Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets (2018)

Re:Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking... by tptacek on Monday October 26, 2020 @01:00AM (#24892962)

I think there's something to this. Leaving aside the sophomore dorm room discussion about whether public bodies should consider fines as revenues streams: when I did a similar analysis (with Matt's help) in the village I live in, I found a multiple-orders-of-magnitude difference in attributable fees between the lowest-fined blocks and the highest-fined blocks; the more heavily ticketed block brought in 5 figures of revenue (that's a lot, for Oak Park). Something is going on there! It should be incumbent on the village to figure out why that's happening, and how to keep it from happening.

(Like Matt, I also found that if you look at the raw data, you'll find citations that are facially invalid; in my case, I found "overnight parking" citations issued in the middle of the day --- 50+ of them).

Last thought: I don't know about the state you live in, but in Illinois it is shockingly easy to FOIA a public body, and the law is to an extraordinary extent on your side. I just flattened Oak Park in a FOIA dispute with just a couple of emails. If you live in a state with Illinois-or-better FOIA (short statutory time window for public bodies to respond, fee recovery for successful legal challenges), you're almost certainly not FOIA'ing enough.

Also, if you're in Illinois: please FOIA your local police general orders, and let me know when you get them; I'm collecting them.

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Re:Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking... by probably_wrong on Monday October 26, 2020 @03:29AM (#24893625)

> if you look at the raw data, you'll find citations that are facially invalid; in my case, I found "overnight parking" citations issued in the middle of the day

I am usually unwilling to accept that something is foul play until I have exhausted all other explanations, and your comment triggered my "but what if?" sense.

I can imagine, for instance, that a car is found with plenty of leaves underneath in a city where the street cleaning shows up in the morning. Or that a traffic cop sees the exact same three cars in the exact same position both at the end of their shift and in the middle of the day the next day.

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Re:Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking... by SiempreViernes on Monday October 26, 2020 @07:38AM (#24895024)

Or more likely, there was a network error one week and they had to manually input all the citations during the day, so the creation date is simply wrong.

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Re:Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking... by tptacek on Monday October 26, 2020 @03:41PM (#24900398)

Doesn't matter. They can't write the ticket if they don't observe the car parked between 11 and 6AM.

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Re:Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking... by Terretta on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @12:22PM (#24920629)

I've observed parking enforcement using a wax stick to mark tire and curb, or pausing to write tickets when already marked and aligned.

Probability of the marks remaining and aligning midday next day if the car was gone overnight seems vanishingly small.

Low tech, maybe not definitive, but still hard to argue with.

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Re:Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking... by hawaiianbrah on Monday October 26, 2020 @01:46AM (#24893150)

What do you mean you flattened them in a dispute?

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