Via NYMag, the NYTimes reports on a crime wave in Queens:
… For the past several months, a number of elderly Korean patrons and this McDonald’s they frequent have been battling over the benches inside. The restaurant says the people who colonize the seats on a daily basis are quashing business, taking up tables for hours while splitting a small packet of French fries ($1.39); the group say they are customers and entitled to take their time. A lot of time.
“Do you think you can drink a large coffee within 20 minutes?” David Choi, 77, said. “No, it’s impossible.”
And though they have treated the corner restaurant as their own personal meeting place for more than five years, they say, the situation has escalated in recent months. The police said there had been four 911 calls since November requesting the removal of the entrenched older patrons. Officers have stopped in as frequently as three times a day while on patrol, according to the patrons, who sidle away only to boomerang right back. Medium cups of coffee ($1.09 each) have been spilled; harsh words have been exchanged. And still — proud, defiant and stuck in their ways — they file in each morning, staging a de facto sit-in amid the McNuggets.
“Large group — males, females — refusing to get up and leave,” read the police summary of one 911 call placed on Jan. 3 at 2:30 p.m. “The group passed a lot of sit-down time. Refusing to let other customers sit.”…
Concerned citizens report there are many perfectly cromulent senior centers in the area — apparently some of the aged scofflaws go to those centers for lunch, so they don’t have to eat that McDs crap — but the oldsters just will not be quietly herded off into demographic quarantine, for reasons that are unclear to the CCs. It’s like the alte kackers wanted to be in the way of all the world’s busy-ness!
(Also, as NYMag points out, “Flushing is apparently totally crime-free now, so you may want to consider moving there – unless you place a high value on ample McDonald’s seating.”)