The Park Slope Patch and the Brooklyn Paper both reported this week that the 78th Precinct will soon be ticketing cyclists in Prospect Park, in response to two crashes in the past six months where cyclists injured pedestrians on a downhill slope of the park loop.
Now that NYPD has shown a willingness to respond to crashes with targeted enforcement, here are some other locations where police might want to devote some resources:
- Eastern Parkway near Bergen Street in Brooklyn, where the Reverend Theauther Love, 87, was struck and killed during his morning walk last month.
- Hillside Avenue near 198th Street in Queens, where a motorist killed Queens Civic Congress President Pat Dolan as she was walking to a community board meeting two weeks ago.
- Fifth Avenue and 65th Street in Manhattan, where this October an 86-year-old grandmother walking in the crosswalk was run over and killed by a turning tow truck driver who failed to yield.
- Broadway and 106th Street, where a motorist struck and killed Daniela D'Ercole as she exited a cab and crossed the street, the impact reportedly sending her body across multiple lanes of traffic.
Ray Kelly's NYPD did not respond to these deaths with a display of targeted enforcement to deter dangerous driving. They responded by saying "no criminality" was involved and exonerating the drivers without much of an explanation why. Of the hundreds of other fatalities and thousands of injuries caused by motorists each year in NYC, the overwhelming majority receive a similar non-response from police.
It remains to be seen how many cyclists will be subject to summonses by exceeding the 25 mph Prospect Park speed limit, but it won't take many for the 78th Precinct to exceed the number of speeding tickets it gives out to motorists. In October, the 78th issued just five summonses for speeding [PDF].
Failure to observe the speed limit is ubiquitous citywide and contributes to hundreds of deaths and life-altering injuries each year. Where is the NYPD response?
