Talking Trash Talking Trash Last week, ...
Last week, the mayor announced his latest initiative to keep the city clean, and once again it involves encouraging New Yorkers to rat each other out for money. The specific trash problem he's trying to take care of is illegal dumping, those litterbugs who strew their garbage around parks and parking lots?anywhere but in the waste receptacles where it belongs.
We've no argument with wanting to put a stop to that. It's a filthy, filthy practice that makes life a little less pleasant for everyone in the area.
But think about it for a second. Why do people do that in the first place? To a certain degree, some people are just dirty slobs who don't care where they dump their garbage. Now take a walk down the street and try to find a trash can that isn't already overflowing. And why is that? Because as part of his budget cuts, the Mayor slashed the number of garbage pick-ups around the city. Yes, the public uproar over that led him to replace some of them, but the Dept. of Sanitation was having trouble keeping up with the trash as it was before the cuts.
Then in June, the mayor nullified whatever effect replacing some of the pick-ups might have had by laying off 325 sanitation workers. It's a losing battle, and people are dumping their trash in parking lots because there's nowhere else to put it. And now the mayor is blaming the public for that?
The bigger question is: Why is the mayor's first tack in approaching a problem?oftentimes a problem he himself has created?to encourage us to snitch on one another? See someone smoking in a bar? Turn 'em in! See someone littering? Turn 'em in! You think that neighbor you never liked might be considering some sort of frivolous lawsuit against the city? Turn 'em in!
What sort of twisted psychology is at work here? Create a problem (cutting sanitation service, for instance). Blame the public for the ensuing mess. Then?here's the corker?turn them against each other. It's classic, and it's very disturbing.
Makes us want to go out and litter.
Penmanship, Nothin'
A few weeks ago, it was reported that most NYPD officers can't read above a 7th-grade level. Now it's being reported that their sloppy penmanship results in 14 percent of all traffic tickets being thrown out of court, costing the city millions in lost fines every year. You start to wonder after a while if there's some sort of intense recruiting drive aimed at the special schools.
To be fair, promises have been made about requiring higher reading scores for new recruits in the future. And fortunately for the NYPD, the answer to their bad-handwriting woes is already here.
Called "computerized ticket-writing gizmos" in Newsday, the hand-held devices couldn't be easier to use. Most of the discarded tickets result from illegible license plate and registration numbers which, until now, the cops have been forced to write down themselves. But now all they'll need to do is scan the code on the car's registration sticker, and bam?you're fucked! That 14 percent of invalid tickets is expected to drop to a mere one percent.
Thing is, you'll be fucked in ways that are much more ominous than simply getting a parking ticket. And though it's not part of the set-up yet, it probably will be soon. These hand-helds can be tied into the DMV database in order to run immediate registration checks. They'd also be able to check for any past criminal record and outstanding warrants. Those are givens. Should New York ever switch over to the "smart" driver's licenses the way they have in Jersey, any traffic cop who stops you could also have immediate access to your medical history, education and financial records, and more?all with the swish of a light pen.
All told, we'd rather deal with the old-style autistic and retarded cops than cops who can end up knowing a little too much about us.
Maybe that explains why Newsday's account concludes on this strange and eerie note: "The first attempt to build a ticket-writing computer in the mid-1980s stoked a major bribery scandal that rocked Ed Koch's administration and led to the suicide of the Queens borough president, Donald Manes." Which reminds us, who's making these things, anyway?
Tourists Still Love New York
If you make a living selling pay-per-view hotel tv porn or framed posters of the Twin Towers, NYC & Company has some good news for you: The tourist numbers went up .3% last year. Altogether the city welcomed a record 30.2 million domestic visitors in 2002, and remains the number-one destination for foreigners. Who are these people?
There's no denying that the two incidents were ugly. First there was the Labor Day assault on an 18-year-old African-American and her friends by a group of white kids wielding broken bottles and, for some reason, a sickle.
Then at 5 a.m. on Sunday the 14th, an unidentified minority youth entered the Nome Superette & Bagels, where he was confronted by five white kids (3 boys and 2 girls). Name- calling and threat-bandying soon escalated into assault and a busted shop door before all the involved parties fled.
These two incidents are being cited as evidence enough that S.I. is a cauldron of widespread violent bigotry. Newspaper columnists began arranging interviews with local skinheads to prove the point, and the FBI is observing the investigation of the Labor Day event.
In the days surrounding those two events, there were a number of similar incidents all over the city, none of which received the sort of coverage the above two did. Here's a sampling.
At 11 p.m. the night before Labor Day, a 52-year-old Indian man from Staten Island found his house egged and himself slurred by a group of teens. He did not report the incident until Wednesday, Sept. 17, long after the hubbub was underway.
At around 5 p.m. on Saturday the 13th, two teenagers continued to help Staten Island live up to its new reputation by making anti-Semitic comments to a 10-year-old.
At 3 a.m. Sunday, a Middle Eastern fellow on the Lower East Side was socked in the face near the corner of Bowery and Bond by a patriotic gentleman who simultaneously made anti-Arab comments.
An hour later up in Queens, two men beat and robbed a Kew Gardens man while making anti-gay comments.
Still more anti-Arab slurs were flying at 4 p.m. on Monday the 15th, when a 14-year-old boy in the Bronx assaulted a 14-year-old Muslim girl. The boy was arrested and charged with assault, aggravated harassment, menacing and using the name "Osama bin Laden" in an inappropriate manner.
On the morning of Wednesday the 17th, although no specific individual was targeted, a half-dozen swastikas were found scrawled on a fence in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn.
Two recent bias crimes are particularly shocking. Three days before the deli incident, two men in a car shouted racial slurs at a 37- year-old woman stopped at a red light. A week later, a husband and wife attempting to leave a railway station were harassed, slurred and assaulted by a group of teenagers.
These may not sound like much of anything at first, but there are three things that make these particular incidents so incredible. First, there's the fact that all the victims?the couple and the 37-year-old?were white. Second, both incidents took place in White Power Central, Staten Island. Finally is the fact that either incident was even reported at all.
Well okay, maybe in comparison with the other boroughs, Staten Island is a racist hotbed. But at least we can take comfort in the fact that all the hatred seems to be directed at everyone, regardless of their race, color or creed.