A white-paneled truck stood motionless and stationary in Midtown one recent morning, the driver wrapped in his phone and oblivious to what was happening outside.
There in the street, Paul Slapikas stole his prey. Skinny and 81 years old, Mr. Slapikas stood in front of the truck like a lost tourist, a camera dangling from his neck and a map sticking out of his coat pocket. He seemed to be deep in conversation on an old flip phone – big hand gestures, a glance at a watch, a tap on the neck as if looking for a friend.
After exactly three minutes and ten seconds, Mr. Slapikas—a lifelong New Yorker who lives a few miles away in Queens—slammed the phone shut, tapped his watch screen, and walked away. If everything goes as it should, he just made $87.50, and maybe more, for those few minutes, and the company that owns the truck will be fined at least $350 that never saw it coming. But for now, Mr. Slapikas is ahead, a bounty hunter perky looking for his next target.
“Easy choices,” said Woodside’s former naval and retired computer specialist.
This is a scene from the city’s benign, but often raucous Citizens Air Complaint Program, a public health campaign that invites – and pays – people to report trucks that have been parked or idling for more than three minutes, or a minute if they are outside a school. Those who file a report collect 25 percent of every fine against a truck by submitting a little over 3 minutes of video of the engine running and the name of the company on the door.
The program has dramatically increased the number of complaints about idling trucks sent into the city, from just a handful before its founding in 2018 to more than 12,000 last year. Some of those complaints become menacing when truck drivers respond.
“I go out thinking I’m going to be attacked,” said Ernest Welde, 47, an environmental lawyer. “My suitcases were stolen by truck drivers. I have been physically attacked. I had to call the police a few times.”
Another man, Eric Eisenberg, had a similar experience in the city last year. An Amazon driver and two colleagues noticed Mr Eisenberg pointed his phone’s camera at their idling truck, knocked him to the ground and detained him, according to a lawsuit Mr Eisenberg filed in January.
“Yes, it is, Dad,” said one of the men according to the lawsuit.
It is believed that vehicles idling in the United States collectively expel millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, and researchers estimate that eliminating excessive idling of only personal vehicles would have a similar effect to taking 5 million of the car off the street. The country’s 250 million cars.
Several states have laws against excessive idling, but few have citizen outsourcing programs like New York City.
The program and increased interest in filing complaints have sparked a new game of cat-and-mouse on the city’s streets as citizen reporters looking for stationary trucks and drivers, perhaps stung by past fines, are increasingly be wary of people with cameras. New levels of stealth have come into play, such as Mr. Slapikas’ tourist disguise.
The camera around his neck has no film. The flip phone does not work. They’re distractions from what’s really going on, which he asked not to be explained in detail and thus revealed to the truck drivers – suffice it to say, it’s an iPhone he’s not holding in his hands while recording. And a lot of fake calls on the flip phone.
If all this seems like a lot of effort for a $350 fine, consider the following: Mr. Slapikas said he raked in $64,000 in rewards in 2021 for simply paying attention to his daily walks to exercise: “I would expect that he takes three a day without even looking.”
He is one of about 20 busy citizen reporters who collectively submit about 85 percent of complaints to the city, a data analysis showed last year. They number a pediatrician, several lawyers and a retired police detective. The loose group exchanges tips and stories, calls themselves Idling Warriors and submits hundreds of complaints every month. The pandemic, and the city’s increased reliance on supplies, has only added more work.
The city paid more than $724,000 in premiums last year alone, and $1.1 million since 2019. For its share, the city received $2.4 million in fines last year, 24 percent more than when the program got serious three years ago. began.
And yet several citizen reporters said in interviews that creaky bureaucracy, loopholes, exemptions and an apparent disinterest in imposing more and more fines have left countless penalties untouched.
For every fine it hands out, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the program, appears to be waving others away for reasons that seem arbitrary to reporters: The company’s name isn’t legible on the truck door, though the license plate could be the reveal owner. The truck’s engine is not clearly audible on the video, even with smoke coming from the exhaust pipe.
Mr Welde, the lawyer, said he filed some 2,000 complaints last year and most are yet to be processed.
“I’ve probably brought the city close to $800,000 in revenue and they’re just going to leave it on the table if they don’t get a staff to come in there and do reports,” he said.
A deputy commissioner at the department, Angela Licata, said the system is still developing and hopefully improving, but the strict requirements for filing a complaint are needed to successfully pursue that claim in court later.
“We can also appreciate that these individuals are putting a lot of time and energy into this,” she said. “We don’t want them to get frustrated.”
She said a staff of 14 is handling the steady stream of complaints where before the program it was only the occasional job of one person.
Excessive idling has been illegal since the 1970s, and the city unveiled a revamped anti-idling program in 2020 with the kitschy endorsement of, yes, Billy Idol, the spiky-haired rock star of “Rebel Yell” and “White Wedding” fame. “Billy Never Idles” was the slogan.
By then, the citizen reporting program had been quietly underway for over a year. Mr. Welde, the environmental lawyer, recalls a dramatic confrontation earlier in his coverage. He was filming a truck—United Refrigeration, he said—and the driver noticed and turned it off, but when Mr. Welde started to walk away, he turned it back on. Mr. Welde continued filming.
“He went from zero to 100 and started taking his shirt off and his watch and started chasing me,” he said. “I ran.”
Mr Welde said he was passionate about improving air quality before the rewards program but called it a great incentive. “The money, it’s great,” he said. If his unhandled complaints from last year lead to fines, he expects to earn $200,000 to $225,000, he said.
Making the video is the easy part of the complaint. “Now the work begins,” said Mr. Slapikas. Videos and photos must be compressed and time-stamped and accompanied by screenshots of the identifying information. Originally, a notary’s signature was required, but today an affidavit from the reporter is sufficient.
There’s more work to be done: it’s the citizen journalists’ responsibility to track them through the subpoena and hearing system after they file their complaint. Many are surprised to learn that it is also their responsibility to determine whether a truck is a repeat offender, and therefore liable for a higher fine – and the reporter a higher premium. The reporters said they spent hours scouring open data records to see if trucks have been cited before — and wonder why the city isn’t doing this in the first place.
Ms. Licata said the department is investigating to self-identify repeat offenders and possibly increase their fines.
The reporters are also responsible for claiming their rewards months later, once they learn that a fine has been paid. The city doesn’t automatically pay the reporters.
The various hurdles may be why the number of people who regularly encounter them is only about 20. A Manhattan attorney who has filed many complaints said he believes most people who file just one give up.
The thrill of the hunt continues. “Your adrenaline gets so pumped up because you could be attacked by this person at any time,” Mr. Welde said. “I have an attack-only file on my computer.”
Still, he tells his friends about the program. “Everyone I say this to says, ‘That’s great, I want to do it,’ and nobody does it,” he said. Similarly, Mr. Slapikas said his circle showed little interest: “They don’t have the motivation to do it.” do it yourself – it’s a full-time job.”
In Midtown, Mr. Slapikas approached an idling truck as if it were a skittish animal, and he leaned over to place his palm against the exhaust pipe and confirm that the engine was running.
“They say the streets are paved with gold,” he said. He started his video, recorded the license plate and slowly walked forward to record the engine noise. He started talking into his prop phone; if anyone had passed by, they could have heard him recite Shakespeare, “Now is the winter of our discontent…”
Inside a truck that was picking up Mr. Slapikas was a driver named Jason Rodriguez. Did he notice? “Never,” he said a moment later, after Mr. Slapikas had left. He turned off his engine. “Thanks for the heads up,” he said, adding that his boss has warned about the complaints program in the past. “He said it’s not fair.”