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Guest Essay

By Nicole Gelinas

Ms. Gelinas is a contributing Opinion writer and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

On a February morning, as light snow turned to light rain, traffic backed up behind a truck on a Brooklyn side street. The driver had stepped out to measure whether he could get past one of a long line of parked S.U.V.s and sedans, jutting off the sidewalk and into the street, outside the 67th Precinct station house in East Flatbush.

Recent visits to Manhattan’s Chinatown found one driver had secured a parking space forbidden to others by leaving a crumpled yellow N.Y.P.D. vest on the dashboard. A second driver left the top half of a police uniform. On a yellow-striped median on Canal Street, a driver had overcome parking laws with a handwritten note indicating that he or she was a police officer.

All over the city, New York Police Department officers and other staff members start their workday by disregarding the law. They park their personal vehicles at bus stops, on sidewalks and in crosswalks, in turning lanes and no-standing zones.

Jessica Tisch, who became Mayor Eric Adams’s fourth police commissioner last November, may have bigger problems to fix than her officers’ parking practices. She has focused her tenure on cleaning up after Mr. Adams, a former police captain who suffused the department with a culture of impunity while accusations of corruption spread and quality-of-life concerns persisted.

But putting a stop to police parking abuses would not only alleviate a quality-of-life concern for other drivers, walkers, bus riders and cyclists; it would make clear to the police and the public that officers have to abide by the rules.

Mr. Adams, who has apparently worked things out with the Trump administration to try to get his federal corruption indictment dismissed, has shown little interest in following rules. Police leaders........

© The New York Times