NYPD CENTRAL PARK PRECINCT COMMUNITY MEETING IN-PERSON TONIGHT AT 7 PM!

This update includes news from Tuesday, June 21. Wednesday at 7 pm is the June Community Meeting of the Central Park NYPD Precinct. It is not a Zoom meeting. It is an old-school, in-person meeting at 86th and Transverse Rd in Central Park.

Want to know why there is no enforcement of the speed limit and the stoplight in our crosswalk? Want to know why licensed motor scooters and motorcycles are being allowed to operate on the Central Park Loop? This is your chance to ask Commanding Officer, Deputy Inspector William J Gallagher. The next Community Meeting of the Central Park NYPD Precinct isn't until September.

Tuesday was another slow day in our crosswalk. I got down there early to practice the timing of the crosswalk soundtrack which I had composed the night before. As it turns out, synchronizing it with the light is a lot harder than it would seem. Will have to work on this.

I started shooting clips at about 12:15 pm, practicing with the pocket radar to see if I could manage to get the radar display into the frame of the camera. It is possible but often it changes focus to the radar display, which is much closer to the lens than the object whose speed is being measured. When this happens, it is impossible to see the object anymore. I shot clips until about 1 pm and went home to follow up with Gale Brewer's office and Mark Levine's office.

We advanced our petition with 360 signatures to Gale Brewer on June 8, the day after we introduced it to Community Board 7, at the suggestion of Kathryn Colglazier, Executive VP of Field Operations at the YMCA. When I got no response from Brewer within 48 hours, I sent her a follow-up email, then called her office and talked with Rosalba Rodriguez, who said she would get a response for me ASAP. At the same time, I advanced the petition to Mark Levine, Manhattan Burrough President, by calling their office since their website provided no email contact.

By June 21, our petition had been signed by nearly 600 people and I decided to update both Brewer and Levine with the new list of signatories, hoping someone in their office would spot someone important on the list and actually respond. That was at 1:41 pm. By 2:03 pm, I had received a terse but polite response from Brewer's Chief of Staff, Shulamit Puder, asking me what kind of traffic-calming device we wanted to be installed and offering to follow up with NY DOT.

Hurrah! We got the camel's nose under the tent! More on my interaction with Sulamit in tomorrow's update. Nothing from Mark Levine's office at all so far.

Today's screengrab is one of the fastest regular speeders and stoplight runners in our crosswalk. He's here several times every day.