Garbage Cops Parked Cars in Bus Lane With Covered Plates

A group of cops employed by the Department of Sanitation parked their city-issued vehicles in a bus lane and blocked their license plates with plastic bags in order to evade bus-lane tickets while they grabbed lunch, according to a video posted on Instagram.

The Wednesday post, by the anonymous user @nofilteraudits_, shows multiple Sanitation officers — including one senior-ranked manager wearing a white shirt — parking two agency cars in the bus lane on 125th Street in Harlem. The officers had their red and blue lights flashing as they ordered food at a fried chicken restaurant.

“He’s trying to hide his plate so he doesn’t get a fucking ticket at the fucking bus stop,” the person filming says, before confronting an officer and saying, “that’s unacceptable.”

The Sanitation cop, who identifies himself as Police Officer Lewis, seems to think it’s fine, asking the person filming whether he will pay for tickets. “You gonna pay for us? You work for the city,” Officer Lewis asks. “Why is it unacceptable though?”

“I’m saying, if you’ve got a solution, tell us,” Lewis adds.

“This is your solution, right? Fucking conceal your plates,” the person in the video by @nofilteraudits_ says. “Imagine if this was regular civilians.”

The person briefly lifts one of the police car plate covers, revealing a license plate nabbed 29 times over the last year. The black vehicle received tickets mostly for blocking bus lanes just like the one in the video, along with tickets for blocking bus stops and other parking violations. The city fined the same car for driving through a red light once and speeding in a school zone twice.

The other white vehicle had no recorded tickets, but had a parking placard in its dash.

The video echoes Streetsblog editor Gersh Kuntzman’s years-long coverage of drivers obscuring or defacing their plates. He launched his quest after the NYPD arrested a lawyer for un-defacing an obstructed plate back in 2022.

Streetsblog reached out to @nofilteraudits_, but has not yet heard back.

Placard Abuse — the anonymous collective that documents people who park illegally in New York City by using placards and other paraphernalia — slammed the DSNY cops for flaunting the law they are tasked with upholding.

“You can’t call yourself ‘law enforcement’ when you’re out on the street openly breaking the law,” the collective told Streetsblog. “There is no excuse for them to illegally obstruct their plates like that. A real part of the problem here is that cops are supposed to set an example for the community, but dirty cops like this guy are out here spreading a culture of corruption with disdain for the law.”

After arguing with the officer on the street, the person filming goes inside the Fluffies Hot Chicken restaurant to ask three other DSNY enforcement agents to fix their plates. They largely ignore him.

He curses at the officers, who then leave with their bags of food, and the higher-level white-shirted officer wishes him a “good day,” before getting into the car with a placard, whose plate cover is now removed.

Officer Lewis, who could not be reached for comment, then takes off his car’s cover as well as the person filming taunts him with “good boy.” Then the video ends.

A spokesperson for DSNY said the agency “took appropriate disciplinary action” but declined to provide any specific details.

“DSNY policy, as well as New York State law, prohibits obstructing license plates. As soon as DSNY became aware of this incident, we took appropriate disciplinary action,” said DSNY’s Deputy Commissioner, Public Affairs & Customer Experience Joshua Goodman in a statement.

Goodman added that DSNY takes public complaints about agency placard misuse via parking@dsny.nyc.gov, and that it takes the issue seriously.

“I can’t comment on personnel specifics, but I hope this emphasizes exactly how we felt upon seeing that video,” Goodman said.