About a month ago, police officers from the 6th Precinct started cracking down on the book vendors and their ubiquitous tables lining Sixth Avenue, especially down by the West 4th Street area. According to DNAinfo, more than 3000 books were confiscated one morning, with officers citing numerous violations of the city's General Vendor Code—this includes violations like leaving tables and wares set up overnight, and covering tree pits.
While police crackdowns on vendors are nothing new, and the Sixth Avenue booksellers have been around for decades—back in 2000 a sociologist from Princeton wrote "Sidewalk," a book about the vendors and their scrappy lifestyle, excerpts of which are available on Google books—their numerous violations were often ignored by police.
According to Robert Lederman, a longtime activist for vendors rights in New York, the recent raids "fit a pattern of what's going on lately downtown, increased summonsing and arresting of artists and also 'gray area artists,' or craftspeople—people not protected by the First Amendment."
Lederman estimates that the reason for such a big raid—a full day's worth of officers loading books into trucks—was that the local business improvement district had complained about the sellers.
Terri Howell, the business and community services manager of the Village Alliance, the Greenwich Village BID office, didn't confirm that they had specifically complained but pointed out that several issues made the booksellers non-complaint with the law: the "abandoning" of property overnight, and having the tables set up over tree pits.
"Those are both things that are completely not legal," Howell said. "The rats are proliferating under the tables [in the tree pits] because they're protected. We had an urban arborist come in to look at the pits, and she confirmed it." Another question: Is "proliferating" our new favorite euphemism?
Howell also speculates that Brandon del Pozo, the new Deputy Inspector of the 6th Precinct, was trying to stretch his legs and increase his presence in the new beat. He was appointed the position less than a year ago.
