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Users of Prospect Park have long complained that the agencies resonsible for ensuring that the greenspace remain clean have failed to do their job.
Now there’s proof.
Over the past 20 months, not a single litterer has received a ticket from a Park Enforcement Patrol officer.
Not one summons — during a rash of filth in the park so egregious that we created a regular column on it called “Meadows of Shame.”
Interestingly, during the same period, Parks Enforcement Patrol officers issued 147 summonses to dog owners for pups off-leash.
That’s 147 tickets to the owners of roving rovers, and zero for the poorly mannered jerks who remain hellbent on leaving the park in worse condition than they found it.
Make no mistake; we’re not defending dog owners who violate leash laws.
But taken together, this 147–0 shutout is clearly a dereliction of duty by these “PEP” officers.
Worse, it could be an indication that the enforcement agents have been directed by the administrators of the park to simply ignore the trash-tossers who have turned the city’s most-important park into the town dump.
There are certainly worse crimes out there, but there is something particularly heinous and disrespectful about discarding trash in a park — one of the few public havens that cooped-up urbanites have.
And this particular oasis has numerous overseers, from the Parks Department to the Prospect Park Alliance to the NYPD, whose officers have written just four litter summonses compared to 50 off-leash summonses during the same period.
The seemingly endless spate of garbage atrocities in the park — coupled with the new evidence that park officials are doing nothing to aggressively fight the guilty parties — is an outrage that requires immediate attention at the highest levels.
Someone needs to take out the trash — and we’re not only talking about the garbage.
©2010 Community Newspaper Group
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