In a week when they lost domestic diva Martha Stewart to the Feds, the editor of The New York Times, Howell Raines, to a scandal, and Senator Hillary Clinton to the talk-show circuit, New Yorkers are no strangers to distinguishing between perception and reality. But when it comes to mayor Michael Bloomberg, they seem to prefer the former to the latter.
The reality is bad enough. First there was Jesse Taveras, who was fined for sitting on a milk crate outside a shop in the Bronx. The official citation was ”unauthorised use of a crate”. Then there was Crystal Rivera, 18 years old and six months pregnant, who was slapped with a $50 fine for sitting on the subway steps and blocking the stairway.
We’ll not dwell on the octogenarian fined $50 for feeding pigeons in the park or the shop owner who had to shell out $400 because there were too many words on his shop awning.
There seems no end to the recent litany of tickets that New York’s finest will issue for the pettiest of infractions: crimes that most New Yorkers did not even know they were able to commit. On its own it would be little more than an annoyance. Overzealous, underemployed cops being heavy-handed in a city where the really bad policemen end up killing innocent people — an everyday tale of ordinary uniformed folk.
But along with the fines comes the allegation that the tickets are less to do with the criminal than the political; that Bloomberg himself has ordered the police to get slap-happy with the fines because City Hall needs the money to plug its $4-billion budget gap.
When you think of how many milk-crate-sitters and pigeon-feeders it would take to even make a dent in the city’s huge deficit, the accusation seems preposterous. Bloomberg, a multimillionaire, could probably find more cash down the back of his sofa than he will collect by harassing — and possibly alienating — potential voters.
The reality (another, different, less convenient reality, unlikely to grab headlines) is that it costs more money to issue the tickets, process the infractions and pursue the non-payers than the fines are actually worth, and that the city actually issued far fewer of them this year than it did last.
The trouble for Bloomberg is not that the accusations of him nickel-and-diming the people who elected him are false; it is that even after he has said they are false, and explained why they must be false, just about everybody wants to believe the accusations anyway.
The press certainly want to believe them. ”Ticket Madness”, ”Another Fine Mess” and ”Sitting Bull” are just three of the Daily News headlines in the past couple of weeks, and may soon be followed by a city-wide campaign.
The budget crisis has left the city in a mess. And everybody blames Bloomberg, also referred to as ”Mike the Knife” and ”Gloomberg”, whose best-case scenario for rectifying the budget would inflict the biggest number of redundancies on the city in 10 years.
The very thing that made him attractive to many — that as a wealthy individual he was in hock to no special interest groups — now makes him weak. There are no special interest groups to support him. The perception worked to his benefit; the reality, however, is far more bleak. — Â