On a February morning, as light snow turned to light rain, traffic backed up behind a truck on a Brooklyn side street. The driver had stepped out to measure whether he could get past one of a long line of parked S.U.V.s and sedans, jutting off the sidewalk and into the street, outside the 67th Precinct station house in East Flatbush.
Recent visits to Manhattan’s Chinatown found one driver had secured a parking space forbidden to others by leaving a crumpled yellow N.Y.P.D. vest on the dashboard. A second driver left the top half of a police uniform. On a yellow-striped median on Canal Street, a driver had overcome parking laws with a handwritten note indicating that he or she was a police officer.
All over New York, police officers and staff start their workday by disregarding the law. They park their personal vehicles at bus stops, on sidewalks and in crosswalks, in turning lanes and no-standing zones.
Jessica Tisch, who became Mayor Eric Adams’s fourth police commissioner last November, may have bigger problems to fix than her officers’ parking practices. She has focused her tenure on cleaning up after Mr. Adams, a former police captain who suffused the department with a culture of impunity while accusations of corruption spread and quality-of-life concerns persisted.
But putting a stop to police parking abuses would not only alleviate a quality-of- life concern for other drivers, walkers, bus riders and cyclists, it would make clear to the police and the public that officers have to abide by the rules.
Mr. Adams, who has apparently worked things out with the Trump administration to try to get his federal corruption indictment dismissed, has shown little interest in following rules. Police leaders have been among the many Adams officials who didn’t think rules applied to them and left amid criminal investigations.
By addressing parking abuse, a longtime problem for the N.Y.P.D., Ms. Tisch would give the public a simple sign that she expects officers and staff to obey rules, and the law.
By rebuilding discipline, Ms. Tisch can keep the N.Y.P.D. focused on what it is supposed to be doing: cutting crime and disorder. Ms. Tisch recently announced a new “quality of life” division to track complaints and responses to issues such as “aggressive panhandling, unruly street vending, public urination and abandoned vehicles.”
She should add to that list uncontrolled, haphazard government-employee street parking, with the worst offender being the N.Y.P.D.
The city government has long provided some employees with windshield placards letting them park without charge in metered spaces, and in no-parking zones and some loading zones. In a report published last year, the city Department of Investigation found that the city issued more than 100,000 parking placards. The Police Department, with almost one-fifth of city workers, accounts for almost one-third of the placards.
Lower Manhattan is the epicenter both of legal placard use and flouting of the rules. On a recent cold, sunny day, Jan Lee and Triple Edwards, longtime Chinatown residents, guided me along the streets around One Police Plaza, the N.Y.P.D. headquarters. Mr. Edwards paused every few feet to point out cars bearing a placard or some notification that the owner was a cop.
Dashboards displayed white-paper printouts of police insignia, handwritten notes about the driver’s status and pieces of police uniforms. A 2007 study of much of Lower Manhattan found 1,012 instances of illegal parking by cars with placards on a typical midday, and Mr. Lee and Mr. Edwards believe the situation has worsened since then.
Downtown Brooklyn, too, is crammed with parked vehicles sporting placards. The area under the Brooklyn Bridge, near the 84th Precinct station house, is a riot of haphazardly parked passenger cars and S.U.V.s parked at odd angles, parked on sidewalks, creeping up the ramp to the bridge.
In Queens, too, if you look around any precinct building, said Robert Holden, a City Council member whose district includes the 104th Precinct house in Ridgewood, “the cops, their personal cars, are blocking hydrants; worse than that, they’re parked on sidewalks.”
“I’m pro-cop,” Mr. Holden added, “but not when they endanger the public.”
Last year, federal investigators from the Southern District of New York found that city vehicles parked on sidewalks and crosswalks created a “pedestrian grid that is often inaccessible to people with disabilities,” with such people “risking injuries from vehicles” to navigate the streets.
The N.Y.P.D. thwarts enforcement of such violations. “Integrity tests” by the city’s Department of Investigation of calls to the city’s 311 complaint line found that “in half of the reported instances, N.Y.P.D. personnel did not respond to the complaints at all.”
The N.Y.P.D. could allow police parking just on a precinct house’s block, with the commander awarding spots, Sam Schwartz, the former city traffic commissioner and a longtime critic of police parking practices, told me. Beyond the block, Mr. Schwartz said, “you ticket them, you tow them.”
The city could also reconfigure precinct house blocks to create and clearly mark legal spots for officers’ cars.
The City Council should have the Department of Transportation enforce rules against placard abuse, rather than leave it up to the Police Department.
City streets will never offer enough legal parking for every government employee, including every police officer, who wants it. Longer term, the Council should reduce legal placard use, perhaps limiting placards to officers working late-night or early-morning hours, or for making trips between work sites that are difficult to reach on mass transit. Digital placards could let the city monitor, regulate and permit employee parking, even potentially charging for commuter parking.
Ms. Tisch has the right temperament to take this on. In her first months in office, she has shown a calm but firm willingness to assert authority over even top-ranked officers.
When he was running for mayor in 2021, Mr. Adams dismissed placard abuse concerns. To “focus on placards, while 5-year-old girls are being grazed with bullets,” Mr. Adams said, “that is not the problem that the New Yorkers I know are thinking about.”
But Mr. Adams’s poll numbers indicate that New Yorkers are tired of his unchecked culture of impunity.