NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — The NYPD is systemically ignoring reported instances of illegal parking and the abuse of government placards across the city, according to the City Council.
Cops are falsely claiming to have taken enforcement action on 311 complaints without even visiting the scene of the reported infraction, leaders of the Council wrote in a new letter to Police Commissioner Dermot Shea.
Staff at the Council’s oversight and investigations division filed 50 parking infraction complaints to 311 between May and July and then waited at the site to observe the NYPD’s response.
Investigators found the NYPD falsy claimed to have addressed the 311 complaints without even showing up 28% of the time — for 14 of the investigators’ complaints.
In most instances — 72% of the time, or for 36 complaints — cops either drove by or took a cursory glance at the illegal parking jobs without taking action, according to the Council.
Three Council members signed the letter, requesting more information from the NYPD on the fraudulent responses: Speaker Corey Johnson; Vanessa Gibson, the chair of the oversight and investigation committee; and Ydanis Rodriguez, the chair of the transportation committee.
City workers’ abuse of parking placards has irked elected officials and advocates, who warn that parking illegally in bike lanes or on sidewalks creates dangerous road conditions. Repeated attempts to rein in placard abuse have shown no effect on the practice.
"Illegal parking and placard abuse are serious safety issues. When vehicles are parked illegally on sidewalks and in crosswalks or bike lanes, pedestrians, cyclists, and wheelchair users are diverted into dangerous traffic,” said Johnson. “With traffic fatalities at their highest point in nearly a decade, illegal parking violations must be taken seriously.”
The report comes as the number of city traffic deaths are on pace to increase for the second year in a row. There have been 207 traffic fatalities recorded through Oct. 10, according to NYPD data. That’s up 15% from the 180 recorded at that point last year.
The members in the letter charged that the NYPD could be falsifying response data to parking complaints at a much larger scale. Investigators reviewing NYPD’s response to illegal parking complaints through the 311 portal found cops reported questionably fast response times.
The NYPD roughly quadrupled the number of illegal parking complaints it has closed out in 15 minutes or less over the last three years, according to the Council analysis.
In 2019, the NYPD responded to only about 2.77% of parking-related complaints and 0.88% of placard abuse complaints in less than 15 minutes, according to the Council’s analysis.
That number jumped in 2020 and in 2021. This year, the NYPD claims to have closed out 10.83% of illegal parking complaints and 12.72% of placard abuse complaints in fewer than 15 minutes.
Those speedy responses came as the instances of reported placard abuse was 14 times higher than in 2019, according to the Council.
“On its face, this would appear to be a positive development,” the Council members wrote in their letter. “But we are concerned that NYPD’s response time is, in some cases, implausibly fast given that it takes time to travel from one place to another in the city and given the findings of our field investigation thus far.”
NYPD spokesperson Sophia Mason said in a statement that the NYPD has received the letter and is reviewing it.
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