How an open data blogger proved the NYPD issued parking tickets in error

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg once called the New York Police Department “the seventh biggest army in the world”. Whether or not that stat is true, there’s no doubt the NYPD is a large and powerful organisation – and, as current mayor Bill de Blasio learned last year, it does not always take criticism well.

Enter Ben Wellington, a Brooklyn-based quantitative analyst who runs the storytelling-through-data website IQuantNY. The map above comes from a recent IQuantNY post examining New York City’s parking ticket data, which is freely available online. The red circles represent millions of dollars in erroneous parking tickets, issued by NYPD officers to vehicles that were in fact parked legally. Continue…

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