NYPD Attorney Proposes Innovative Car Share System For NYC

Earlier this week, officers from the makeup-friendly New York Police Department swarmed Manhattan's East Village for an important duty: Taking a bunch of bicycles. There were worker-friendly e-bikes parked on the side of the street, you see, tightly and neatly parked along the curb — behavior the NYPD simply could not allow in spots that could have gone to cars. 

Then the cops apparently realized that street-parking a New York bicycle isn't actually a crime, and wandered off, but not before telling New Yorkers a new truth: Cars are no longer owned by the individual in our fair city. A new day has dawned, comrades!

The full quote, from NYPD attorney Matt Russo via StreetsBlog, is this: "You can't store personal property on the street. A bike is personal property and a car is not." It's official: Cars are no longer personal property within the five boroughs of New York City. Given that they're not private property, either (they aren't means of production) or public property (they're not owned by the government), the NYPD clearly means that every car is owned by all New Yorkers — free for all of us to use as we need.

The exact tenets of this new Marxism-Leninism-NYPDism have yet to be clearly laid out by any authority, though presumably the mayor's office will issue some sort of statement defining how the new interborough carshare will work — Mayor Zohran Mamdani must have won over Police Commisioner Jessica Tisch something fierce. From each according to their automobile ownership, to each according to their need for a car. The original pitch of Uber and Lyft, finally realized by the apparently newly woke New York Police Department. 

Sure, the statement from the NYPD attorney was based on a truly fascinating misunderstanding of what constitutes personal property, but I can dream of a world where men who don't know what ownership is aren't going around taking bicycles from people for the crime of not being white. I can imagine a police department committed to social ownership of goods like automobiles, and I beg you to let me live in this world a little longer. It's better than the one we've got.