Thursday’s Headlines: Who Ya Gonna Call Edition

It's a pretty fitting metaphor for the current troubles of the Adams administration that when a major law enforcement crisis hits the city — in this case, the ghost car epidemic — the mayor calls in the Sanitation Department instead of the NYPD.

Sure, the police department is technically part of a new ghost car task force announced on Wednesday, but this is clearly a Sanitation Department operation.

After all, when the NYPD simply failed to do anything about tens of thousands of 311 calls of abandoned vehicles, as Streetsblog reported, Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch created a new approach — and suddenly thousands of cars were removed from the streets. Not all of them, but a good number.

And so it is with the new task force. In its first five days earlier this month, the 15 cops assigned to the Sanitation Department for the 90-day pilot seized 295 ghost cars — that is, cars without plates, or with fake plates or with real plates that don't match the make and model of the car, or with temporary plates that have either expired or weren't real in the first place.

At a press conference at a tow pound near JFK Airport, the mayor acknowledged that Tisch is the driving force in this area of law enforcement right now, saying she "has really focused on this issue at the level that we believe it ought to." (One could imagine Interim Police Commissioner Thomas Donlon thinking, "Hey, I can hear you!" except Donlon was a less-than-inspirational presence at the presser.)

Tisch, for her part, has been obsessed with the issue of ghost plates since Streetsblog's Polk Award-winning series was published.

Are there flaws in the Sanitation Department plan? Sure. Firstly, a 15-person ghost car task force is simply too small.

And owners of the alleged ghost cars will still have seven days to "claim" their car (though they'll have to produce legit paperwork, which is not easy if you're truly driving a ghost car). For years, thousands of 311 service requests about abandoned cars have been closed with the response that the owner "claimed" the car.

And there are so many real plate scams on the Interweb right now that the city will always be playing Whac-a-Mole on ghost plates.

And not enough cops even use the plate-reading technology that Tisch created when she was a Deputy Commissioner for technology at the NYPD. In a city with so many other crimes, plus attendant mayoral scandals, running plates on a phone app is still too low a priority for most officers.

Indeed, when I left the presser and hopped back on my bike, I had barely entered South Ozone Park when lookie what I found:

The coverage of the presser in amNY was straightforward, while its sister paper, QNS, offered up stenography.

In other news:

• Don't miss our top story today: Pedestrians and cyclists will wait at least another three months for the Department of Transportation to give them their own space on the Queensboro Bridge, thanks to the latest delays.
• Everyone covered yesterday's big news: The MTA's announcement of its next five-year rehabilitation plan and its $68.4-billion pricetag, half of it unfunded (Streetsblog, NY Times, amNY, Gothamist, Hell Gate, Bloomberg, The City, Crain's). The Post, Gothamist and amNY even got a second-day story on the same day (whaddya know!)
• The mayor's signature zoning effort, the City of Yes for Housing Opportunities, is in trouble. (Gothamist)
• It's easy to live without a car in New York City. Try it in Vermont. Rest in power, Curt McCormack (VT Digger)
• Protesters gathered at the Sutter Avenue L train station to decry this week's police shooting (Hell Gate). And others held a mass fare evasion in Union Square: