GothamistAreas in red mean more pee pee arrests.
Let’s say you are a New Yorker, or you are visiting New York, and you have every intention of being a good citizen. You really do. But then you get super drunk and all the Starbucks are closed. You’ve been following all the rules and you don’t want to get busted for this one tiny thing, but you really really really have to pee on someone’s shrub right now. Luckily for you, the NYPD’s Records Access Division keeps stats about where in the city people get arrested for peeing, and Gothamist was nice enough to put them into this amazing interactive map.
What you do is you just find a neighborhood, and click on it, and then you will see how many arrests were made in that precinct for public urination. For example: The West Village, precinct 6: 704 arrests in 2012. The Upper West Side (southern half), precinct 20: 22 arrests in 2012. Finally, there’s Williamsburg, precinct 90, with a whopping 1,181 public urinations in 2012. Jesus, Lena Dunham.
Of course, stats don’t tell the whole story. Yes, a lot of people pee on the street in Williamsburg, but a lot of people pee on the Lower East Side too. Even if there were only 434 citations there, it doesn’t mean less pee — it might mean there are more bathrooms, or fewer cops who care. So this map is not useful for determining which parts of New York are less urine-soaked. But it might help you avoid arrest through strategic geography.
Still, though: Try to pee in the bar, in that white porcelain thing that was made for it. It works pretty well.
