Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has stepped up her criminalization spree against cyclists in recent months even as mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, who has championed cycling, has said he'd like to keep her in charge of the NYPD.
Summonses for running red lights and other offenses remain above even the initial surge in ticket-writing that came with the April 28 rollout of the criminal crackdown.
As a result, thousands of cyclists and e-bike riders, including many immigrant delivery workers, have become ensnared in the criminal court system. Workers' boosters called on Mamdani to issue a moratorium on the criminalization of cycling.
"The NYPD’s crackdown is not a traffic safety strategy — it’s a social control policy disguised as one. It enforces inequality and the privileges of the powerful by ignoring the disproportionate harms they cause, criminalizing instead the movement of those whose labor keeps the city alive," said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of Worker's Justice Project and co-founder of its Los Deliveristas Unidos campaign, in a statement.
The data
On April 28, the NYPD began doling out criminal summonses for low-level violations — summonses that require a physical appearance at a summons court for the same transgressions that, previously, could be paid online or by the mail.
The NYPD said its change in policy targeted only e-bike riders and only for six violations: going through red lights or stop signs, riding the wrong way, riding recklessly, riding under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and riding on the sidewalk.
In reality, officers have been caught entrapping cyclists or hitting them with criminal summonses for infractions not on the above list, such as for wearing headphones over both ears. In one case, officers pulled a Taser on a cyclist. In another, they came down hard on a Brooklyn mom. And in a third, they were caught on camera violently arresting a teen.
Above all, the change led to a surge in summonses and court appearances, and the latest data show the upward trend kept going.
The NYPD gave out 1,620 criminal court summonses labeled "bike" from mid-July through the end of September, or 21 per day. That's a 162-percent increase from the eight tickets per day that cops issued between April 28 and July 15.
Month-to-month numbers show a steady incline toward August, and a slight decrease in September, however, those last numbers are still well above pre-crackdown figures.
That's only the tip of the iceberg.
There are many more violations that the NYPD data doesn't specifically break down by mode of transportation, but that spiked after the crackdown started, indicating that they were mostly targeting two-wheelers.
For example, the most common criminal court summons from the NYPD's list of offenses, disobeying a red light, skyrocketed to 8,691 between April 28 and Sept. 30, up from just 14 over the period last year. That's a 61,978-percent increase.
The pace of those tickets continued to increase into the fall, from 4,250 (55 per day) from April 28 to July 15, to 4,422 (58 per day) from July 16 to Sept. 30.
The data also reveal a deep racial disparity, with the vast majority of the red light summons, or around 81 percent, going to people of color this year, with Hispanic New Yorkers making up the largest share at 39 percent.
Rhetoric vs. reality
Tisch deployed the nation's largest police force against cyclists and e-bike riders as part of a what she called a renewed focus on "quality-of-life" offenses, channeling complaints from community boards and 311. She claimed without ever providing evidence that the pivot was rooted in "data," despite car and truck drivers causing almost all traffic violence.
City stats revealed that e-bike crashes and injuries were actually down in the lead up to the crackdown. As such, street safety advocates – along with the usually car-friendly community boards – panned the shift.
The top cop initially made the rounds celebrating the criminalization approach, but has rarely mentioned it in recent months.
It's all part of Mayor Adams's turn against the sustainable mode of transportation in the waning months of his administration, claiming that the city's signature street safety initiative Vision Zero had for "far too long" been unnecessarily focused on drivers.
Advocates urged the next mayor to focus on building out a safe network of cycling infrastructure.
"This is another example of the upside-down priorities of Mayor Adams’s bizarre war on biking, giving criminal summonses to dozens of people on bikes every day, while bicyclists and pedestrians are constantly put at risk by dangerous drivers and hazardous streets," said Transportation Alternatives's Executive Director Ben Furnas.
Mamdani has recently said that enforcement against e-bikes should focus on holidng delivery apps accountable, but he also backed a controversial 15-mile-per-hour speed limit that Mayor Adams instituted for Citi Bikes over the summer.
And he is hoping that Tisch will stay on if he is elected on Tuesday. When asked about this, however, his campaign went silent.
The NYPD's well-staffed press office has repeatedly declined to respond to Streetsblog's requests for updated statistics specifically breaking out criminal court summonses to bikes and e-bikes versus motorists.
