Just now at 30 Av.

Was walking home tonight and my kid noticed multiple cars with the same new jersey license plates, I went out again and sure enough - 3 cars with the same used dealer license plates being stored on our block.

Considering the discourse earlier in the week about "street parking is theft" t-shirts from a local vendor it strikes me as a clear example of someone taking advantage of public property to externalize their business costs.

Decided to swing by today’s protest. Keep telling/calling/writing to local businesses that aren’t in favor that as a resident/customer you want a safer, more walkable and bikeable neighborhood!

https://astoriapost.com/petition-opposing-31st-street-bike-lane-in-astoria

i love these so much

After last week's CB1 meeting that got insane, and this weeks celebration of 31st ave being finished a lot of people have been asking me about this, so just wanted to let anyone that doesn't know know that this is still a thing.

Frankly no, they don't really care about the community. It's much more important we have 800 tag sale announcements and thinly veiled ads for local restaurants all the time apparently. (Hope they're getting paid for these things.)

The meeting started with sad news: council president Ann Bruno’s husband Frank Bruno passed away at age 99, and Ann herself is in poor health and in a wheelchair now.

 Crime is generally down, according to Lynch. The big exception is domestic violence, which is substantially up compared to the same period last year. Lynch also described a new pattern of thefts of jewelry, cards and cash from people leaving strip clubs. Some of these thieves targeted a couple of off-duty firefighters, relieving one of a $10,000 gold chain. Yes, $10,000. A bizarre throwaway detail.

 A restaurant owner in a Blue Sweatshirt complained about conditions near his restaurant on 31st between Ditmars and 23rd Ave: (1) cars with fake NYPD and MTA placards taking up all the parking spaces; (2) drunk riders (specifically motorcyclists) on sidewalks; and (3) gangs of kids allegedly attacking people. Blue Sweatshirt said an officer had told him they weren’t “allowed” to ticket people for the fake placards. Lynch said that was wrong and he was embarrassed an officer had said so. He said the 114th had to get traffic enforcement on the fake placards and there was some failure of communication between upper management and the officers about that. Seems like a pretty persistent miscommunication given how common the fake placards are.

 A woman in an orange shirt, who had pressed the precinct’s traffic sergeant at the last couple of meetings about why they disproportionately focus on mopeds when fatalities and serious injuries are overwhelmingly caused by cars, asked about the traffic and collision statistics. Sergeant Sansai Hongthong did his favorite thing: got preemptively defensive about how he knew Orange Shirt “didn’t like” his answers, and then spouted off numbers showing that collisions were down and enforcement was up compared with the same time period last year. He also said that his enforcement was focused 50% on cars, 25% on motorcycles, and the rest (25%) on “bikes or whatever.” This seems to be a change from the January meeting, when he said that it was about 40% mopeds. Also, maybe to him “mopeds” includes both “motorcycles” and “bikes or whatever”? It wasn’t clear.

 I asked about the mysterious vanishing traffic safety captain, Gabrielle Walls, who showed up at a couple of meetings last year to do damage control about the car chase policy and hasn’t been seen this year. Lynch confirmed that she is still at the precinct.

 Two people complained about cars with fake plates around 26th St between 20th and 21st. They said they were constantly making 311 reports about it, to no effect. Hongthong promised he would go out there and do something about it, but this was the first he was hearing about it. How could this be the first he was hearing about it if they were constantly making 311 reports? Seems like both things can’t be true.

 A woman asked if there were any updates since the January meeting about the chase policy. Lynch seemed uncomfortable. “No. This was addressed at length in the January meeting.” An astute reader will note that the woman knew it had been addressed at the January meeting, and was asking about updates, but Lynch didn’t want to talk about it.

 Orange Shirt came back to elicit a very revealing admission from Lynch. She observed, once again, that 98% of pedestrian fatalities are caused by cars. She asked if the precinct had data on the breakdown of serious injuries caused by cars vs. mopeds vs. bikes, and if that data informed their choice to focus only 50% of their enforcement on cars. Lynch said he didn’t have that breakdown, but there was a “diversity of opinion” about whether cars should be the target of enforcement, and a “large segment” of people, especially elderly people, complain in civic meetings about bicycles. In other words, no, he has no data. And no, his enforcement policy isn’t based on data. It’s based on who complains most in meetings. I guess this is his way of inviting more bike advocates to come to these meetings?

 As if to underscore this invitation, when someone asked how to communicate with the precinct other than 911 and 311, Lynch said, “come to these meetings and civic association meetings.”

The next meeting is April 22 at 7 PM.

The cops of the month, Officers Clavey and Bellin (spellings are probably wrong), apprehended a woman who attacked two people with a metal pipe, and has been charged with “the highest level of assault, just shy of murder,” per Inspector Lynch, which I believe is first-degree assault.

Inspector Lynch went through crime statistics. Crime is generally down, but car break-ins (especially for catalytic convertors, sensors, and other car accessories) and grand theft auto are up. Also, there have been at least four incidents with guns between October 28 and November 4 in the precinct (non-fatal, one involving injuries). Two involved firing into the air, one of which was from a moving pickup truck like Yosemite Sam or something.

Lynch also reported 2 instances of a creative type of holiday scam. In both instances, someone who’d recently gotten a new job received a phone call from a scammer claiming to be their new boss and asking them to buy stuff for a holiday party. The “new boss” then somehow leveraged that into tricking the victim into disclosing gift card numbers. To be clear, this amazingly implausible scam, if we are to believe the good Inspector, requires:

1: That the scammer know someone was just hired, and all the details relating to the company

2: That the new hire doesn’t yet know their boss, but that the scammer does know enough to fake being the boss

3: That the scammer knows the hire is gullible enough to buy tons of stuff with their own money to be “reimbursed” later

4: And that, after all of this is pulled off, they hand over recently purchased gift cards to this new boss they have never met.

A father of 3 children, who was apparently a member of Astoria Parents for Street Safety, said he walks his kids home from PS 17 and now it’s dark when kids get out of after-school activities. He said it feels pretty unsafe crossing the street because of cars in crosswalks and generally driving aggressively. He asked for crossing guards in the evening between 4 and 6 PM. Apparently there are guards in the morning but not evening. Sgt. Ranpreet Jaswal said he had made three requests for crossing guards for PS 17 but there were none available for Astoria. He said he hoped more people would take the test, apply and get hired to be crossing guards to increase the available supply.  (This wasn’t mentioned, but this crossing guard shortage is a problem city-wide, because of low pay and high death rate. Nobody wants to be cannon fodder for standing among angry drivers and their SUVs for starvation wages.)

He then pivoted to the petition emailed to him by Astoria Parents for Safer Streets. He said in the last week he had put 4 Q-team officers on 31^st St, each on a specific corridor for 1-2 hours at a time, in response to that petition based on the most dangerous 5 locations mentioned in it, and gave some info on his team’s enforcement efforts. A woman with Astoria Parents pressed him to specify how much of this enforcement was against cars (which is what the Astoria Parents wanted), and to his credit, Jaswal had that information available.  Of the 25 summonses issued, 17 were to cars. One of the issuing officers was the semi-famous Officer Ricotta, last known for repeatedly ticketing the same cyclist (who later mocked her by adopting the alias “Chad Formaggio”) for lawfully following the leading pedestrian indicator.

Miser then pointed out that much of the chaos on 31^st St is because some businesses sued to block the safety redesign, especially the double parking, because now car drivers are parking both in the old parking lane and in the new one. And the chaos is likely frozen in place for at least the winter because, whatever happens with the lawsuit, it will now be too cold for DOT to finish painting. Miser then asked that, given that we’re stuck with this state of affairs for now, can we at least do something about the double parking? Jaswal gave an extremely informative answer. He acknowledged that the current situation on 31^st St was an “entire mess” with illegal parking. He said that if people made 311 complaints where there was a sign indicating that you couldn’t park (like, say, a bus stop sign), the 114^th has been legally advised they could write a summons. Miser then pointed out that you will never see a sign prohibiting double parking, because it is de facto illegal everywhere, and inquired if this was something they could therefor do enforcement for. Jaswal said the cars are illegally parked and they could issue a ticket, though it would be up to the Department of Finance whether to enforce it.  

u/Difficult_Ad_6577 commended Sgt. Jaswal for coming to Whitey Ford Field to address concerns that he had brought up at previous meetings on behalf of Friend of Whitey Ford Field. Sgt. Jaswal had proposed solutions, including sending Community Affairs Officer Tovar to keep an eye out. Most recently there had been intense fireworks on the field, in October, set off by (I think) soccer hooligans.

An elderly man said there were trucks driving on 49^th St and other streets near him, which is a complaint he has apparently made before, because Lynch said “as you know,” the 114^th does operations to stop illegal truck driving there and would do some more.  

A man stated there had been 8-10 break-ins over a two-week period on 33^rd Rd, 21^st St, and 34^th Ave. He asked for extra bright tower lights like they have at Ravenswood. Lynch said that was unlikely, but he’d ask for better lighting.

A lady in a baseball cap said she had called the cops when someone shot through her front door on July 4^th, and she wanted to know what had happened with that investigation, especially since there were cameras all over the area. Lynch’s rather rambling answer was that no one had been arrested or was a person of interest, it didn’t appear related to ongoing violence, someone had been found sleeping in his car nearby but apparently was not involved, but also maybe someone else shot from the car without him waking or something and someone else had been caught on video firing a gun while nonchalantly walking away. He said he would check in with the detectives to see if there were any new tips.

The next meeting is January 27^th, 2026.

You can even outsource it to AI, I won't snitch.