Why Is the NYPD Summoning Cyclists to Court?
A conversation with Kevin Duggan, the Streetsblog reporter who broke the story about a new policy to more seriously penalize cyclists who commit minor traffic violations.
Leg Day is a newsletter about the pursuit of joy as a city cyclist, which is often made much harder by the police.
An incomplete list of asocial (and illegal) behaviors I have witnessed from drivers within a few blocks of my apartment this week:
Rolling through a red light while holding a cell phone up to their face
Leaving their car parked in a bike lane while sitting on their phone inside
Loudly slamming down on their horn the moment a light turns green
Quickly opening their door into the bike lane, forcing someone behind them to swerve into traffic
Leaving their car parked in a bike lane while they are nowhere to be seen
None of these drivers received tickets. Indeed, despite being the vast majority of road users and the ones who cause the highest percentages of injuries to each other, cyclists, and pedestrians, New York City drivers rarely seem to get tickets for speeding or running red lights. In fact, a recent Streetsblog investigation revealed that, despite being only 2% of road users, cyclists and e-bikers are getting 15% of red light tickets.
How is the NYPD responding to this clear imbalance? By doubling down. Over the last few weeks, advocates learned that the recently established “Quality of Life” department of the NYPD was working on a “pilot program” that would change how it treats certain low-level traffic offenses. When Kevin Duggan, staff reporter at Streetsblog, did more digging, he found that what had been described as a pilot was a new official policy about how cops would treat certain low-level traffic offenses. Starting last Monday, a cyclist or e-biker who runs a red, fails to stop at a stop sign, rides recklessly or under the influence, or down a street the wrong way will no longer just get a ticket. Instead, they will be issued a criminal summons that requires them to appear in court. Those who miss their court date could have a warrant issued for them.
If you’re in a car, however, you’ll continue to just get a traffic ticket. And honestly, you can probably still talk your way out of it.
The new policy has already emboldened cops to take more aggressive stances towards people on two wheels. Bikers have reported that they’ve received criminal summonses for wearing headphones in both ears (you’re only supposed to wear one), not having a bell (technically illegal, as I’ve written), and moving through an intersection with the pedestrian crossing (totally legal, but cops famously respond super well to being corrected). Weirder, Duggan found, one cop apparently wrote a cyclist a summons for swerving out of the bike path, which the biker only did because the cop had just stepped into his way. (Happy Bike Month everyone!)
Response to the policy change has been swift and critical from advocates, politicians, and legal experts. Ben Furnas, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, referred to the policy as a “dangerous escalation.” “Though, as a sheer function of physics, people on bikes cause dramatically less destruction and risk than drivers, Mayor Adams and Commissioner Tisch have created a special class of the law for people on bikes, where the punishment in no way equals the crime,” Furnas said. Further, State Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest has pointed out that the policy could be used to target immigrant delivery workers and “feed [them] into the administration’s deportation machine as the mayor seeks to allow ICE onto Rikers,” she wrote on Bluesky.
To get some more context on the evolving story, I spoke with Kevin about his reporting earlier this week. An edited version of our conversation is below.
LD: Thanks for making the time to speak with me, Kevin. Let’s get into it. What is the new NYPD Policy and how is it different from what was in place before?
KD: Starting on April 28, the NYPD said it would begin handing out criminal court summonses for a selection of violations that would have previously gotten traffic tickets to e-bike riders and cyclists. The violations are things like failing to stop at a red light, going the wrong way, failing to stop at a stop sign, reckless riding, that kind of thing. There is a list of offenses they are officially targeting. If you are stopped for running a red light, you used to just get a $190 ticket. You could go to a DMV hearing to contest it, but otherwise you would just paid it and be done with it. Now, if you get a summons, you have to show up to a court, regardless of whether you decide to contest the charge.
The NYPD says it is focusing its policing efforts on 14 corridors in the city where they say they have received the most complaints about e-bikes. [Editor's note: those are in every borough but Staten Island. In Manhattan its Second Avenue, Sixth Avenue, Delancey Street and 125th Street. In Brooklyn, it’s Broadway, Flatbush Avenue, Fulton Street and Grand Street. In the Bronx, it’s Fordham Road, 149th Street and Tremont Avenue. And in Queens, it’s Roosevelt Avenue, Steinway Street and Northern Boulevard.] They talk a lot about e-bikes, but I’ve heard from several non e-bikers who have gotten tickets as well. It covers both.
Can you explain why they are saying the policy change is necessary? Couldn’t they just ticket more aggressively?
Police leaders have said that they get a lot of complaints about e-bikes who are riding on the sidewalk and going the wrong way. They’ve said they’re employing a data-driven approach to make the changes, but they haven’t given us everything that we think that would actually explain the reasoning. The data they say they are using to justify the change is 311 and 911 calls. 311, being the non-emergency hotline for the city and 911, for emergencies. We’ve asked for that data, but they haven’t provided it. They keep just saying that these 14 corridors are the places where they get the more complaints.
The reason they say they need to amp it up to a criminal court summons isn’t very clear. They haven’t said much publicly. But a police source has told us that a criminal summons makes it easier to hold people accountable. If you don’t show up to pay a ticket, or don’t pay a regular ticket, it’s harder for them to track you down to do so. With a criminal summons, if you don’t show up, they can open a warrant for you. Then, if you get picked up or stopped for anything else in the future, they can arrest you. So it ups the ante a bit on the enforcement mechanism they can use.
The police used to issue a lot more of these court summons, not necessarily for bikes, but more for things like smoking in the park or violating open container laws. In 2016, the city council passed a bunch of bills intended to lower the penalties for low-level, non-violent offenses. [Editor’s note: the reason for the Reform Act was because these kinds of violations were disproportionately affecting Black, Brown and poor New Yorkers, often forcing them into the criminal justice system and impacting their ability to find employment and secure housing.] It seems like they’re going back to that approach, at least with bike enforcement.
You published your first story about the policy change on May 2, but say it went into effect on April 28. How did you find out about the change? Was there no public announcement?
Yeah, the way this trickled out is very interesting to me. The policy change was public, but it went unnoticed for awhile. A few weeks ago, the NYPD commissioner, Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Mayor Adams announced this new quality of life division within the NYPD, focused on low-level crimes. It’s not in the official press release about the division, but in the transcript of the press conference, they talk about e-bikes and how they were going to focus on e-bikes.
Later, we heard from members of this very active subreddit called r/MicromobilityNYC who go to their local NYPD precinct Community Council meeting every month. These are very obscure meetings that every precinct holds to allow people within a community to voice their complaints and tell cops what they should be focusing on. At one of those meetings, the local Sergeant mentioned that they had this new pilot program where they were giving out criminal summonses. I saw a post about this and reached out to the NYPD press office who confirmed that the program was not a pilot, but rather a citywide policy.
I ended up finding out more information on it at a city council hearing last Monday, the same day the policy took effect. It was council oversight hearing on policing, and some council members questioned some senior police officer officials about this policy there and they went into detail. That was the first kind of public explanation beyond an obscure, you know, community meeting in Queens. But it really trickled out in a very unusual way.
Is this really just something they can do? Is there a legal mechanism for changing the severity of these kinds of infractions?
That’s a good question. Some lawyers I’ve talked to have definitely questioned whether this is legal. At the council hearing, the NYPD mentioned that they have concurrent jurisdiction over both giving tickets and legal summons. But I’ve asked NYPD what the legal mechanism is that gives them the ability to change the policy and haven’t heard back yet.
Have you heard from cyclists who have been affected by the policy?
Oh yeah, the stories are coming in. I’ve seen plenty of posts on Reddit about people getting hit with criminal summonses. I’ve also spoken to people who have gotten criminal summonses for like, stopping at a red light, but not in front of the white line on the ground. If you walk around New York City, you’ll see drivers ahead of the white line at basically every intersection. It’s pretty much ignored by everyone. But a cyclist got a criminal summons for it. We’ve also heard from someone who got a criminal summons for wearing non-noise cancelling wired Apple headphones in both their ears.
A very interesting case I heard was from someone who was coming off the Williamsburg Bridge in Manhattan on Delancey street, one of the corridors the NYPD is focusing on. He told me there was an officer parked next to the bike lane at the point where the bridge path ends. As the biker was moving closer, he said the officer had like, locked eyes with him, then stepped out into the bike path, forcing the cyclist to swerve aside. When the cyclist complained that the cop had almost made him crash, the cop said he was being disorderly and gave him a summons for failing to yield to a pedestrian—in this case, the very cop who was issuing the summons and had just stepped into a bike lane that isn’t even supposed to be a pedestrian crossing—and for being disorderly. When the cyclist complained further, the cop threatened to give him a further summons for obstructing governmental administration, which is this kind of catch-all offense the police use to say someone was interfering with their work. In this case, the cop was saying that the cyclist was preventing the cop from catching another e-biker he was trying to catch, though the cyclist told me he didn’t see any other e-bikers around.
So this is how this policy is shaping out, as far as we can see. But we want to talk to more people, especially e-bikers. A lot of people using e-bikes for work are delivery workers, a huge portion of whom are immigrants. By making people that aren’t citizens or might have a difficult immigration status go to criminal court at a time when immigration enforcement officers are often going to courts to pick up people for deportation, it’s an extra danger that lawyers have raised to me. We’re still seeing how all of this will go, but there’s a lot of problematic issues with it already.
Do you have any advice for cyclists trying to stay on top of what is and isn’t allowed and the consequences they might actually face
It’s hard to say because it’s so early and we don’t know all the details of their plan. We know the corridor’s the NYPD says it’s focusing on, so it’s good to be mindful when you’re riding in any of them. But it’s also probably a good idea to refresh yourself on what the rules are about biking in the city. We’ve heard reports of people getting stopped for stuff that is definitely allowed, like riding with the crosswalk. But there’s a limit to what knowing your rights can get you. I’ve heard of people who bring a copy of the city’s bike rules with them when they ride. In one instance, someone told me that this helped them get a cop to stop writing a ticket for them halfway into writing it. But I’ve also heard from people who show cops evidence that what they did wasn’t illegal, only to have the cop kind of shrug it off. It might just depend on the cop you get that day. And if you do get a summons, it’s probably best to reach out to a lawyer to figure out what your options are, even though all the ones I’ve talked to are still figuring out how to proceed in these cases. It’s just all so new. Oh, and also, try not to give a cop a hard time. They can often just add other charges, as we’ve already seen.
To continue tracking the story, I highly recommend following Kevin’s work at Streetsblog. He and the other reporters on that team do an amazing job covering the minutiae around traffic policy here in New York. Kevin is also actively collecting stories from cyclists and e-bikers who have been affected by the NYPD policy change. If you have a story to share, email kevin@streetsblog.org.