Please Don’t Pass Laws If You Have No Way (Or Plan) To Enforce Them

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.

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