Ghosts Of Police Commissioners Past

Elsa Walsh has a pretty comprehensive profile of Miami chief of police John Timoney in this week’s New Yorker. (It’s not online, so you’ll have to pick up a copy of the mag yourself, or, uh, you can borrow my copy if you see me.)

It touches on much of his time in Philadelphia, of course — when most of those people the police arrested for making puppets were, it turns out, not really guilty of anything but making puppets to protest George Bush — but also focuses on his departure. Here’s the money anecdote:

Timoney has always had a tendency to lash out at critics and acknowledges that this only made things worse for him. By his own account, he began one meeting that was intended to patch things up with a union leader by saying, “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

But the final provocation, Timoney said, may have been the call telling him he owed nearly two thousand dollars in parking tickets, all issued in a single month. Timoney learned that his son had used the car, and he paid the fines; he also says that a high-ranking officer informed him that some of the tickets were probably “ghosts” — made-up infractions. “It started to get real ugly with the union, and personal,” Timoney said.

Yes, that’s right: The union was pissed at John Timoney, so they apparently wrote him a bunch of parking tickets in order to piss him off. I love this city. Love? Is that the right word? Yeah, I think it is.