City Agencies Wrote a Quarter-Million Summonses in Lower Manhattan Last Year, But Placard Enforcement Mostly Targets the Handicapped
Various agencies of City government issued nearly a quarter of a million summonses for parking violations in Lower Manhattan during 2024, according to statistics available from the NYC Open Data portal, resulting in slightly more than $22.1 million in revenue, or an average fine of $88.00.
For the purposes of this analysis, Lower Manhattan is defined as the NYPD’s First Precinct, which is the area south of a jagged line formed by Houston Street, Broadway, Chambers Street, Centre Street, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
A striking anomaly in this data is that among 249,217 parking violations, only 317 were for “misuse of parking permit.” This may surprise some Lower Manhattan residents, who are accustomed to seeing many hundreds of illegally parked vehicles bearing government-issued placards on local streets each day. These cars occupy bus stops, spaces in front of fire hydrants, and “no stopping, no standing, no parking” zones, which are legally forbidden to all vehicles – and generally do so with impunity.
In a second, counterintuitive datum, the majority of the summonses issued for “misuse of parking permit” appear to target not government employees using their personal vehicles for commutation purposes, but rather private individuals who are eligible for handicapped parking credentials.
A Broadsheet review of the license plate numbers that recur most frequently in the database of parking summonses issued in Lower Manhattan indicates that all the vehicles cited four or more times for “misuse of parking permit” were displaying “SPI” (or “special parking identification”) credentials. These are issued to persons who “have a severe, permanent disability that impairs mobility,” according to City documentation. This enables the driver to park at “no parking” spaces, and at parking meters without depositing money. Several of these citations noted that the SPI permit was expired, obscured from view, or displayed by a vehicle other than the one to which it has been issued. But several dozen alleged only that the vehicle displaying SPI credentials was parked in a space for which these are not given privileges, such as a bus stop or in front of a fire hydrant.
By contrast, vehicles bearing placards identifying the driver as a government employee are routinely ignored by enforcement agents, regardless of where they park. A local case in point is River Terrace, where each weekday, approximately 35 vehicles displaying law enforcement credentials utilize this quarter-mile long street as their private parking lot. Many of these vehicles may belong to officers assigned to the New York Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), an arm of the Drug Enforcement Administration that is headquartered at 250 Vesey Street, in Brookfield Place. Because this office, which brings together more than 100 officers from a dozen-plus City, State, and federal agencies, conducts sensitive, undercover investigations, it must conceal from public view the vehicles it uses for actual law enforcement operations. For this reason, OCDETF pays for 130 parking spaces in an underground garage within 250 Vesey Street.
The vehicles parked on River Terrace appear not to be used for any official purpose. Rather, they are used by officers driving between their homes and the OCDETF office at Brookfield Place. During a 2018 meeting with CB1 officials, convened to address illegal parking by law enforcement personnel in Battery Park City, a New York Police Department commander was blunt, telling CB1 members that the officers at OCDETF required many dozens of street parking spaces “for commutation purposes.”
The Broadsheet’s review of 2024 summonses issued in Lower Manhattan for “misuse of parking permit” found only three that cited vehicles bearing credentials from the Police or Fire Departments. One was issued to a vehicle with an NYPD placard that was expired. The other two were issued to vehicles with FDNY placards, in both cases for parking in an unauthorized zone.
These results appear to be a statistical echo of two recent probes, one by federal prosecutors and another by the City’s Department of Investigation (DOI), both of which reached parallel conclusions: that police officers flagrantly disregard the law they are sworn to uphold, by helping themselves to extra-legal parking privileges.
The federal probe, conducted by the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), determined last April that “NYPD vehicles and the personal vehicles of NYPD employees frequently obstruct sidewalks and crosswalks in the vicinity of NYPD precincts.” (In this context, the OCDETF office at 250 Vesey Street is the equivalent on a police precinct.)
The federal report continues, “the information that SDNY has reviewed to date establishes that 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. Most notably, a recent study identified parking behaviors at 91 percent of the NYPD’s precincts that resulted in obstructions to sidewalks and crosswalks with the potential to render those pathways inaccessible.”
Separately, the probe by the City’s DOI found, “the NYPD’s enforcement of parking permit misuse at the street level has been uneven and inadequate in that Traffic Enforcement Agents and NYPD officers frequently choose not to issue summonses to illegally parked vehicles displaying parking permits.”
As part of this probe, DOI anonymously called in multiple 311 complaints about actual instances of illegally parked vehicles displaying NYPD credentials. The results of these “integrity tests” documented that “NYPD took no enforcement action in any of the instances of parking permit misuse reported by DOI; in half of the reported instances NYPD personnel did not respond to the complaints at all.” Yet each of these complaints was administratively categorized by NPYD either as “unfounded” or “resolved.”
Many hundreds of law enforcement personnel use placards to park each day throughout Lower Manhattan in spaces that are off limits to people not fortunate enough to have such credentials. The monetary value of such a privilege is substantial. Daily parking in a local garage runs, on average, to more than $50. Extrapolated to five days per week, and 50 weeks per year (allowing two off for vacation), this comes to $12,500. The person paying this amount would have to earn approximately $16,000 before taxes in order to cover such an expense.
Alternately, parking illegally on the street requires an even-larger budget, because the City’s parking enforcement agents are authorized to write repeated tickets to a single vehicle for the same violation throughout the day. But assume, conservatively, that a vehicle parked illegally is ticketed just twice each day (for the same number of days described above), and that each summons carries a fine of $101: the average price of a parking ticket in Battery Park City, which is tied for the highest anywhere in the five boroughs, according to a 2017 study by SpotAngels (a smartphone app that offers users real-time data about available street parking options nearby). In this hypothetical, the cost of the privilege rises to $50,500 per year, or more than $65,000 before taxes.
Last May, Community Board 1 enacted a resolution deploring the abuse of placards by NYPD personnel and other government employees, and calling for (among other measures), “legislation that would allow citizen reporting of government-owned vehicles and vehicles with government-issued placards that are obstructing sidewalks, pedestrian ramps, crosswalks, bike lanes, bus lanes and bus stops.”