Cops Are Writing More Parking Tickets Citywide — But Failing Badly In Manhattan’s Placard Zone

It’s a good news/bad news thing: NYPD officers are issuing more traffic-related summonses citywide after the much-hyped creation of “quality-of-life” teams, but some areas of the city, including the area around NYPD headquarters that’s notorious for placard abuse, are experiencing a bizarre decline, the agency’s own data show.

The top line is solid: cops wrote 12-percent more summonses through most of May compared to the same period in 2025. And vehicle-related 311 calls are down 3 percent, possibly due to the public seeing action against dangerously parked vehicles.

But Streetsblog’s own analysis of the NYPD’s 311 and traffic data show that in the 10 precincts of the NYPD’s Manhattan South patrol bureau, where cops and other placard-wielding municipal workers clog the streets with their illegally parked vehicles, summonses written by cops are down 30 percent this year compared with the same period last year.

What could be the reason summonses are down? For one thing, a huge portion of the illegally parked cars in Lower Manhattan belong to law-enforcement officials, as Streetsblog revealed in 2022. In that survey, vehicles parked with placards occupied about 65 percent of the parking spots in the area. Almost 10 percent of those placards were expired.

One expert said that officers could increase their ticket-writing any time they want, merely by … writing more tickets. But in Lower Manhattan, officers are handcuffed … by themselves.

“Most parts of the city have enough regular New Yorkers that the NYPD can increase their ticketing numbers without touching the placard class,” the users behind the anonymous social media account Placard Abuse wrote to Streetsblog. “Lower Manhattan is so saturated with placard corruption that they can’t make the numbers without taking action against the placard class.”

How poorly are the cops of Manhattan South enforcing parking violations? Let’s put it this way: Citywide, NYPD officers on the beat have written 107,000 parking summonses so far this year, but only about 2,900 summonses, or 3 percent of that total, were issued in Manhattan South.

For context, that’s 370- to 700-percent fewer summonses compared with other nine patrol boroughs except for Staten Island.

And the cops in the area seem to be slacking off in that area in other ways: speeding tickets are down 51 percent and cellphone usage tickets are down 25 percent, according to the NYPD’s own data. For context, citywide speeding tickets are only down 14 percent.

Streetsblog previously reported on the NYPD’s longstanding efforts to avoid obeying the same parking laws as ordinary New Yorkers, including the agency’s decision to continue the controversial practice of treating areas around police stations as “self-enforcement zones.”

Calling 311 for more parking enforcement

The NYPD does not publish weekly citywide quality-of-life data. Instead, each precinct posts a weekly quality-of-life report.

The department does not publish precinct-specific traffic reports. It divides the city into nine patrol boroughs to report weekly summons statistics — and those statistics don’t include tickets by traffic enforcement agents, as the department clarified once Streetsblog inquired about the data.

Streetsblog pulled recently weekly quality of life reports posted all 78 precinct websites to build a picture of changes in 311 call volumes around the city.

Streetsblog’s analysis shows that the three precincts around City Hall and 1 Police Plaza received 36-percent more 311 vehicle-related calls this year compared to the same period last year.

This came as cops in the larger patrol borough of Manhattan South were writing so many fewer tickets — suggesting the NYPD is treating the area as one giant self enforcement zone.

The NYPD spokesperson’s lengthy email to Streetsblog detailed why the department thinks everything is good: overall summonses are up 3.2 this year across the city and nearly 11 percent in Manhattan South.

But that number includes tickets issued by the NYPD’s traffic enforcement agents, who are civilians, not cops. The department did not explain the 30 percent year-over-year decline in traffic enforcement by cops out on the streets of lower Manhattan.

“The numbers you referenced should not be viewed in isolation, as they represent only a portion of overall parking enforcement activity occurring within the borough,” the spokesperson, who did not provide a name or rank, wrote in an email to Streetsblog.

This increase in citywide increase in traffic enforcement comes after Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch launched precinct-level quality-of-life teams meant to address 311 complaints like noise, illegal parking and abandoned vehicles.

And in some patrol areas, those teams are making progress. In the Bronx South patrol borough stretching from Throggs Neck to Highbridge, parking summonses are up 43 percent. In the Manhattan North patrol borough, parking enforcement is up 33 percent.

“Each borough develops deployment strategies based on localized traffic conditions and community complaints,” the department spokesperson wrote. “Bronx South and Manhattan North both experienced increases in precinct-level parking enforcement activity due in part to focused quality-of-life enforcement.”

Tow problem

Streetsblog’s analysis of 311 data shows that requests to individual precincts related to parking have jumped this year — and beat cops are barely working to meet the surge.

The 105th Precinct in Queens, for example, received 92-percent more complaints about double-parking this year vs. last — but the Council member whose district includes the precinct wasn’t all that impressed at the precinct’s recent boast of towing away five vehicles in light of the 3,400 calls about illegal parking made so far this year in that precinct alone:

“I want to make sure that the team has the resources to remove trucks,” Council Deputy Speaker Nantasha Williams, whose district includes the 105, said at a hearing on Monday. “All of us in southeast Queens would love that.”

NYPD Transportation Bureau Chief Olufunmilola Obe told Williams that 59 vehicles have been towed away so far this year in Williams’ district.

For contex, that’s roughly one vehicle towed away every three days — a shockingly low level of enforcement for a division of the police department that will receive $212 million in this year’s budget.

Tisch claimed that increased enforcement has been held back because of a lack of tow trucks. She said the department is considering training more officers to drive tow trucks.

“Precincts that have towing needs should probably have tow trucks assigned to them,” she said. “There are acute towing problem that we are seeing in specific precincts.”