The error is in this section:
{
"id":"2002-12-05-22-24-56_000010083df0188b4001eb56",
"service_name":"Outdoor Electric System Complaint",
"expiration":"2099-12-31T00:00:00Z",
"brief_description":"Report faulty Con Edison equipment, including dangling or corroded power lines or "hot spots.""
}
See where it says "hot spots." in an already quoted string. Those "
's should've been escaped. Since you don't have access to edit the JSON perhaps you could do a search for "hot spots.""
and replace it with \"hot spots.\""
like str_replace('"hot spots.""', '\\"hot spots.\\""\, $str);
for as long as that's in there. Of course that only helps if this is a one time thing. If the site continues to make errors in their JSON output you'll have to come up with something more complex.