FLIP THE SWITCH: Brooklyn Panel Asks DOT To Take Over Parking Enforcement From NYPD

The NYPD must be stripped of its parking enforcement responsibilities, a Brooklyn panel recommended in a vote that urged elected officials to move the job back to the Department of Transportation.

The Transportation Committee of Brooklyn Community Board 6 on Wednesday night unanimously passed the resolution, which reminded city officials that the DOT handed out parking tickets until a government reorganization by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1996.

The resolution said traffic enforcement would “get the attention it needs” if parking violations were overseen by DOT — plus the NYPD would get to “focus on crime reduction,” the resolution reads.

Any longtime reader of Streetsblog is well aware of the less-than-stellar reputation of the NYPD, thanks to placard abuse and the abuse of people who call 311 to report illegal parking. But that history wasn’t even a factor in Wednesday’s resolution, which came about in response to a conversation around a request for more loading zones and the way the city’s existing loading zones are clogged up with illegal parking.

When DOT’s new liaison to CB6 suggested any new loading zones would simply wind up full of trucks from a nearby Sanitation garage, the committee began to think bigger.

“We’re constantly doing this piecemeal approach to traffic enforcement, and DOT definitely sounds like they’re on our side in terms of trying to crack this nut a little bit,” said Committee Co-Chairman Doug Gordon. “And [committee member] Jerry Armer proposed a resolution that we ask our elected officials to support advocating for a transfer of parking enforcement back to the DOT. It wasn’t anything we were planning to do. It wasn’t really on the agenda, nobody specifically lobbied for it I think it does probably suggest a greater frustration around parking.”

The responsibility for parking enforcement shifted from DOT to the NYPD during Giuliani’s first term, as part of a larger effort to reshape municipal government. But putting Traffic Enforcement Agents under the auspices of the NYPD was not a panacea for taking care of the lower-level illegal parking issues that proliferated thanks to placard holders and lieutenant’s girlfriends who know they can get away with parking anywhere.

DOT employees responsible for parking enforcement could wind up seeing themselves as part of the larger collective of civil servants who simply ignore parking rules that are violated by themselves or their brother officers, but Gordon saw the possibility for things working slightly better than the way they work now.

“If you don’t have these complaints being filtered through the local precinct, then you don’t have that moment where someone sees it come in and says, ‘Oh, we know that spot. That’s where our guys park so we’re therefore not going to enforce it.’ If you had some sort of roving band of traffic enforcement agents through an independent or outside agency from NYPD, I think it would get us part way towards cleaning up some of the illegal parking,” he said.

The Transportation Committee resolution does not lay out exactly how the reallocated responsibility for parking enforcement would happen, and instead calls on elected officials to work out the best way to do it. The resolution will be voted on by the full board on April 8.

Advocates’ calls to take the NYPD out of parking enforcement is not new. In 2020, criminal justice reformers pushed for traffic stops to be taken out of the hands of the NYPD, and while the idea got as far as a semi-endorsement from Attorney General Letitia James, there was never enough support in the city to make the proposal a reality.

But even as the call for a total overhaul of traffic enforcement has fallen out of the zeitgeist, the NYPD’s disdain for ticketing illegally parked cars and insistence on parking on the sidewalk has gained the attention of academic researchers and even the federal Department of Justice (before it was taken over by the forces of evil). As those issue continue into 2026, Gordon said the fact that the resolution was a snap idea passed on the same night it was thought up was proof that people are looking for any kind of answers to the situation.

“There’s just a growing awareness that something’s not right with parking enforcement,” he said.

The DOT did not respond to a request for comment.

Brooklyn Community Board 6, full board, April 8, Van Alen Institute (303 Bond St. between Union and Sackett streets, 6:30 p.m. For info, click here.