The Police Department has increased criminal summonses against e-bike riders by 4,000 percent in the first two weeks of Commissioner Tisch's controversial crackdown, according to data NYPD provided to Streetsblog after multiple requests.
The NYPD wrote 916 criminal court summonses to e-bike riders since it launched its sweeps on April 28 — an astronomical increase from the mere 553 such criminal violations cops wrote all of last year, NYPD said.
That's about 65 criminal summonses a day — a roughly 43-fold increase of the rate of criminal court summons ticketing of last year. If the Adams administration continues apace, cops could give out close to 24,000 of the so-called pink summonses this year, which would return the city to a level of bike enforcement not seen in more than a decade.
Advocates slammed the policy as a "massive overreach" that the police "sneaked in" without any public announcement ... until Streetsblog first exposed the shift earlier this month.
"It’s alarming that a policy change that was sneaked in without public notice has already escalated to become a massive crackdown," said Ben Furnas, executive director of Transportation Alternatives. "Giving criminal summonses to hundreds of cyclists every week does nothing to make our streets safer.
"This policy is an egregious overreach, and we call on elected officials to demand the NYPD reverse it immediately," Furnas added.
The enforcement spree echoes the early 2010s, when cops issued tens of thousands of tickets to riders a year to cyclists, mainly for riding on the sidewalk. That did not significantly deter people from mounting on the foot path, and the new decree for harsher enforcement is unlikely to work out the way police brass claim it will either, said one advocate and former city transportation official.
"They gave out 20,000 tickets to cyclists in one year, and did we get cyclists off the sidewalks? I don’t think so," said Jon Orcutt, director of Advocacy at Bike New York, who used to work at the Department of Transportation in the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations. "I don’t see any strategy here and that’s part and parcel for the police in traffic [enforcement] my whole life."
The Department's fortnight-old blitz amps up traffic tickets to so-called C summonses, which require those ticketed to show up to a criminal summons court or else a judge can issue a warrant for their arrest.
The policy has angered cyclists and advocates for delivery workers, many of whom are immigrants facing heightened risks of deportation in the Trump era.
Law enforcement officials have claimed their push is about increasing safety for New Yorkers, but the danger on the streets is from car and truck drivers, not cyclists, according to the NYPD's own data: In 2024, 37 pedestrians were injured in 179 reported e-bike collisions, but 9,610 pedestrians were injured overall, so e-bike riders caused just 0.4 percent of pedestrian injuries.
That pattern continued in the first three months of this year, with one pedestrian injured by an e-bike rider, according to the NYPD. Over the same period, 2,271 were injured overall, so e-bike riders caused less than 0.04 percent of the reported pedestrian injuries.
Police leaders originally claimed they were driven by data like 311 and 911 complaints, before admitting to Streetsblog this week that the escalation arose from vibes-based feedback at community meetings. Tisch has not spoken about the new policy, but published an op-ed in the right-learning New York Post on Wednesday that wrongly called e-bikes "extremely dangerous" and claimed, again wrongly, that her officers are only targeting cyclists who are reckless, ride the wrong way, ignore red lights or stop signs.
In fact, Streetsblog has documented numerous cases of regular cyclists receiving criminal summonses for simply stopping their bike in a crosswalk or wearing headphones.
The police's press office declined to give the same numbers for classic bike riders, but previously told Streetsblog that e-bikes made up "more than 90 percent" of its criminal summonses.
Troubled history
A look back at last year's criminal summonses against cyclists reveals that 96 percent of those went to New Yorkers of color and just 4 percent went to white people, according to NYPD data. The criminal summons log on Open Data did not include a separate category for e-bikes.
Nearly two-in-three tickets were for biking on the sidewalk, and the remainder were largely for infractions against the city's rules for commercial cyclists, which include requirements like wearing a reflective vest and carrying an ID with the business's name.
Sidewalk bike ticketing historically disproportionately targeted New Yorkers of color, and the NYPD used to give out as many as 31,000 criminal summonses for sidewalk cycling in 2011, after which those numbers started to decline and drop precipitously under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014, according to city data.
The sidewalk biking summonses have long been the main tactic the NYPD used to criminalize cycling behavior, but that enforcement wound down in the lead-up to a set of criminal justice reforms the City Council passed in 2016 to move other low-level infractions to civil hearings.
The legislation aimed to undo many of the harms caused by rampant criminal court summonses, for infractions like smoking in a park, having an open container of alcohol or littering, which most affected people in poor neighborhoods of color like Brownsville, Jamaica, the South Bronx, and East Harlem.
At the time of the reforms, around half of people with summonses missed their court dates and there were 1.5 million open summons warrants in New York.
When the city moved low-level violations to civil hearings, the number of criminal summonses dropped by 90 percent, while appearance rates only declined slightly, from 51 percent to 49 percent, a 2018 report on the Council's reform by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found.
Streetsblog has been covering NYPD Commissioner Tisch's decision to turn traditional traffic tickets into criminal summonses like no one else in town. Here's a full list of our coverage over the past two weeks, in case you have missed something or need a reminder that when there's a big story on the livable streets beat, turn to Streetsblog:
- May 2: "Policy Change: NYPD Will Write Criminal Summonses, Not Traffic Tickets, for Cyclists."
- May 5: "NYPD’s Red Light Criminalization Marks ‘Obscene’ Escalation: Advocates."
- May 6: "As NYPD’s Criminal Crackdown on Cyclists Expands, It Grows More Absurd: Victims."
- May 7: "Komanoff: Tsk, Tsk, Tisch — Criminal Summonses for Cyclists Will Backfire."
- May 9: "NYPD’s Push To Criminalize Cycling Spells Trouble For Immigrant Workers."
- May 12: "Cyclist Launches Class Action Suit For Bogus NYPD Red Light Tickets."
- May 13: "NYPD Admits Bike Crackdown Based on ‘Community’ Vibes, Not Data."
- May 15: "Quiet Desperation: NYPD's Tisch Didn't Tell DOT About Her Crackdown on Cycling."
