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NYPD Arrests Cyclist for Uncovering Obscured License Plate, Lets Driver Go
- maerF0x0 4y agoI guess "two wrongs do not make a right" turns out to be legal advice. Still hope the underlying root cause gets addressed.
- freejazz 4y agoThe Strokes said it the best... "New York City Cops, they ain't too smart"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwayyy479087 4y agoWilling to bet the driver was a cop or family of a cop
- drewrv 4y agoMaybe they even had a little "get out of jail free" card. https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-courtesy-cards https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-court...
- klyrs 4y ago> recklessly damaging property over $250. That's an expensive little piece of plastic
- sorwin 4y agoI don't agree with the license plate being covered, but that also doesn't give you the right to go and around rippingt hings off of people's cars. It's not his property, leave it alone. This isn't any different than someone damaging your car because they disagree with something being displayed on it, or lack there of.
- __float 4y agoIt's a small piece of plastic. A damaged car is generally expensive to repair, and "disagree with something being displayed" is very different than "intentionally obscures license plate". You can't "both sides" and pretend to be neutral when your argument equates two incredibly different scenarios.
- sorwin 4y agoIt doesn't matter. You're not the police, or anyone in charge of those matters. What gives you the right to touch their car?
- lostmsu 4y agoThe fact that said car was used to break the law. Even if his actions were to be found illegal under current law, I'd say they should be explicitly allowed as a form of vigilantism.
- googlryas 4y agoIs there any indication he damaged the property by moving the piece of plastic? From the picture it seems like it was just wedged under a screw, so you could probably pull it off without causing any damage. Maybe some other statute comes into play, buy criminal mischief doesn't seem fitting unless he, say, snapped it off.
- sorwin 4y agoIt says he pulled it off, not unscrewed it. Literally in the article. What right did he have to do that? Not his car or property, nor his job. If I don't agree with the ruling of some judgement around banks, I don't go around breaking their windows and ATMs, right?
- googlryas 4y agoYes and pulling something off of another thing doesn't necessarily damage it.
- tweestuff 4y ago[dead]
- BaronVonSteuben 4y agoI'm a social ignoramus so wondering: is the cyclist in this case being a "Karen"? I have little sympathy for the driver, but it does seem like the cyclist should have reported the driver to the police rather than taking the law into their own hands.
- scelerat 4y agoI'm glad the cyclist did something to raise awareness. Roads are a shared space with shared responsibilities. Valid, visible licenses plates are fundamental to public accountability for drivers of automobiles. They are there for everyone to see. There is no way that driver should be able to get away with obscuring his license plate, and I think the cyclist was within his rights to uncover the obscured license plate.
- BaronVonSteuben 4y agoIn this particular case I agree with you. But how would you write this into a law that citizens and police can reference to determine whether a particular action is ok or not?
- scelerat 4y ago"License plates are the property of the state and must be visible, unobscured, and attached only to the vehicle to which it is registered." If the issue is a person removing a piece of tape covering a license plate, then really nothing happened. The citizen unobscured state property which is supposed to be visible. It would be like removing a sticker from a speed limit sign, or picking up litter. If it's some other piece of plastic attached to the car itself, well IMO that's what courts are for. That cyclist goes before a judge and maybe some technical reading of the law interprets what he did as tampering with the vehicle. Another completely reasonable interpretation though is that the cyclist was making the shared roadway that the car was on safer for everyone else.
- freejazz 4y agoThe police weren't justified in charging him for criminal mischief and I bet you it will get dismissed, and he'll win on a false arrest claim as well. Those should be starting points for your analysis.
- erisian 4y ago
- JohnTHaller 4y agoFor folks outside NYC, there are a ton of cars that do this here and it generally never results in a ticket regardless of reports directly to the police or 311. It's done to dodge speed cameras, red light cameras, and tolls as well as to avoid being reported for reckless driving and accidents. The drivers who do this are generally the more dangerous ones. In NYC, under 15% of drivers who kill cyclists are arrested. Only 3% of hit and run cases are solved. 124 pedestrians, 50 motorcyclists, 19 cyclists and 15 people on mopeds and ebikes were killed in NYC last year.
- chimeracoder 4y ago> The drivers who do this are generally the more dangerous ones. Let's call a spade a spade: the NYPD are the single worst offenders in almost all type of traffic and parking offenses (including obscured license plates). There are entire watchdog groups dedicated to documenting traffic-related NYPD abuses of power. This is also why it's pointless to report violations, because 311 just sends it to the police, who take no action.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pclmulqdq 4y agoAnecdotally, members of the NYPD, celebrities, and politicians are all among the classes of people who are the most dangerous drivers in the city. It wouldn't surprise me if most of the "unsolved" fatalities have one of them on the other end.
- ZoomerCretin 4y agoAnd yet the United States ranks highly on public corruption indices because the data is primarily "perception" rather than reality.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> And yet the United States ranks highly on public corruption indices because the data is primarily "perception" rather than reality. The US actually scores very poorly for a major developed democracy, I don’t know why you’d say it ranks highly.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoIt sounds like the person who obscured the license plate may have had some political clout (or been a friend of a cop). That is how the NYPD works these days.
- bradleyjg 4y agoThe NYPD union has negotiated an exemption from the requirements that most city employees have to live in the city (along with teachers and firefighters IIRC.) I think this should be revisited in the next contract negotiation.
- joncrane 4y agoA link to a prior tweet speculates that the owner of the car is a city employee.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bragr 4y agoThese days? Please be specific, when was the NYPD not like this? Unless you're counting when the mob controlled the NYPD as separate from people with clout. Here's a poster from 1887: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citizen_asking_Mayor_Abram_Hewitt_for_protection_from_the_police.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citizen_asking_Mayor...
- pclmulqdq 4y agoYou're right, of course. New York (and other major cities) has always corrupt as fuck.
- willcipriano 4y agoThat's how everything works these days.
- Gigachad 4y agoIf automated plate recognition cameras fail to detect a plate, it should immediately flag a human reviewer and someone should be sent out to stop the car.
- klodolph 4y agoI don’t think there’s an automated plate recognition system on the planet which works 100% of the time. This is a super hard problem to begin with.
- Gigachad 4y agoThe automated system just gets a human to look at it. If the human can see it clearly obstructed, it calls for a search. The automation just cuts the search in to a manageable size
- bombcar 4y agoWhy involve a human? No plate visible? Anti tank weapon launch. Problem solves itself, the vast militarization of our police force is justified, everyone happy.
- freejazz 4y agoWhy is your response so ridiculous? Wanting the police to pull over vehicles purposefully obstructing their license plates is incredibly reasonable. They are creating havoc on the streets of NYC and you are just making this ridiculous comparison for no reason...
- kazinator 4y agoBut these systems are not used in real-time. Run a light, get a ticket in the mail weeks later, kinda thing. If just one symbol is obscured, they could get the subset of plates that match on the other letters and numbers and then narrow it down by make and model, from the photo.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- scelerat 4y agoHere in oakland, tons of cars driving around with no plates (or stolen plates) and cops do nothing.
- AYBABTME 4y agoAnd local government officials run on platforms of vowing not to let police enforce these sort of actions. Not allowed to enforce speeding fines, parking fines, lack of license plate fine, public nuisance fines. I'm not sure what the end game is. I understand the rationale that these indirectly target people of lower economic background, but is this sort of policy going to improve all this? Should we get our laws and standards down to the lowest common denominator? I'd love to hear balanced and convincing counter arguments, because the compassion card isn't quite convincing as is.
- scelerat 4y agoI admit to having been swayed by some of those arguments in the past, but the purely utilitarian case I feel has never been strongly made (and should be): Are more people harmed in the process of police enforcing traffic laws (unlawful violence, egregious or excessive citation, etc.) than are harmed because of behavior enabled or exacerbated by unenforced traffic laws (running red lights, speeding, driving with lights off which result in property damage, injury, or death, or unlicensed vehicles used in other crimes, etc.). Either way there is a social justice argument to be made, and I'm surprised I haven't heard a strong voice for enforcement, because my intuition is that more people are harmed in more broad economic terms when traffic violations are allowed to proliferate than those who would be harmed by interactions with police which run foul. It's just that when someone innocent gets unjustly murdered during a police interaction, it's such a horrific and newsworthy event and kind of distracts from regular, daily injustices (including traffic deaths). In a way kind of like mass shootings vs more regular low-grade gun violence.
- jeffbee 4y agoWhen you drill into the social justice argument, at least some forms of them, the injustice is essentially that the poor are forced to drive and the bus service sucks. If you are concerned that the cost of registering a car, or paying tickets for expired plates, or repairing your headlights is outrageous and can cause a marginal person's financial life to spiral out of control, your first and best tool is better public transportation.
- vehemenz 4y agoYou can't report the driver's plate # if you can't read it. So that alone warrants ripping it off.
- throwmeawayy 4y agoThe bicyclist's mistake was waiting for the police.
- kazinator 4y agoHe's a lawyer though, so that's his thing.
- throwaway09223 4y agoYeah, I suspect he's ready for the long haul on this one.
- jonny_eh 4y agoLawyers aren't afraid of court, not any more than a fish is afraid of water.
- Aaronstotle 4y agoMy thought as well, better to leave. Although on the bright-side this did raise awareness
- foxes 4y agoCars are sacred property to some. I’ve known people who have been assaulted by drivers for daring to touch their precious vehicle as they are about to be ran over.
- lliamander 4y agoIt seems like there was some favoritism towards a city employee, which if true would be bad. The person covering their license plate should face consequences regardless of their position or connections (and possibly even fired from their job). But quite frankly this bicyclist is in the wrong here. In general, if you are going to put your hands on other people, or their stuff, you better be prepared to explain how doing so was necessary and that you had no alternative. The only thing in danger here is city revenue (it's not like the fines were improving the driver's driving). This sort of busy-body vigilantism is tedious.
- hahaxdxd123 4y ago40,000 people die in America every year from car collisions. Accountability is necessary.
- lliamander 4y agoNon-sequitor. There's no evidence that the actions taken were either necessary or even efficacious.
- mjmsmith 4y agoThe NYPD arrests people for avoiding a $3 subway fare, but does nothing about defaced license plates which avoid much higher fines and tolls. It's lazy or corrupt (probably both) and actions like this are one way to draw attention to the situation.
- lliamander 4y agoSounds like the NYPD have an incentives problem.
- mjmsmith 4y agoYou could say that. https://twitter.com/placardabuse https://twitter.com/placardabuse
- Gigachad 4y agoA good idea would be to pool up every fine where a plate was obscured, and then every time the police find someone with an intentionally obscured plate, they get put in the group that has to pay off the whole pool of unassigned fines.
- jmull 4y ago> But when they illegally cover their license plate so they can avoid tolls, evade red-light cameras and speed cameras, and generally put others at risk, we say go for it. Nope. No. Don't. It's bad to obscure your license plate. It's bad to vandalize other people's cars. Both of these are true.
- stfp 4y agoAnd by vandalize you mean touch?
- foxes 4y ago>Drivers casually slaughtering countless pedestrians, cyclists; spewing damaging noise and pollution; car focused design ruining cities and society: Drivers of HN sleep. >Person flicks a bit of plastic obscuring a license plate: WTF thats a REdLine stop that vandal!!!
- throwawaylinux 4y agoSurely this can't be that difficult to comprehend. You can't grant yourself a pass to damage another person's property because of what you feel they intended to use it for, because of what you believe its value should be, because you don't like that they own or use cars, or because you have linked them to casually slaughtering countless people, the ruination of cities and destruction of society. There are very limited circumstances in which you may take the law into your own hands. Being angry is not one of them.
- Gigachad 4y agoYes you can and you should. You like too many others are happy to sit idly by and watch the decay of society but some people actually have ethics and care more about keeping the community safe over “muh private property”.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
- xiphias2 4y agoThis is off topic, but these kinds of posts make me even more frustrated that Sam Bankman Fried who stole from me and millions of other people is not arrested, and all I got is ,,be patient he will''.
- throwup 4y agoCan we not talk about crypto on literally every post, thanks
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoafaict this would be a serious offence in germany and also been taken very seriously. after all a license plate is essential to enforce law wrt any crime involving a car. so, i'm surprised to read several comments here about how this is common in the states.
- Markoff 4y agothis is quite common in Prague to avoid parking fees due to loophole in law, some go even so far to remove license plate completely while parking OTOH Ukrainians park their cars everywhere in Czechia (CZ received most UA economic migrants per capita in world) without paid parking or straight up in illegal locations knowing there is no way to enforce fines outside EU and anyone being loud about it will be automatically labeled Putin lover
- sixstringtheory 4y agoI’ve seen cars equipped with LED bars above and below license plates to camouflage them. Nobody is making you drive. If you think you can get away with evading tolls and red lights, you shouldn’t be surprised if someone breaks that shit off your car. You deserve it. You want a lawless society, you might just get one. You can always take the advice being offered here to vote, vote away the tolls and red light cameras if you don’t like them.
- JohnDeHope 4y agoThis is not a story about license plates, cyclists, ghost cars, or the NYPD. "This presumably City employee..." Laws do not apply to the ruling class; laws apply to the working class.