Blowin’ it, big ‘time’
2,846 parking tix may be tossed over bad dates
Hey, Doc: The DeLorean might be illegally parked.
City traffic agents and cops have issued hundreds of potentially invalid parking tickets for violations that haven’t even happened yet – all because they got the date wrong, a Daily News analysis showed.
At least 2,846 parking violations since July 2015 were logged as occurring in the future, records from the city’s online database show. All of the erroneous summonses were handwritten and could be tossed out – potentially costing the city at least $242,790 in revenue from lost fines.
The city said a so-called “future issuance date” can occur from sloppy paperwork or careless data entry. Either the person writing the ticket makes a mistake and uses the wrong date, or the day is mistyped when a handwritten summons is entered into the system that was analyzed by The News.
The Department of Finance is now investigating the 2,846 violations after The News gave the city a list of them.
“The Department of Finance is carefully reviewing these future-dated summonses to confirm their validity, and will work to ensure it does not make this mistake again,” city spokeswoman Marcy Miranda said.
The agency will probe the validity of the tickets and confirm the dates are reflected in the city’s online databases.
If the traffic agent or cop issuing the ticket writes the wrong date – swapping out 2019 for 2021 for instance – then the summons is automatically invalidated.
This is to avoid a violation of due process, as the issuing officer can’t affirm that the violation took place in the future. Tickets like that would just be dismissed at hearings.
But even if the issuer writes the correct date and it’s mistyped into the system, the tickets could still be scrapped.
The city said anyone who gets parking tickets can contest them, so violators who notice the date discrepancy online can potentially get their summons dismissed.
The Department of Finance didn’t know how many of the future tickets are invalid. But the city stressed the issue is uncommon, with traffic agents and cops issuing 10 million or more parking violations a year.
Still, the number of “future issuance dates” have increased under Mayor de Blasio.
So far this fiscal year, there have been 1,595 future summonses. There were 623 in fiscal year 2018, 339 in fiscal year 2017 and 289 in fiscal year 2016. There were none in 2015.
The issue may be even more widespread. On Friday The News looked at summonses with dates after June 7, 2019, to avoid inflating the problem. Thousands of additional parking violations had issuance dates in the past that still somehow fell outside the fiscal years that they were logged under.