The Police Department will continue to allow precinct commanders to ignore parking rules, refusing to implement one of the major placard abuse reforms recommended by city probers earlier this year, Streetsblog has learned.
The NYPD quietly informed the Department of Investigation of its decision to maintain the controversial "self-enforcement zones" in a letter sent in July responding to the recommendations made by the anti-corruption watchdog in its April report.
"The Department declines to eliminate self-enforcement zones," NYPD Legal Bureau Inspector William Gallagher wrote, dispensing with the recommendation in just one sentence. (The existence of the letter was not previously known to the public until Streetsblog obtained it.)
Ending self-enforcement was the only one of 10 recommendations that the Police Department outright refused to implement, a DOI spokesperson confirmed.
"Self-enforcement zones" are areas around precinct houses where the NYPD precinct personnel enforce parking regulations themselves, instead of leaving the job to the agency's traffic enforcement agents, who are civilian employees.
This puts the precinct commander in control of who writes parking tickets around precinct station houses, where the biggest offenders are ... police officers.
The result of self-enforcement has been that cars are everywhere, including on sidewalks, with little regard for pedestrians who need to get through, as Streetsblog has exposed for years, most graphically in its (March) Parking Madness series that ranked various precincts by the egregiousness of their illegal parking.
Later, during the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice threatened to sue the city over placards — and cited the Parking Madness series — because illegally parked cars leave so little space on the sidewalks it makes it impossible for the disabled to pass, a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The NYPD also took issue with two other DOI-backed reforms:
The first called on the NYPD to audit and potentially revoke placards from current holders if they have been caught misusing them more than three times. DOI's initial report found that enforcement of the three-strikes rule had been "uneven and inadequate."
It's unclear how much progress — if any — the NYPD has made on this front. It its most-recent open data filing, the NYPD said it issued 25,817 "restricted" or headquarters garage permits in 2025 out of 28,318 applications, meaning, at least that some would-be placard-holders were turned down. But the agency did not explain why.
The second DOI recommendation called on the NYPD to provide more information about how it handles complaints to 311 about illegal parking and the blocking of bike and bus lanes, including potentially recording the badge number of the officer who handled the case and requiring cops to provide photographic evidence they responded to the complaint.
Safe streets activists have long complained that NYPD officers simply close out complaints about illegal parking — particularly in bike lanes and bus lanes — without addressing them. City Council lawmakers and the city tabloids publish semi-regular investigations into the issue, seemingly to little avail.
Some data suggests the issue may be getting ever-so-slightly better. Dashboards powered by the city's 311 data show that the percentage of illegal parking complaints that led to a summons has risen consistently since Jessica Tisch became police commissioner.
Overall, cops hit drivers with 13,679 summonses out of 51,073 illegal parking complaints in October 2025, a rate of 26.8 percent, up from a rate of 19.9 percent in October 2024. Still, that stat shows how much work still remains to be done.
The DOI said that the NYPD has proposed alternatives in both reform proposals, but the DOI declined to provide details, saying the conversations are ongoing.
Additionally, DOI said that the NYPD accepted but had "not yet fully implemented" the remaining seven recommendations. Those include:
- Assigning traffic enforcement agents to handle 311 calls instead of sending uniformed cops;
- Coordinating with the city departments of Transportation and Education to develop a "uniform" printed placard to make fake permits more readily identifiable;
- Bolstering training for officers to better identify fake permits;
- Emphasizing in training that officer's "discretion" for issuing parking summonses should not mean giving preferential treatment to vehicles with placards;
- Encouraging police officers to issue summonses for placard misuse in addition to illegal parking when ticketing a vehicle with an improperly used permit;
- Working with DOT to study the feasibility of automating parking enforcement, using technology like computerized license plate readers
- Hiring a consultant to help develop an automated parking enforcement system.
The DOI report did not include a recommendation to move traffic enforcement from the NYPD to the Department of Transportation, which many street safety advocates have sought for years as a way to increase the division's independence and bolster enforcement. However, the union that represents the traffic agents has staunchly opposed the idea.
The Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
