Cut ’Em Off at the Pass

As someone who has on occasion paid tickets for being parked at expired meters—once while Christmas shopping for children’s books, no less, adding to my holiday fervor—I’ve never had trouble sympathizing with Paul Newman’s crime in Cool Hand Luke, which he described as “settling an old score.”

The law is there to protect us all, so of course I sympathize with it too. But I will note that when I lived in New York, I found the NYPD would not allow their parking enforcement crew to even use the same color cars as regular cops drove. The regular cops knew what people think of parking cops, and they wanted it to be clear that whatever you might think of the NYPD with its long history of graft, corruption, Mob influence, and occasional brutality, at least they weren’t parking cops.

I have to chuckle, then, at recent reports from Atlanta that not only has someone cut off the heads of 40% of the city’s parking meters, but the regular cops aren’t even investigating it as a crime.