Will Mayor de Blasio Cut NYPD Tentacle Holding DOT?

Mayor de Blasio said this week that he is having “active conversations” about about relieving the NYPD of its outsized role — and statistically documented racial bias — in traffic enforcement and public space management.

The mayoral admission comes as the chorus calling for reining in the NYPD grows louder in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — a symphony of voices that has not subdued even as the mayor announced reforms such as shifting some NYPD funds to youth programs and also removing the NYPD’s oversight of street vendors.

Advocates want more, specifically getting the NYPD out of public space. On Thursday, Mark Winston Griffith and Danny Harris, the executive directors of the Brooklyn Movement Center and Transportation Alternatives, wrote in Gotham Gazette that having the NYPD involved in traffic enforcement and public space management amounts to “spending so much money on practices that harm people of color” because of the police department’s racially biased enforcement.

The same day, the mayor said he was sensitive to the call.

“I think there’s other areas [beyond the change in vending enforcement] where civilian efforts would be better,” he said. “We made that decision on social distancing as well. We’re going to keep looking at that. [But] traffic enforcement is something that we all need to keep this city safe, to keep this city moving.”

So for now, cops remain in traffic enforcement — despite the fact that traffic stops are the most likely way that cops interact with the public, according to the Department of Justice. And, as Vice recently reported, cops are far more likely to search the car of a person of color than a white person. Officer discretion has bocame officer discrimination, writer Aaron Gordon concluded.

De Blasio did say he was sensitive to ensuring that communities of color are treated fairly. The NYPD’s record on that is poor. Statistics show that 99 percent of “illegal pedestrian crossing” tickets went to blacks and Hispanics in the first quarter of this year, up from 89 percent in 2019. And when cops were still doing social distancing enforcement, 90 percent of the people arrested were black or Hispanic.

SIDEBAR: THE NYPD IS A TERRIBLE VISION ZERO PARTNER — A TIMELINE

And that’s on top of longstanding patterns of systemic racism. The stop-and-frisk policy of then-Mayor Bloomberg meant that black and Latino people were nine times more likely to be stopped by police than whites, even though white people were twice as likely to be found with a gun, Griffith and Harris pointed out. And cops write far more tickets to black and brown cyclists for riding on the sidewalk than they do to whites.

And obviously the NYPD killings of Sean Bell and Eric Garner would not have happened if civilians were enforcing basic rules governing public space.

And beyond racism is simple disrespect for some road users. Would a DOT employee tell a cyclist to “go back” where they came from, as an NYPD officer did last year? Would a civilian use a car as a battering ram against a defenseless bike rider, as another cop did last year?

So why not, the mayor was asked on Thursday, move all such enforcement into a possibly more equitable agency, such as the Department of Transportation?

“I won’t accept any bias or disparity,” the mayor said. “Structural racism has got to be a thing of the past. It’s been corrosive. So I think there is a different question here about how you weed out racism and bias and disparity versus also considering how you get the job done on these issues that matter so deeply. We have to do both at once. So we have to protect people’s lives. We have to make sure that people are safe on the road. We have to make sure that any agency that takes on any mission feels able to do it effectively.

“I don’t think it is as simple an equation as what you are putting forward,” the mayor added. “So, are we going to look at everything? Yes. … But what I hear in communities all over the city is people want to be safe and they want an end to bias and discrimination and disparity. They want both, they need both. We have to figure out what gets us to both. And that’s what these conversations in the next two weeks are going to be all about.”

At a hearing last week, Council Member Carlos Menchaca questioned NYPD officials about why they allowed federal agents, including ICE officers, to provide security at station houses during the height of the protests. The answer from Deputy Commissioner Ben Tucker was very revealing: He said the federal agents freed up NYPD officers so they could return “to the front lines.”

Such language, Conner D’Aquoi said, reveals a lot about how the NYPD sees public space.