Photos by Al O'Leary

Sometimes the best way to challenge the bosses is in the pages of the city’s tabloids and on the airwaves. And that’s exactly what the PBA did with its “Don’t Blame the Cop” media campaign, one of the most successful public information efforts in PBA history.

As every police officer in the city knows, summons quotas have been a problem for years. Early in 2003, the issue reached critical mass because of the rapidly decreasing numbers of police officers and the city’s huge budget gap. The orders went out: Write summonses or else.

To make matters worse, the city had nearly doubled the price of parking fines to $105. Then the state upped the ante by adding a $10 surcharge. When you consider the kind of burden that places the average working person and the intensity with which the department was seeking those summonses, there was a real potential for turning the city’s citizens against the cop on patrol.

The PBA needed to protect its members and direct the blame where it belonged.

With a 60-second radio spot in the can and a full-page print ad ready to go, we waited for the right moment to kick the campaign off. That time came when the department released the Compstat book in April. It showed that the number of summonses issued during the first four months of the year by police officers in our 76 precincts had increased by over 75,000 despite having 1,000 fewer police officers to write them.

n Monday, May 12, the PBA issued a press release to police beat reporters at One Police Plaza in which Pat Lynch said “policing in NYC is no longer about fighting crime and protecting the community, it’s about raising money.” The release contained Compstat statistics supporting the claim, and stories appeared the next day in all the city’s daily newspapers.

The snowball had been pushed over the edge of the hill and was about to roll down picking up speed and mass.

Radio and TV news programs regularly take their cues from the morning papers, so on the day the story made headlines, the PBA did radio and TV news interviews, which gave the story a higher level of public impact.

Two days later, the PBA held a news conference releasing documented evidence of summons quotas and announcing its “Don’t Blame the Cop” public information campaign. Every television station in the city, the two all-news radio stations and several print reporters showed up, and the evening’s news was saturated with the story.

In a matter of one week, the PBA had generated millions of dollars worth of news coverage before spending a dime on advertising. After a week of free news coverage, we began airing the “Don’t Blame the Cop” radio spot on virtually every major radio outlet in the city, including the Howard Stern and Imus in the Morning programs. We also made sure to buy time on the Mayor’s Friday morning WABC broadcast, which generated even more news over the weekend.

And when the radio spot hit the air waves, something interesting happened. The public began to contact the Daily News with what the paper called “silly summonses.” The first was a citation for “unauthorized used of a milk crate” in the Bronx. That one wound up on page one and generated another dozen or so opportunities for the PBA to get its message out.

The floodgates opened. Irate citizens came out of the woodwork with tales of tickets for the most ridiculous reasons: Having more than your store’s name on an awning. Feeding the pigeons. Blocking your own driveway. Driving with a faded inspection sticker. Taking up two seats in an empty subway car. The list goes on and on. Some of these were also page-one stories.

The following week, the “Don’t Blame the Cop” full page print ads ran in the Chief-Leader, Newsday, New York Post and Daily News on succeeding days. And then the national news media got interested in the story. Pat Lynch spoke to the Fox Network news, CNN, National Public Radio and the Cable News Service out of Washington, D.C. Then the story went international, with interviews given to the British Broadcasting Company, Japanese TV, French TV and Norway 2 TV. Apparently, the world is still interested in what happens in the Big Apple.

And in the end, what did the PBA’s most successful public information campaign accomplish? Well, people around the world now know that, when they get a summons in New York City, they shouldn’t blame the cop.