Friday’s Headlines: NYPD Placard Chaos Edition

The boys in blue are making us blue.

In two incidents in as many days, NYPD fell far short of the city’s extremely attenuated expectations.

The first came on Wednesday night, when an MTA bus driver sideswiped a KIA Carnival in lower Manhattan. The driver had illegally parked the white minivan in a painted buffer and decorated it with an NYPD parking placard in the dash to fend off traffic enforcement agents.

Jeff Coltin, the newly-minted editor-in-chief of City & State, photographed the collision, which held up traffic, including several express buses, for "blocks and blocks," he said:

The license plate holder from a dealership in West Islip, Long Island was an especially thoughtful touch.

As for the NYPD placard: "It is real," an NYPD spokesperson, who did not provide their name, told Streetsblog. "We are looking into it."

Council Member Lincoln Restler responded to Coltin's tweet by touting his bill to end the city's practice of handing out parking permits for private vehicles entirely:

(Editor's note: This story originally said this crash occurred in Brooklyn. We apologize for the error.)

The second incident came on Thursday morning, when the driver of a Ford SUV ran over and killed a 4-year-old boy on Rockaway Parkway and Linden Boulevard, near the border of Brownsville and Canarsie in Brooklyn. After the driver fled the scene, anonymous NYPD sources told the New York Post that the victim had been "running" and "dashed away from his mom" before the driver struck him.

But as our dear leader Gersh Kuntzman noted in Streetsblog’s writeup of the collision, the deadly crash was extremely predictable — and is almost certain to happen again:

The intersection of Linden Boulevard and Rockaway Parkway is designed for danger. Since January 2022, there have been 368 reported crashes in just a three-block radius of the intersection, injuring 215 people, including 29 pedestrians, 11 cyclists and 175 people inside cars, according to city stats mapped by Crash Count.

The intersection itself has been the site of 130 reported crashes over the same period, injuring 63 people, mostly people in cars, which is evidence of high speeds.

Blaming a toddler for his own death, caused by a driver the NYPD have not yet located: Do New York’s Finest even listen to themselves?

In other news:

• Mayor Mamdani installed a trio of top-level staffers at the Department of Transportation: Madeline Labadie as chief of staff, Tiffany-Ann Taylor as chief strategy officer, and Sindhu Bharadwaj as director of strategic initiatives. (NYDN)
• Families for Safe Streets held a vigil on Canal Street to advocate for the comprehensive redesign of the dangerous thoroughfare. (NY1, PIX11, ABC7)
• Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is reportedly brainstorming ideas for suppressing the price of gasoline, which will likely skyrocket as the effects of Trump’s strikes on Iran propagate through the global economy. (Politico)
• A pile of snow near a train station in Haddonfield, New Jersey has grown so large that the train's operator, PATCO, is soliciting bets on when exactly it will melt. (NY Post, PATCO)
• Businesses on Staten Island’s North Shore are lining up in support of a nascent bus rapid transit project that DOT wants to build within an unused railroad right-of-way. (Staten Island Advance)
• Two unidentified men once again stole a beloved tile mosaic by the French artist Invader. This time they pilfered a pizza-themed mosaic from Nonna's Pizzeria in Greenpoint. (Greenpointers, EV Grieve)
• A 4-year-old boy helped his mom park her car in New York City. (People)
• Assembly Member William Colton wants to ban car insurance companies from charging higher premiums to people older than 60. (Staten Island Advance)
• Alexander Hamilton's newspaper took Mayor Mamdani to task for abandoning his commitment to universal daylighting. (NY Post)
• The California Highway Patrol arrested Britney Spears for drunk driving in Ventura County. (TMZ)
• Punk rocker Richard Hell showcased his book-filled tenement apartment in the East Village. The resulting story wisely omitted the current rent. (NY Times)
• DOT will install a protected bike lane on Ocean Avenue in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, which forms the eastern perimeter of Prospect Park. (Patch)