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 New York, police officers and staff 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.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The New York York Times (paywall)
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
Photo by Alexander Spatari/ Getty Images