Today's New York Daily News has a story about some of its staff who are smokers trying to get a ticket under the new New York City law that bans smoking in certain outdoor spaces. The article is hilarious in terms of what these people had to do to get a ticket and should be read in its entirety. However, I will attempt to summarize.
The article reports:
"The Daily News landed the city's first smoking ban ticket Friday - and it took all day to do it.
"The News sent one staffer to the beach at Coney Island and another to the High Line, spending a total of six hours doing everything they could to get a ticket. They got a first-hand look at the lax enforcement.
"Photographer Pearl Gabel, after flagrantly puffing in the presence of a Parks Department officer for a couple hours, finally scored about 6 p.m."
Maybe I just don't live in the real world, but somehow I think their are much more awful things people could be doing in a park than smoking.
As I have stated before, I am a nonsmoker and cigarette smoke bothers me, but if I am in an open space and someone is smoking, I have the option of walking over to another part of that open space to get away from the smoke. Wasting Park Police time on a smoking ban just seems totally ridiculous to me. Next we will have the Park Police looking for people who are eating donuts--that can't be healthy and contributes to obesity, therefore it must be stopped.
This is another example of people having their freedom taken away piece by piece.
Leave a comment