This is the sixth first-round battle in our annual March (Parking) Madness contest. Previously in the first round, Brooklyn Heights's 84th Precinct, the 110th Precinct in Elmhurst, the 48th in the Bronx and last year's champs, the 114th Precinct, all moved onto their disrespective borough finals. Polls remain open until Tuesday at 11:59 p.m. in our first Manhattan semi-final battle, so click here to vote. For a reminder on why we do this contest, click here.
The precincts meeting in today's matchups managed to keep their parking sins to the spaces just around the precinct, which could possibly be chalked up to the fact that both precincts have parking lots and both are near subway stops (or that someone read last year's contest?). But what the precincts lack in disrespectful parking practices they more than make up for in hideous driving records. Almost every car we found parked at the 69th and 83rd was flagged multiple times by red light and speed cameras, an unfortunate tribute to our S-Cops-Laws feature.
83rd Precinct (Bushwick)
The 83rd Precinct is mere blocks away from the Myrtle-Wyckoff transit hub, which could maybe explain why only a piece of one sidewalk was taken over by a combination of official and personal cars.
One officer outdid himself by ensuring that his patrol van was parked directly against the sidewalk though, making it literally impossible to walk down the block unimpeded. We hope no one in the neighborhood uses a wheelchair, pushes a stroller, or just wants to be treated with a little respect by officers sworn to protect and serve them:
Then again, there was also a big parking lot, leaving far less of a reason for someone to park a car where it doesn't belong.
But unsurprisingly, officers who did park on the sidewalk were uniformly dangerous drivers. Five out of nine cars parked on the sidewalk had not only been nailed by school zone or red light cameras, all five were multiple offenders, including one speed demon who somehow has managed to get four camera-issued speeding tickets this year already. Two drivers got at least one school-zone speeding ticket each year between 2018 and 2022, and while the other drivers have kept a clean record so far in 2022, two more drivers were multiple year scofflaws.
But this is nothing compared to our next contender.
69th Precinct (Canarsie)
Of course, someone has to win lose the game, and in our opinion, the 69th Precinct is the favorite to move on to the next round. The not-so-nice officers of the 69th also have a parking lot and also are just steps from both the L train and the B6, B60 and B82. But officers at the 69th didn't only cut off sidewalks with their cars on both Foster Avenue and East 98th Street...
...they also used the sidewalk as a dumping ground for unwanted office furniture. After all, if no one can walk on the sidewalk, it's a good place to store your broken chairs, right?
It's also a good place to store your destroyed cars from a gruesome crash, because it's not like you don't have a parking lot for that.
Officers from the 69th beat their neighbors to the north in terms of raw numbers of dangerous drivers and percentage of sidewalk parkers who got nabbed by cameras. Thirteen out of 15 cars parked on the sidewalk around the precinct had at least one ticket from a red light or speed camera, making for an astounding 86 percent of illegally parked cars. Also there was this license plate cover, which is illegal.
No one was able to top the individual fireworks of whoever it was from the 83rd Precinct who managed to get four school-zone speed tickets already this year, but there were still plenty of speed demons among the ranks of the Canarsie precinct. Among them: a driver who got multiple school-zone speeding tickets in 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2021; a driver who got at least one school-zone speeding ticket every year from 2016 to 2022; a driver who got 14 school zone tickets between 2019 and 2021; four drivers who got more than one ticket from a red light camera and one driver who only got caught speeding once, but also racked up 15 parking tickets in six years.
No matter which precinct you think should advance, don't forget that these issues go much deeper than sidewalk parking. According to Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez, multiple offenders are supposed to be rare with traffic cameras.
"[F]rom the start of the program in 2014 through the end of 2020 — seven years — the majority of violators had received no more than two notices of liability," Rodriguez recently told the City Council.
But as these precincts show, even when the NYPD doesn't decide to steal sidewalk space, their staff can show contempt for the rest of us by happily taking up spots as some of the worst of the worst drivers in the entire city.
But which precinct deserves to move onto the borough final? Vote now. We'll keep the polls open until Wednesday at 11:59 p.m. so tell all your friends!
