I Quant NY took a closer look at the public data the NYPD released on moving violations issued during the slowdown that took place in December of last year and January of this year. Offenses under the rubric of “moving violations” were one of many that police enforced less during the slowdown, and I Quant NY used moving violations data as a measurement to see where the slowdown was most pronounced, reasoning that though it’s an imperfect data set, it does present an estimate of how the slowdown happened as a whole. The most drastic decrease was in Staten Island’s 120th Precinct, the notoriously troubled precinct where Officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner last year.
The 120th Precinct had a 81% decrease in summonses for moving violations issued between November and December of last year, the highest of anywhere in the city (the smallest decrease was Brooklyn’s 62nd Precinct, which only wrote 14% fewer summonses, just across the Verrazano Bridge from the 120th).
The numbers also contradict the narrative that the slowdown happened as a response to the murders of Officers Ramos and Liu on December 20. Since that happened so late in the month, there’s no way the slowdown could have had such an impact in such a short period of time. “[The NYPD] could only cause a 30-40% reduction for that month if [they] stopped writing tickets all together at that point,” I Quant NY writes.
The numbers support the conclusion that the NYPD is a bunch of babies.
(Photo: Joe Jackson)
