About Those Cell Phones

Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave his annual State of the City speech in which he outlined his administration’s plans to build on past successes and take steps toward a brighter future.
We applaud most of his plans including lowering the overall property tax rate by 5 percent for property owners to go along with continuation of the $400 rebate.
The proposed elimination of the City’s 4 percent sales tax for all clothing and footwear - not just items up to $110 - is a great idea. We hope Governor Eliot Spitzer can find a way to eliminate the remaining 4.3 percent State sales tax and help our merchants compete with their New Jersey counterparts.
Plans to further empower school principals and send letter grades for all schools to parents are moves in the right direction.
This City needs more affordable housing and Bloomberg plans to build and preserve 165,000 units in the most ambitious - $7.5 billion - initiative ever undertaken by an American city. Bravo!
On the crime front, “This year, we’ll begin a revolutionary innovation in crime-fighting - equipping 9-1-1 call centers to receive digital images and videos New Yorkers send from cell phones and computers, something no other city in the world is doing,” Bloomberg said.
“If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition you’ll be able to transmit images to 9-1-1, or online to NYC.GOV. And we’ll start extending the same technology to 3-1-1 to allow New Yorkers to step forward and document non-emergency quality of life concerns, holding City agencies accountable for correcting them quickly and efficiently,” he said.
We cannot help but wonder if this plan will be a boon or a boondoggle? We suspect that 9-1-1 will rapidly become flooded with videos and the precincts will not be able to keep up with the influx of information.
Perhaps the Mayor will reverse his policy banning students from bringing cell phones with them to schools now that any John Doe in the street can send in his cell phone video to 9-1-1. Students can be the victims of crimes or observers of crime and dangerous building conditions on the way to and from school.
We must allow a million schoolkids to have their cell phones too!