To Protect and Unnerve: Cop Hits Cyclist With Squad Car … In a Protected Bike Lane!

Vision? Zero.

A cop drove his squad car into the Schermerhorn Street protected bike lane in downtown Brooklyn last week and injured a cyclist who had the light and was clearly in the well-demarcated cycle track.

According to video of the June 10 incident obtained by Streetsblog, Officer Michael McGinn and cyclist Andi Khoo-Miller were both traveling eastbound on Schermerhorn Street at around 2 p.m. But when McGinn turned right onto Hoyt Street, he struck Khoo-Miller with the nose of his squad car — then later claimed that the cyclist “came out of nowhere” even though the eastbound cyclist had the right of way.

The video also shows that McGinn never came to a full stop before turning right nor did he signal for the turn, according to a police report written by his colleague. McGinn did slow down slightly before the crash, but so did Khoo-Miller, probably saving him from a serious injury.

“If I was going a full 15 miles per hour, it could have been so, so much worse,” said Khoo-Miller, who was taken to an area hospital after the crash with back and leg pain for which he was prescribed painkillers. He missed a day of work from the pain.

The NYPD’s Patrol Guide requires that officers obey traffic laws “except under exceptional circumstances or extreme emergency” — and neither of those conditions was met by McGinn, whose sirens and lights were off.

If disciplined by the department, McGinn faces no more than five lost vacation days for failing to signal, according to the NYPD’s disciplinary matrix.

But what’s worse to Khoo-Miller, McGinn was basically indifferent after hitting an unprotected human being with a 3,000-pound squad car: He repeatedly asked the cyclist for his ID, and he couldn’t understand why Khoo-Miller wanted another officer to come to the scene to take a report.

“He seemed like he didn’t give a shit,” Khoo-Miller said. “I asked him to apologize and he said, ‘I would, but I don’t like your attitude.'”

McGinn’s lieutenant eventually drove to the scene.

“Your officer said I came out of nowhere,” Khoo-Miller told the lieutenant, who responded, “Yeah, they always say that,” according to Khoo-Miller.

Worse, police officers’ poor driving causes the city to pay out millions of dollars in crash settlements. Across all agencies, motor vehicle crashes are typically the largest cause of city payouts, costing the city more than $173 million in fiscal year 2023, for example. And in that year, 29 percent of all tort claims filed against the city involved NYPD.

And in fiscal year 2025, according to the comptroller’s settlement dashboard, NYPD car crashes cost the city in settlements.

An easily thwarted design

Schermerhorn Street is now a key east-west link in the Brooklyn bike network, but it wasn’t always a safe space for pedestrians and cyclists.

Between 2015 and 2022, the then-two-way street between Smith Street and Flatbush Avenue was the site of 396 reported crashes that injured 28 cyclists and 34 pedestrians, according to city stats.

It was redesigned in 2022 to make the roadway one way and install a two-way protected bike lane, with DOT Project Manager Ben Schwed saying, “Injuries growing year after year — an alarming trend we want to bring down.

But the DOT design still left ample room for NYPD officers assigned to the Transit Bureau station house at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station to combat-park their personal, placard-bearing vehicles far out into the middle of the roadway, which forces trucks into the bike lane and, sometimes, cyclists back into the roadway.

Last year, Council Member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn Heights) found 457 illegally parked cars per day on key routes in the area. Almost 60 percent of those cars had placards or other NYPD memorabilia on their dashboards.

Locals have had enough. The transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 2 voted unanimously in April for the city to give parking enforcement powers back to the DOT, essentially saying that the NYPD couldn’t be trusted to police itself.

A regular Schermerhorn rider, Khoo-Miller said he frequently files 311 complaints about illegal police parking in the area, “But they just close them out.”

In some ways, that hurts more than the injuries he suffered.