NYPD De-Escalates Its ‘Bummer Streets’ Policing At This Week’s Car-Free DOT Event

The NYPD largely pulled back from its “overkill” policing at this Saturday’s Summer Streets event, reducing chokepoints that had created dangerous congestion for runners, walkers and cyclists at the previous week’s event — a de-escalation that came after a week of criticism from media outlets including Streetsblog.

Cops still used many cars — official squad cars as well as many personal cars — to block most crosstown traffic, and some of the busiest intersections still featured multiple police vehicles blocking the previously joyous car-free promenade, but at most intersections, “blocker” vehicles remained only one the side street and not in the open roadway. And at some places, like Cathedral Parkway, the NYPD used only one blocker vehicle instead of the two or more that were deployed last week.

One cop told Streetsblog that the orders came down from high to let our people flow.

“We were supposed to kinda get out of the way this time,” the officer, who requested anonymity because of the department’s longstanding gag-order on rank-and-file officers. “[The order was to] just leave the avenue open and block the side street.”

Apparently, not everyone got the memo:

And policing strategy seemed to differ block by block, even on the same street (though the idling of police cars was a constant):

Last week, during the first Manhattan Summer Streets of the season, pedestrians and cyclists were stunned to see the open public spaces clogged with cop cars. A lieutenant along the route told Streetsblog that the vehicles were “obvious overkill” that squeezed pedestrians and cyclists at busy intersections. Attendees were furious.

“I’ve never seen anything like the policing this year [at the first Manhattan Saturday] at previous Summer Streets,” said one woman who attends every year. “Their presence was palpable. At every car crossing street, there were four to six cop cars. Most of the cars were just parked with cops sitting inside, blocking the route. I also saw cops in SWAT gear with large rifles uptown. That was jarring.”

NYPD brass defended the chokepoints by claiming that the stepped-up police presence was the result of an increase in vehicle rammings. But these attacks have been a threat for decades. Yet only this year — Mayor Mamdani’s first — did the NYPD changed its policy. In fact, last year, there had been a major ramming attack in Los Angeles just one week before the first Summer Street event, but the NYPD didn’t put any blocker vehicles at intersections for the car-free event just days later.

Last week’s “overkill” policing was a new policy by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who had been appointed by then-Mayor Eric Adams, but held over as top cop by Mayor Mamdani to, as the New York Times put it last year, “placate powerful New Yorkers” who find him “soft on crime.”

Though the two have occasionally disagreed, the mayor apparently signed off on the policy, which was put into effect for the Aug. 1 Summer Streets. But over the next few days, the mayor was asked about it repeatedly, and, at one media stop, said he would “follow up on the reporting around Summer Streets.” Days later, cops appeared to yield a bit. (Neither City Hall nor the NYPD responded to questions for this story.)

Mamdani came into office with expectations that he would expand the city’s Open Streets program. “I would explore a regular pedestrianization program on Sundays and holidays,” he wrote in his Streetsblog questionnaire during the campaign.

But despite Mamdani touting new funding for the program earlier this year, Summer Streets 2026 covers more or less the same distances as Summer Streets 2025. It consists of five Saturdays — the first one was July 25 in the Bronx and Queens, then three consecutive Saturdays in Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge through Harlem, and finally a Brooklyn and Staten Island day on Aug. 22.

It’s unclear if the officers supposedly protecting Summer Streets are even up to the job.

On Park Avenue, for example, Streetsblog found a sergeant and three officers moving a marked patrol car back and forth in front of southbound cyclists just north of 14th Street:

But the marked patrol car and four counterterrorism cops did not prevent a confused driver from turning from 14th Street to drive north on Park Avenue.

It was a Streetsblog reporter, not the four officers, who stopped that car from hitting the many cyclists and pedestrians enjoying the temporarily reclaimed public space.