A crime wave can be a boon to the media—dramatic content, urgent headlines. The other afternoon, in lower Manhattan, Gersh Kuntzman, the former Post and Daily News columnist, who now runs Streetsblog NYC, set out to document a crime wave of his own making. He slipped on fluorescent gloves and mounted his silver-and-lime bike, which was covered with stickers (“FUCK CARS”) and outfitted with a black pannier. Inside: paper towels and a blue acrylic paint pen. The goal: to restore license plates whose numbers had been intentionally obscured, a common, illegal tactic employed by drivers looking to evade the city’s speeding-ticket cameras. The restoration work was not exactly legal, either. Kuntzman held up a lanyard. “I always have my press pass,” he said, “just in case we get into a fight.”
In November, a Brooklyn lawyer had been arrested for “criminal mischief” for undefacing a plate. Inspired by the news, Kuntzman began filming similar acts of vigilantism and posting them on Twitter, along with an earworm theme song he’d written, to call attention to the problem. On his lower-Manhattan ride, he found his first offender on Lafayette Street near Walker: a Lexus with a chunk of paint missing from the letter “D” on the back plate. Kuntzman, a hammy fifty-seven-year-old with a short beard, whipped out his pen and his phone to record himself coloring it in, using the plate’s embossing as a guide. “There it is,” he said. “Nice, clean plate.”
He headed south, past a row of cars infringing liberally on a new bike lane. He slowed before Worth Street, at a silver Mercedes parked in a crosswalk. The car’s plates were encased in opaque plastic—impossible for the cameras to read. On the dash: an M.T.A. Police placard.
A man in a suit approached hesitantly and placed a toddler in the Mercedes’s back seat. A woman in a short white dress and carrying a red bouquet opened the passenger door. Kuntzman shamed them for the plate cover. “We just got married, sir,” the woman said. “Can you calm down?”
Kuntzman offered congratulations and rode off. Such confrontations, he said, were rare. Once, in Brooklyn, he snapped two cars bearing identical plates. A woman came up to him and asked why he was taking photos of her car. “I said, ‘I’m not,’ ” Kuntzman recalled, “which was a lie.” Later, he called 311 and reported her.
He entered Federal Plaza, a hotbed of malfeasance. “It wouldn’t dawn on most members of the public to cover their plate,” Kuntzman explained. But law-enforcement types do it all the time. He filmed a gray S.U.V. with covered plates and a mysterious federal placard, and a silver Subaru Impreza with the same type of obscuration and I.D. Down the block, the bumper protector on a Hyundai Elantra with FEMA and D.E.A. markings tactfully hid the rear plate’s final digit. Kuntzman’s favorite method of concealment? Leaves carefully wedged under a plate’s frame. “ ‘Oh, officer, I was parked under a tree last night,’ ” he said, imitating such a culprit, “ ‘and a leaf fell and happened to cover the “F” on my plate!’ ”
On Bowery, Kuntzman stopped to scribble in the missing characters on the plate of a health-care van (“They’re probably curing the sick and helping the ill, but they’re also criminal miscreants,” he said) and to speak with the perplexed driver of a FedEx truck that had no back plate at all. (“Want me to draw one in?” Kuntzman asked.) He surveyed the lot near 1 Police Plaza. Uneventful. “Top brass tend not to engage in this kind of thing,” he said. Then he checked another police lot, beneath a ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge.
He stopped at a Hyundai that offered a subject for the final video of his lunchtime hunt. The paint on one side of the front plate was missing entirely, leaving an expanse of naked tin. “You can’t say this is normal wear and tear,” Kuntzman said into his camera. A burly man in a black parka walked by, looking annoyed. Kuntzman reached for his paint marker, then decided that, given the location, he’d let it go. “I’m not gonna pull out my pen,” he said, grinning. “But you know I could.” ♦