development; one on Vernon Boulevard between 48th and 49th avenues; and one on 31st Street [actually, 21st Street].

The bottom line is that dog owners will let their animals shit on the grass you sit on, even if there is a dog run directly across the street — because dog owners don’t use the grass except to tear it up around a turd. Additionally, they think nothing of destroying trees, completely ignoring what “curbing your dog” actually means*. Instead of agitating for more permissive policies, they should really be teaching their fellow owners how to be less inconsiderate. As for the rest of us, we shouldn’t give up and we shouldn’t give in — these people’s animals are disgusting and we don’t deserve to have them in our faces . . .

*And even that is a generous allowance — walk through any dog-friendly neighborhood on a hot summer day and the tell-tale scent of dog urine wafts through the streets . . . the smell is horrible, like a pungent chicken broth, and it makes our streets way more pedestrian unfriendly than most other quality-of-life obstacles that the city spends time worrying about.

Location Scout: Gantry Plaza State Park.

“Although Much Has Been Made Of The So-Called ‘Battle Of The Badges,’ These Are Isolated Episodes That Are The Result Of Individual, Low-Level Breakdowns In Discipline. They Are Not The Product Of Systemic Problems And Don’t Occur Higher Up Where It Would Jeopardize The Mission Of Each Agency”*

*That’s from Bloomberg’s statement to the 9/11 Commission in May 2004, and the sad thing is that he was talking about the lack of inter-agency cooperation, not even intra-agency cooperation:

The New York Police Department has removed a senior official from one of its two sometimes competing antiterrorism units, after it played a role in disrupting a sensitive federal terrorism investigation, current and former police officials said on Wednesday. He was replaced by a top official from the other unit.

The investigation was disrupted two weeks ago when detectives from one of the units, the Intelligence Division, sought assistance from a Queens imam who then alerted the central suspect in the case to the inquiry.

The transfers, which removed one official from the Intelligence Division and replaced him with another from the Counterterrorism Bureau, came in recent days amid intense activity in the case. Federal agents and police detectives have been hunting through New York City and other places for operatives in a suspected Qaeda bomb plot.

Again, the NYPD is playing with the security of all Americans. When they’re good, oh they’re real good, but there’s also a huge lack of oversight here. People in California, Denver or even New Jersey don’t vote for Michael Bloomberg, much less Ray Kelly, and when the NYPD fucks up, it affects them, too. I’m surprised more people aren’t more pissed . . .