In April 2024, the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) released a scathing report on how the New York City Police Department (NYPD) enforces parking laws in New York City. The report found, in relevant part, that the NYPD frequently opts to turn a blind eye to illegally parked vehicles displaying inapplicable or expired parking permits, letting NYPD and other City Government employees park illegally with no consequences. The DOI also found that the NYPD “has no written policies or procedures” for enforcing parking laws in the areas around police precincts and other government buildings in NYC, and Traffic Enforcement Agents told DOI investigators that were subject to internal discipline if they issued parking tickets in sufficiently close proximity to NYPD precinct buildings. This parking permit enforcement problem comes on top of the longstanding problem of “ticket fixing,” in which officers make parking and traffic tickets “disappear” as favors for friends. A favorite technique for helping friends or family (or those willing to pay) get out of tickets (or worse) is the practice of police officers giving out (or even selling) “PBA cards” (named for the Police Benevolent Association, the largest municipal police union in the world); with a quick flash of a PBA card, drivers can avoid a speeding ticket or even arrest. PBA cards have long been identified as a notorious example of petty corruption within the NYPD (see here, here, and here, and here). In fact, an NYPD officer sued the department last year, alleging he was demoted for ticketing a cardholder who was a friend of his supervisor (see here and here).

These are examples of what we might call “quotidian corruption”: officers deciding that low-level civil laws apply to some members of the public but not others, and engaging in this selective non-enforcement to help out friends, family, or those with the right connections. While there are certainly far more important forms of police misconduct, such as racial bias and improper use of deadly force, it would be a mistake not to take quotidian police corruption seriously. As one former NYPD police officer turned prosecutor and law professor commented, in connection with a high-profile ticket fixing scandal, even though the alleged behavior might not be “seriously corrupt,” ticket fixing must stop “for the sake of the public trust[] and the NYPD’s own reputation.” 

The NYPD is unlikely to address these problems itself. Even if the NYPD leadership decided to support more evenhanded enforcement for these low-level offenses, police unions would likely prevent any such reforms from taking place. This leaves the possibility of reform largely in the hands of New York City Government. Here are three potential reforms that City Government could undertake to help combat the quotidian corruption permeating the NYPD, listed in order from least to most challenging:

• First, the City Council should pass legislation requiring the three NYC agencies with the power to issue parking permits (the NYPD, the NYC Department of Transportation, and the NYC Department of Education) to draft and implement a uniform process for creating and issuing parking permits, particularly for parking around precinct headquarters and other government offices. The City Council could include default policy language that would take effect if the precinct or department failed to take action on its own. Doing so would send a signal to the NYPD that uneven enforcement of parking violations is unacceptable.
• Second, the City Council should bolster funding and support for the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), the body tasked with investigating police misconduct and making disciplinary recommendations. Unfortunately, while the past few years have seen a notable uptick in formal complaints against NYPD officers, funding for the CCRB has declined over the same period, leaving the body unable to deal with many of these complaints, or in some cases with whole categories of complaints (see here and here). The City Council should prioritize increased and steadier funding streams for the CCRB and other oversight agencies, to ensure that the vagaries of the annual budgeting process do not impede investigations into police misconduct.
• Third, the City Council needs to counter the power of the police unions, for example by enacting legislative reforms that curtail unions’ ability to contribute to political campaigns (see here and here), or simply by insisting on more robust police misconduct policies, notwithstanding union opposition. (Right now, police unions make it too difficult to discipline or terminate officers who engage in misconduct due to multiple levels of internal appeals available to such officers.) 

As the DOI report succinctly put it, quotidian corruption “erodes the public trust in municipal government.” The NYPD is supposed to serve and protect all New Yorkers equally, and these examples of quotidian corruption illustrate that it does not fulfill that obligation. While considering other police reform efforts that might more readily (and rightfully) create headlines, New York City government must not neglect to deal with the NYPD’s routine practices that undermine public trust in law enforcement and in government writ large.