Jessica Tisch, Mayor Adams's new pick to head the NYPD, showed a deep commitment to reforming New York City's cluttered and unsafe streets as head of the Department of Sanitation. Time will tell if she carries that commitment over to 1 Police Plaza, where the entrenched institutional shortcomings run far deeper than at the agency responsible for garbage collection.
We've tangled over the years with the NYPD over its deficient commitment to Vision Zero (and we're not just talking about all the cops-in-bike-lane tweets), but a new commissioner is a chance for a clean slate.
So we'll meet Tisch halfway by offering her a list of places to start if she wants to involve the NYPD in making city streets safer for pedestrians, cyclists, kids, seniors and even motor vehicle occupants:
1. Make police follow the law — and discipline them if they don't
NYPD's "anything goes" attitude towards driving behavior is on display in every corner of the city, and sets the lowest bar possible for public.
For starters, cops' illegal parking outside of precincts is so bad that the Justice Department threatened to sue the department earlier this year for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act for routinely blocked sidewalks and crosswalks (something Streetsblog documented in its multi-year "Parking Madness" tournament).
Police officers are also the city's most notorious bike- and bus-lane blockers. NYPD has seemingly never told its employees to do their part to keep bike lanes and bus lanes clear. That forces cyclists to dangerously maneuver into car traffic and slows down bus service for hard-working commuters.
Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Gersh Kuntzman's "criminal mischief" campaign has exposed law enforcement officers as the most-brazen violators of laws that prohibit drivers from obscuring their license plates to skirt tolls and traffic enforcement cameras.
Sociologist Noah McClain, who researches policy misconduct and impunity, has shown that NYPD rarely disciplines driving related misconduct — except in instances where the officers have committed other, unrelated violations.
"The NYPD could certainly tie promotion beyond rank of Lieutenant to integrity indicators for the unit or command under their supervision. Abuse of placards or other insignia, parking on sidewalks and using defaced plates and the like on officers’ personal vehicles are unique indicators because they are on full public display and discoverable with a quick audit of the blocks around a precinct," McClain told Streetsblog.
"Command supervisors who look the other way even on the NYPD’s own rules governing officers’ private vehicles may be looking the other way on other matters, as well," he added. "So, even if the NYPD cannot be convinced that safe, usable streets and sidewalks are important public goods the NYPD ought to work towards, those same goals might be supported in pursuit of the integrity which NYPD claims is so central to its mission."
As McClain has documented, the NYPD actually has official "Self Enforcement Zones" around precincts where the department effectively allows unfettered illegal parking by cops. To rein in the practice, Tisch could set specific rules for those zones and clearly delineate where they start and end, McClain told Streetsblog.
She could also get rid of "Self Enforcement Zones" entirely.
Department employees will continue to violate the law if they know they can get away with it. It's past time to bring the gauntlet down on that behavior, which Streetsblog has shown is easy to catch — just visit any police precinct house.
Of course, Tisch's predecessors have been thwarted from enacting tough discipline on department employees close to Mayor Adams. Making matters worse, former Police Commissioner Edward Caban reduced the suggestion punishments for a slew of offenses, including refusing to take complaints from civilians, on his way out in September, The City reported. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams called that out in a statement on Wednesday.
"No commissioner should be preventing the disciplinary processes from playing out, as others have," Williams said, "and needed reforms should be seen as progress rather than obstacles."
2. Keep bike lanes and bus lanes cleared of illegal parking
NYPD has little interest in enforcing laws against drivers blocking bus lanes and bike lanes — as demonstrated by its minuscule response rate to blocked bike lane complaints filed by members of the public through the city's 311 system. Officers have made their disdain for enforcing against parking violations clear by harassing and threatening city residents who submit complaints.
A recent study called out NYPD's "systemic failure" to enforce safety-related parking violations submitted through 311. There's evidence officers are actually lying in their official responses to 311 complaints: The study found "a pattern of extremely rapid complaint closure" and that illegal parking persisted in more than 52 percent of complaints NYPD claimed to have addressed.
"This issue has completely destroyed the integrity of the 311 system," said Jon Orcutt, a former city official who's now a spokesman for Bike New York. "Let's get a special lane squad together that starts clearing cars and trucks out of bus and bike lanes. It's completely missing now. There's no action. I don't pretend we can go from zero to 1,000 in a year, but just having a squad that shows up."
3. Get rid of placards!
Government workers of all stripes use official city parking placards to store their personal and city-owned cars in bike lanes and crosswalks, in front of fire hydrants and even on the sidewalk. Traffic enforcement agents avoid ticketing illegally parked vehicles with placards out of fear of retribution — imagine if the violator is a well-connected or senior official, for example.
The new police commissioner could put a dent to that by reviving the parking placard reforms ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in 2018. Like many efforts to curtail placard abuse before and since, the reforms have mostly floundered, but they did include some decent ideas, including:
- A dedicated unit for enforcing against placard abuse in known hotspots like Lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn.
- A three-strikes-and-you're-out rule for placard abusers — revoking a permit if it's caught being misused three times.
- A $240 penalty for illegal parking with a placard, which requires authorization from Albany.
- Barcode-adorned placards that would be harder to forge and impossible to transfer from one vehicle to another.
Tisch could also double down on the NYPD's 25-percent reduction in parking placards since 2019. Fewer placards means fewer opportunities to commit placard abuse.
4. Take Vision Zero seriously
NYPD is technically a partner in the Department of Transportation's Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic deaths, but it hasn't always played the part. In 2016, Tisch's predecessor Bill Bratton said that the goal of zero deaths would "probably remain elusive." Just last week, DOT held a press conference to celebrate the installation of new protected bike lanes on Queens Boulevard — with an NYPD squad car parked in the bike lane for the duration of the event.
NYPD should stay out of bike lanes regardless, but the fact that officers couldn't deign to follow the rules during an official city photo op underscores the department's disregard for both the DOT and its policy goals. In an ideal world, DOT would at least tell NYPD to stay clear of the bike lane during its announcement.
The fact that that doesn't happen, while cops routinely block bike lanes and bus lanes, shows how City Hall's transportation goals hit a dead-end at NYPD — a dynamic that Tisch can and should try to change, as she's done at Sanitation.
In recent months, Tisch's DSNY launched a ghost car task force to seize cars without plates, with fake plates, with expired temporary plates or with real plates that don't match the make and model of the car — stepping into a void the police had refused to fill.
The task force seized 3,996 cars between Sept. 9 and Nov. 19, or an average of 56 cars per day, according to Sanitation officials. With congestion pricing likely to unleash a torrent of covered and fake plates on New York City streets, NYPD should get in on the action.
"You know there's a new wave of license plate masking in the works, and that fundamentally screws up any idea of driver accountability to allow that," Orcutt said. "You can walk out and find a masked plate on any block anywhere. The MTA cops are able to grab a lot of people when they do it, but let's do it more. And let's get the NYPD involved."
5. End deadly vehicular chases — and make information about those chases public
Police vehicular chases have surged under Mayor Adams, unleashing an untold level of carnage on city streets — untold because NYPD refuses to release data on how many of the chases lead to traffic injuries or deaths.
NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell has sounded almost proud of the practice. Last year, he touted vehicular pursuits as a sign of effective policing.
"With the enforcement of more moving summonses and car stops, and people thinking they can take off on us? Those days are over," Chell said. "So yes, vehicle pursuits are up."
NYPD brass has stubbornly defended the reckless and unsafe practice even as the carnage has persisted: Last month, a hit-and-run truck driver killed cyclist Amanda Servedio while fleeing an NYPD officer attempting to pull him over for a burglary. Witnesses on social media claimed 10 to 15 police cars were chasing the single vehicle — at high speed through a residential neighborhood.
Three people have died as a result of police chases so far this year, according to Transportation Alternatives. Refusing to release information to the public about the issue only serves to obscure the practice's deadly impact.
If Tisch truly cares about the safety of New Yorkers, she'll tackle the issue of police chases head-on.
And informing the public shouldn't be limited to just during emergencies. NYPD has nearly 100 people working in its press office, yet department press officers show little interest in communicating effectively about vehicular violence.
NYPD spokespeople refuse to sign their names on emails and call traffic crashes "accidents" — language that effectively absolves reckless drivers of responsibility for their actions.
Moreover, the department's record-keeping makes it impossible for the public to know what type of vehicle caused a crash, how many hit-and-run investigations are solved, how many crashes lead to charges against drivers or how many red light tickets go to drivers versus cyclists.
All of that needs to change — is Jessica Tisch up to the task?
