They ran out of tickets!
Officers from the 79th Precinct were busy trying to save cyclists and bust illegal parkers on the newly unprotected stretch of Bedford Avenue, but had to stop issuing summonses because they ran out of them.
One day after Streetsblog alerted city officials to the danger presented by illegal parkers filling the painted bike lane between Willoughby and Flushing avenues, two officers were performing some of the rarest of police actions: responding to 311 complaints of illegal parking in a bike lane and trying to move car drivers along.
We spotted the officers on Wednesday first ticketing a passenger car parked in the bike lane between Park and Myrtle avenues. The pair — Sgt. Austin Slamowitz and Officer Ashur Morris — then continued down Bedford, but decided not to ticket several vans and trucks that were also blocking the bike lane for reasons that were unclear.
The officers left, so Streetsblog started filing 311 complaints about other vehicles that were parked in the bike lane — which is now easy to do because the bike lane is no longer protected by a row of parked cars, but merely by paint that drivers don't respect.
Despite a long history of ignoring 311 calls, the police did respond to our complaints, returning to Bedford, but declining to issue any tickets. In one case, they showed up after our report of an illegally parked van. The officers spent 15 minutes waiting for the driver to return, and when he did, they let him go without a ticket.
“We have to give them a chance to come out before ticketing them,” said Slamowitz, offering a falsehood.
Morris explained the real reason for the failure to write a ticket: he claimed that cops had run out of blanks because they had issued so many citations to illegally parked vehicles throughout the morning. He said the pair waiting for another officer to bring them more summonses — but before backup could arrive, the driver of the illegally parked van drove off scot-free.
Both officers said they responded promptly to the 311 calls because they're part of Mayor Adams’s recent quality-of-life initiative — a double irony, given that this initiative has led to a huge increase in criminal summons being issued to cyclists and that the protected bike lane was designed, in part, to eliminate the double-parking problem.
Despite not writing a ticket to the van, Slamowitz recognized that the new design of the bike lane — which now requires constant vigilance on the part of an already strapped agency with a lot more important things to do than write parking tickets — is flawed.
“It's a problem because a lot of bicyclists are going into the street and getting hit by cars,” said Slamowitz, as if he had read Wednesday's Streetsblog front page.
When told that police were forced to divert attention and resources from their other tasks, advocates for safe streets reminded that well-designed streets are self-enforcing.
“A paint-only bike lane invites double-parking,” said Nick Conklin, the Brooklyn Organizer for Transportation Alternatives. “And without loading zones, trucks are forced to load and unload in the street. We will never enforce our way to Vision Zero while our streets are designed so poorly.”
Indeed, Slamowitz admitted that his efforts on Wednesday do not represent the best use of NYPD resources. (Slamowitz, for example, made $192,000 plus benefits last year, according to SeeThroughNY. And Morris made $97,500.)
“I mean listen, it’s part of what we do,” he conceded. “Is it our highest priority job? Definitely not. There’s people out here getting robbed, stabbed, shot, and killed.”
