Quote Originally Posted by typhoon186 View Post
I've seen the undercover decoys walking Main Street a few times and was even approached by them. It was so obvious. It should be entrapment! you take 400,000 bikers, and 20,000 gallons of beer then dangle a hot taco in front of them. Somebody's going to want to buy one.

Unfortunately, I'm seeing the Police departments becoming a REVENUE generating entity for many municipalities and ethics are not what they once were. False accusations, borderline charges and rogue prosecutors are giving many good men in uniform a BLACK eye.

During the BOOM years, they had a lot of tax revenue coming in and many Departments went hog wild, today, they are trying to maintain the over expansion and using in my opinion un-ethical tactics to shake down many citizens simply for revenue.

When the New Yourk City department turned their back on the Mayor a few months ago, there was a HUGE PANIC within the city managers office because the REVENUE generated by the Police had stopped coming in... it was all about the money. Officials estimated New York’s lost revenue at just under $5 million


New York City police have finally resumed making arrests and issuing tickets after an unofficial slowdown that began in late December and lingered into this month. Last week, police made 6,910 arrests citywide and issued 14,399 parking tickets and 14,367 moving violations, according to the New York Times. Those figures still aren’t on par with statistics from the same period in 2014, but they’re a big improvement over previous weeks, as you can see from the chart below:


Chart by Alison Griswold. Data from the NYPD via the New York Times.


How much has that monthlong drop-off in police activity cost the city? Well, from the week of Christmas through Jan. 11, city officials estimated New York’s lost revenue at just under $5 million from all fines, compared with the same period a year before. Parking tickets accounted for a shortfall of about $3 million—they reportedly average $69.13 per ticket and declined by about 44,000 in the slowdown’s first three weeks. At the same time, the Times noted that the less-than-$5-million figure did not include “the additional loss of revenue from speeding tickets, other moving violations, and petty crimes that were not cited, totals that are more difficult to calculate, given the varying penalties for different offenses.”

So it’s hard to know exactly what New York City missed out on while police lowered their enforcement activities. We can loosely update the estimate from Jan. 11 by noting that even in the latest week parking tickets remained down nearly 40 percent, or roughly 8,638, from the same period in 2014. Multiplying that out by $69.13 per ticket, you get that the city lost another nearly $600,000 in the most recent week from the ongoing shortfall of parking tickets alone.* The New York City Comptroller’s Office on Tuesday was not able to provide an updated estimate of how much the city has lost to the slowdown.


While a loss of several million dollarsisn’t a terrible hit for a city with a $77 billion budget for fiscal year 2015, it’s also a not-insignificant amount of money. Police Commissioner William Bratton has countered that New York may in fact be saving money from reduced overtime pay for officers. But it’s really anyone’s guess how the slowdown will appear in the budget when the final tallies are in.

*Correction, Jan. 20, 2015: This post originally misstated the approximate amount of money the city lost a shortfall in parking tickets in the latest week. It is $600,000, not $600 million.