>If you didn't have ID you were automatically shipped
> > off to Rikers for the night. If there was anything out against you,
> > you were busted. And if they didn't like your looks - i.e., you were
> > a young black male - you were busted.
>
>Makes you wonder how much money they lost versus having to spend money
>on security, security furniture, booth attendants, and so on.
But it wasn't about revenue lost to transit jumping. Zero Tolerance (ZT) as practiced under Guiliani and his police chief Bratton is about getting a sheet on people:
"People say ZT doesn't work because in New York or Baltimore, 80 percent of the quality of life tickets are never paid and an enormous amount of the misdemeanor court dates are no-shows," says Lt. MacLhinney of Baltimore's FOP. "But hey, that doesn't matter. What counts is we've got them in the system! We're building a data base."
Christian Parenti has a very similar quote from a cop in northern California, Fresno I think, in Lockdown America.
And here's a nice one from Guiliani:
When confronted with charges that the NYPD was making war on the city, Guiliani's response was: "That's too damn bad."
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/dec97Parenti.htm