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Oh, the bottle of alcohol in a brown paper bag, you're almost getting the respect you've been working for: Now if you get fined for having an open bottle of booze, en-brown-bagged, you just need to send in a check for $25 if you don't want to contest the charge. But, if you think you were unfairly accused to stumbling around the streets, smelling of your Colt 45, you can still go to court. The Times has statistics for summons for "open containers of alcohol in public" as well as rates of conviction and rates of cases being dismissed. Have any readers been busted for that? And have they gone to court? Gothamist was once in a car that was pulled over, and police were gleeful when they heard clinking bottles, only to find a stash of empty Snapple bottles.
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I was. I had to waste a day-off sitting in the courtroom just to be told not to do it again and to pay $25. There were people there in court that day who were caught with a joint that got off with just a promise not to do it again. There were people who didn't have the proper color flag on their jet-ski who were given a $100 fine.
I can't believe we are closing firehouses in this city and yet we pay to use the summons/court system for things that should just be a simple fine. stoopid, but typically so.
Bottle of wine in Tompkins Square Park. Was going to contest it, but the charges were mysteriously dropped. Shame they sent the notice to my mom's address, though.
Tecates in Fort Greene Park this year and Ballantines 40s in the subway last year. Both times the cops were super buddy-buddy, insinuating they approved of our liquor choices, wished they could be in our shoes (probably not the summons part of the shoes so much as the boozing), thought we were great kids... One even offered us his services in home repair and decoration. then slapped us with stupid $60 fines and summonses. Thats not how BUDDIES treat other BUDDIES.
Man, I am so glad I read this. I got popped about two weeks ago in Manhattan with a Foster's in a brown paper bag.
But now I wonder, should I show up and try to fight it? or should i just mail in the $25. The thing is, when I got the ticket the cop told me I had to appear, and there's nothing on the ticket itself that says the fine is $25. I had been planning on taking a long lunch break and going down to the clerk's office to pay it (in advance of the court date.)
I got nailed for a Bass in a paper bag while coming out of a 6th St. Indian restaurant, and spent a day two months later waiting to be called by a judge. Almost everyone else in the courtroom was open bottle, too, except for the people that caught later on in the night for public urination.
I was walking down the street in Williamsburg once, slightly out of it, with an empty beer-in-paper-bag in my hand, when the cops pulled up in a car and asked what was in the bottles. We said "nothing", and they just told us to throw them away (we did) and didn't give us a ticket.
Did I mention that we were walking in the middle of the street?
What's the point of the brown paper bag, anyway? I always thought it protected you from summons, but apparently not.
Before I moved back to NY, I had visited friends living on the LES with my then boyfriend. We had pretty much hopped from bar to bodega alternating brown bags with drinks purchased and consumed at establishments. The night was youngish but BF was pretty drunk, as was I to a lesser degree. Somehow he decides to buy an entire six pack of beer to drink brown bag style while sitting infront of a random stoop. In his state he dropped the entire bag (smash, tears.. bye bye beers) then goes back into the same bodega and buys another- just as friendly officer walks around as he is swigging.. Friendly officer asks what is in the bag- BF says Nothing.. Officer says "Why are you lying to my face, do you think I am stupid?" BF gets belligerent- I mediate- suffice to say I saved his hide from a trip uptown- officer made him pour the entire (new) sixer in down the drain- but he actually said to me "he would have been fine if he did not take a swig when the bottle was not yet in the bag".
a friend was busted THIS WEEK by the NYC police van that goes around looking for weed and open alcohol. he said they picked up someone for open beer while he was riding around in the van. i posted about it yesterday on my site...
http://cityrag.blogs.com/main/2004/week27/index.html#a0001705618
wrote a song about it, wanna hear it? My Day In Court, Summer 1999
i went to court, it was lovely, i got off on the open container charge, it was peeing on the cop car while they were writing my ticket that got to them, but paying 50 bucks was well worth it
All these years, nobody has been able to explain to me where cops get the right to look into our private belongings. Where the hell did "unlawful search and siezure" go?
First it was suspicion of drug dealing and "ooh, that shape in your coat looks like a gun". Now, they're using al-Qaeda as an excuse to go through our stuff?
Next, they'll want to have sex with my mother to make sure miniaturized suicide bombers aren't hiding out in her vaginga.
Sitting on the corner of Washington and Underhill in Brooklyn at about four or five in the morning. It was one of those hot-as-crap NY summer nights, eighty five and humid. Out of my mind on a whole number of intoxicating substances. Forty of Budweiser in plain site. Cops drove up and probably took notice because I was the only white guy for about three miles. They wrote out the ticket, but I went belligerent (cocaine's a hell of a drug) and refused to sign it. That seemed to work - when I showed up at court a few months later they had no record of it.
I just get the bodega owner to pour the beer in am empty coke can. Messes up the taste a little, but it's better than shelling out another $25. if I get caught....