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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of this article?

> Like all drivers in New York State, Giovansanti is immune to consequences as long as he pays the $50 tickets

So he's allowed to do this. Why are we talking about it?

Setting aside any concerns about cops being examples, public servants, etc, I'm shocked the NYPD's insurance doesn't have a problem with it.

My wife worked for a County government agency in Ohio. Her job duties included driving. She was required to report all traffic citations or crashes, regardless of when they occurred (during or outside of work hours), to the County and sign an affidavit annually attesting to such reporting.

If she exceeded a threshold of violations in a year the County's insurer would refuse to cover her. Because her job duties included driving this was considered grounds for termination.

Life as a cop is extremely different than the typical citizen, at least in most countries where I've spoken to cops, which doesn't include the US though, but I'm sure the same applies there because points everywhere.

Was a firefighter, same. And not so much a "threshold of violations in a year" but "clean driving record for three years at time of hire, and maintained."

Because he shouldn't be allowed to do that? Because police officers should be held to a higher standard than others? Because being immune to consequences isn't a thing anyone should be? Those are just the reasons I could think of in ten seconds, I'm sure others could come up with more.

We are talking about this because part of the job of a journalist is to expose broken policies.

It's already a well known problem. That's what the Stop Super Speeders Act is meant to solve. So pass the bill and move on. No need for investigative journalism to expose a problem we already know about.

I didn't know about this. And if that bill hasn't passed yet, a reminder to push politicians to get their act together is never bad.

You don't get to decide what information journalist get to write about.

NYPD policy should probably consider repeated reckless disregard for the law to be a discipline issue.

If he paid the fine, I don't know that it's disregard for the law.

The laws says if you do this, you owe a fine. If you pay the fine, it's following the law.

The law says if you murder someone you go to jail. Therefore, it’s following the law to murder someone as long as you take the punishment.

Of course not, the punishment is actually what happens because you disregarded and didn’t follow the law.

The law actually says it’s illegal to speed. It doesn’t say it’s ok to speed as long as you pay the fine.

> The laws says if you do this, you owe a fine. If you pay the fine, it's following the law.

You're following the part of the law that punishes you for violating the other part of the law, not the law that originally punished you. This is an important distinction.

Some people in the thread are claiming he's not in fact paying the tickets. I don't know if that's true or not but the people I see on the road acting that willful generally have look to have put some forethought into it i.e. they have their license plate obscured.

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