The week before last, a white Dodge van with dark windows and no license plate sat parked in the middle of Time's Square for at least two days without receiving a ticket. Tourists and office workers ambled around it until the day before New Year's Eve, when someone finally called the police, who sent out a bomb squad and a robot to inspect the vehicle before declaring it safe. For the most part, the incident was viewed as a cautionary tale about the war on terror: while our eyes are trained on the skies, our crosswalks remain vulnerable. But in some precincts it was seen as part of a smaller-scale war that has been going on longer: the war against parking placards. The van didn't raise alarm, police said, because its dashboard displayed a sign for a police fraternal organization, the Detectives Crime Clinic of New Jersey and New York (The group said the placard may have been stolen; police said the van-which contained fake Burberry scarves-belonged to a sidewalk vendor.)

The move was bold, but the tactic was familiar. Parking placards, like bobbleheads and fuzzy dice, are a long-standing feature of the landscape of urban windshields. They are distributed to city and state agencies--police, clergy, housing--to be used by workers when on official business. In practice, they are treated as twenty-four-hour parking passes, and are highly coveted. (In 2008, the Post reported a spate of break-ins in Washington Heights, where thieves smashed a number of windshields to steal the placards within.) Tabloid photographers never tire of busting prominent placard-abusers. Reported offenders have included Kimora Lee Simmons, whose driver, a moonlighting prison guard, put up a Department of Corrections placard while taking her shopping at Barneys, and Ron Perelman, who, according to the Post, stuck a sign from a charity called the Federal Law Enforcement Foundation on the dashboard of his Yukon Denali S.U.V. (A spokesperson for Perelman said that the car in question belonged to an employee.) According to Wiley Norvell, the communications director for the pedestrian-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, last week happened to be a big one for high-profile placard abuse: Justice A. Kirke Bartley, who presided over the Astor trial, was caught using a state-police placard to avoid feeding meters near his Upper East Side home so was Pedro Espada, Jr., the State Senate majority leader, whose car was parked in front of a fire hydrant.

Mayor Bloomberg has cut the number of city-issued placards in recent years, but, Norvell said, the problem is systemic: because parking agents don't want to risk ticketing other civil servants, they don't enforce the rules. "If you can get away with throwing any old thing on your dashboard, it doesn't matter how many placards are issued," he said.

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[more available to New Yorker subscribers: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/01/18/100118ta_talk_widdicombe]