Diplomatic Parking Violations in New York City
Diplomatic representatives to the United Nations and their families are given immunity from prosecution or lawsuits in the United States. The original intent of these laws was to protect diplomats from mistreatment abroad, especially in countries not on friendly terms with the home country.6 However, these days diplomatic immunity is more commonly viewed as the “best free parking pass in town” (BBC News 1998). Dip- lomatic vehicles in New York possess license plates tagged with the letter D, which signals diplomatic status.7 While these vehicles may be ticketed, the car’s registrant is shielded from any punishment for nonpayment of the ticket. Thus one immediate implication of diplomatic immunity— not just in New York, but also in most other capitals (e.g., London [BBC News 1998], Paris [Agence Presse–France 2005], and Seoul [Korea Times 1999])—has been that it allows diplomats to park illegally but never suffer the threat of legal punishment, leaving a “paper trail” of the illegal acts (see http://www.state.gov/m/ds/immunities/c9127.htm). To illus- trate the magnitude of the problem, between November 1997 and the end of 2002 in New York City, diplomats accumulated over 150,000 unpaid parking tickets, resulting in outstanding fines of more than $18 million.
The New York City parking violations data are at the level of the individual unpaid violation.8 Drivers have 30 days to pay a ticket before it goes into default, at which point an additional penalty is levied (gen- erally 110 percent of the initial fine). Diplomats then receive an addi- tional 70 days to pay the ticket plus this penalty before it is recorded in our data set as an unpaid violation in default. The information on each violation includes the license plate number; the name and country of origin of the car’s registrant; the date, time, and location of the
6 While the origins of diplomatic protection date back many centuries, the current incarnation is found in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. See http://www.un.int/usa/host_dip.htm for the full text.
7 Note that while the vehicle’s diplomatic status is revealed by the license plate, the country codes denoting particular countries are unrelated to country names; e.g., the code (at the start of the plate number) for Mozambique is QS and the code for Nigeria is JF.
8 We gratefully acknowledge the New York City Department of Finance, in particular Sam Miller and Gerald Koszner, for compiling these data.
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violation; the fine and penalty levied; and the amount paid (if any). The most common violation in our data was parking in a No Standing— Loading Zone (43 percent of violations), which is typically parking in someone else’s driveway or business entrance. The remainder were spread across a range of violation types that imply varying degrees of social harm:9 fines for expired meters accounted for 6 percent of the total, double-parking 5 percent, and parking in front of a fire hydrant 7 percent, for instance. Also note that in 20 percent of violations the registrant is the mission itself, signifying an official rather than personal vehicle. While the majority of violations are located within a mile of either the country’s UN mission or the UN complex, many are com- mitted in other parts of the city. We return to the issue of violation location below. The total period of coverage in our data set is November 24, 1997, to November 21, 2005. (Refer to the Data Appendix for more on the data set.)
A crucial change in legal enforcement took place in October 2002, when the State Department gave New York City permission to revoke the official diplomatic plates of vehicles with three or more outstanding unpaid violations (Steinhauer 2002). In addition, the Clinton-Schumer Amendment (named after the two New York senators), put in place at the same time, allowed the city to petition the State Department to have 110 percent of the total amount due deducted from U.S. foreign aid to the offending diplomats’ country, although this latter punishment was never invoked in practice (Singleton 2004).
In constructing our data set, we generate separate measures of the extent of unpaid violations for the pre-enforcement (November 1997– October 2002) and postenforcement (November 2002–November 2005) periods. In each case, we employ the total number of unpaid diplomatic parking violations for a particular country. In order to control for base- line mission size, we calculate the total number of UN permanent mis- sion staff with diplomatic privileges using the UN Blue Book for May 1998. Published twice annually, the Blue Book lists all UN mission staff, as well as their official titles. We additionally use UN Blue Books for 1997–2005 to track the UN tenure of individual diplomats. Fortunately, the Blue Books generally use consistent spellings across editions, facil- itating automated matching across time. In most cases, the spelling and format were also consistent with the names in the parking violations data; the algorithm automatically matched 61 percent of diplomats in the violations database. The first Blue Book we use is from January 1997,
9 Almost all parking violations in the data set resulted in fines of US$55, making it impossible to assess the extent of social damage by violations’ relative prices.
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1026 journal of political economy
and we use this as our start date for calculating tenure at the United Nations.10
We obtained data on the number of diplomatic license plates regis- tered to each mission from the U.S. State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions, and we use these data as a control variable in some specifi- cations. Unfortunately, these data are available only for 2006, though we were assured that the numbers are largely stable over time.11
Table 1 presents the annual number of violations per diplomat by country during the pre-enforcement period (November 1997–October 2002) and the postenforcement period (November 2002–November 2005), along with the total number of diplomats in May 1998. Overall, the basic pattern accords reasonably well with common perceptions of corruption across countries. The worst parking violators—the 10 worst (in order) are Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Al- bania, Angola, Senegal, and Pakistan—all rank poorly in cross-country corruption rankings (described below), with the exception of Kuwait. The raw correlation between the country corruption rankings and pre- enforcement parking violations per diplomat is �0.18, and that between the corruption ranking and postenforcement violations per capita is �0.24. While many of the countries with zero violations accord well with intuition (e.g., the Scandinavian countries, Canada, and Japan), there are a number of surprises. Some of these are countries with very small missions (e.g., Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic), and a few others have high rates of parking violations but do pay off the fines (these are Bahrain, Malaysia, Oman, and Turkey; we return to this issue below). The smallest missions may plausibly have fewer violations since each mission is given two legal parking spaces at the United Nations, and this may suffice if the country has very few diplomats.
Figure 1 plots the total violations per month during November 1997– November 2005. There are two clear declines in the number of viola- tions. The first comes in September 2001, corresponding to the period following the World Trade Center attack. The second and extremely pronounced decline coincides with increased legal enforcement of dip- lomatic parking violators.