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.

Eagles Lose Again

The verdict is in for the Philadelphia Eagles.

They have a really lame group of players.

While other teams have players getting in trouble with the law in various ways, oh, let’s just pick an example out at random, say, holding sex parties on boats, the Mormon-led Philadelphia Eagles have a player Dhani Jones getting arrested for dancing and, now, Donovan McNabb and Jeremiah Trotter parking in handicapped spaces.

Trotter and McNabb’s cars were caught parking in handicapped spots in Glassboro, N.J., which happens to be ground zero for handicapped parking rights’ activist Maryann Cottrell, who turns in motorists who have parked in handicapped spots.

McNabb had a pretty good defense, actually — he was in the hospital at the time his car was ticketed — and it was his security advisor who actually parked the car, but no dice: He’s hit with $289 in a ticket and court costs. (By the way, when you get a parking ticket, don’t you just pay it unless you really, really feel you didn’t do anything wrong? Who fights these things?)

Trotter didn’t show up for his morning hearing — again, you’re rich, just pay the ticket! — but when the judge threatened to suspend his license, he showed up around noon. No word on his ticket, but it seems he’ll end up paying for his vehicular transgressions, too.

Geeze. What does it take to get a good athlete scandal around here? Oh, yeah, Terrell Owens. Can we get him back?

2 Phila. Eagles Face Wrath of Glassboro, NJ Parking Judge [KYW 1060]
Culpepper Now Free To Have Naked Women Dance In His General Vicinity (But There, And Only There) [Deadspin]
March 27: Let’s Hear It For The Boy