The Department of Justice has warned the NYPD to stop allowing officers to park their cars on sidewalks and in crosswalks outside precincts — lest the feds be forced to sue the city for violating the civil rights of people with disabilities.
Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), sent a letter on March 29 to the Police Department’s legal bureau to report the findings of a DOJ investigation into precinct parking behaviors, and to warn the department that the widespread scofflawery must end.
“The sidewalks and crosswalks adjacent to NYPD precincts are subject to frequent obstructions by both the private and police vehicles of NYPD members, resulting in inaccessibility of the pedestrian grid,” wrote Williams, citing last year’s study by University of California, Berkeley professor Marcel Moran finding illegal sidewalk parking at 91% of the city’s 77 precincts, including every single one in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
“The City of New York (and, more specifically, the NYPD) has failed to ensure that the pedestrian grid is ‘readily accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities,'” Williams continued.
Don’t even think of parking there!
For years, the phenomenon has been visible at virtually every police precinct in the city, where officers “combat park” both their squad and personal vehicles perpendicular or diagonal to the curb, or even entirely on the curb, often blocking a significant share of the sidewalk. Impounded vehicles are also often parked this way outside precincts.
At some precincts, police have even illegally painted parking lines onto the street and sidewalk to make officers’ illicit parking look more legitimate.
While annoying to most New Yorkers, the practice can be dangerous for those who rely on wheelchairs for mobility, forcing them into the street when they are unable to navigate a sidewalk blocked by officers’ vehicles.
The issue is personal for Jean Ryan, the president of Disabled in Action NY and a wheelchair user. She used to go to meetings at a Midtown building across the street from, ironically, the NYPD’s Citywide Traffic Task Force on 30th Street, where officers have long parked diagonally on the sidewalk in illegally painted spaces.
All of the illegally parked cars would block her from being able to reach an Access-a-Ride vehicle picking her up, forcing her to wait in the street, she recounted.
“There is a fine line between being seen by your driver and being hit by a car because you are in the street,” Ryan recounted. “Isn’t it disgusting that our police force think they can have inaccessible precincts and block sidewalks, that we aren’t the public, too?”
These practices by police officers are not only illegal under city law, which generally prohibits city vehicles being parked on the sidewalk. It’s also, Williams contends, a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, the landmark federal statute prohibiting state discrimination against people with disabilities.
For that, Williams in his letter warned the NYPD (and other city agencies) to get their act together or face a federal civil rights lawsuit.
Williams instructed the city to adopt new parking rules around precincts ensuring accessibility of the pedestrian grid, retraining officers on parking enforcement and their own practices, and to establish a procedure where members of the public can complain about illegally obstructive parking by city vehicles.
On the last point, the NYPD must provide quarterly reports to SDNY on the complaints received, as well as resolution of complaint, “including the remedy imposed by the NYPD with respect to the driver and responding officer, if any.”
“In the event we determine that we cannot secure compliance voluntarily to correct the deficiencies identified in this letter, the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit pursuant to the ADA,” Williams wrote.
Letter under review
Reached for comment, the NYPD simply said “we are reviewing the letter.”
Parking behavior at precincts does not appear to have meaningfully changed since the letter was sent, although the New York Post reported earlier this month that police brass were warning officers to stop parking illegally around their worksites, citing a “high ranking police source.” That came after a report by the city’s Department of Investigation, required by a 2020 city law, found the problem to be widespread and egregious, but before the DOJ letter’s existence was first reported by Streetsblog last week.
The NYPD did not return a follow-up inquiry about the alleged instructions from 1 Police Plaza to stop illegally parking.
Whether the NYPD will heed by the strongly-worded letter is anyone’s guess, as city laws and Department policies on parking are often openly flouted. NYPD bylaws call for command discipline, from “oral admonishment to a 5-day penalty,” for illegal parking, and parking placards are supposed to be yanked after three instances of misuse under city law. But Williams said the NYPD submitted data showing only 80 instances of discipline or permit revocation from 2021 through 2023, despite the phenomenon being visible at almost all precincts.
The cops also appear to be ticketing cars with placards, for NYPD or other agencies, less than non-city vehicles. Police issued summonses to the vehicles in 2.8% of complaints for illegal sidewalk parking of city vehicles between 2021 and 2023, compared to 10.7% of non-city vehicles, Williams said.
Complaints about the behavior — to 311, at community boards, or directly to the precinct — appear to consistently be ignored.
“We have spoken with numerous individuals with disabilities who have explained their personal experience with the difficulty navigating
around City Vehicles parked on sidewalks,” said Williams. “And many reported that no matter what efforts they made to resolve the problem— contacting the local precincts, submitting 311 reports, or attending community board meetings — things had either not improved or gotten worse in recent years.”
Ryan’s experiences, with the NYPD and other agencies, have been consistent with what Williams described, based on his interviews with members of the disabled community. Ryan, a Bay Ridge resident, said she often deals with not only parked cars on the sidewalk outside FDNY Engine 242 on 5th Avenue, but sometimes moving cars on the sidewalk.
“No matter how many community board meetings we had with police and FDNY, they still did it and the meter people have been instructed to ignore those violations,” said Ryan.
Asked at a City Council hearing last year to explain and justify the ubiquitous outlaw parking, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, said it happens because “a lot of people work at the precinct and there’s not enough parking spots.”
Additional reporting by Lloyd Mitchell
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