De Blasio On NYPD Ticketing Cyclists After Deadly Crashes: 'We Need Cyclists To Obey The Law'

At Thursday's press conference

At a press conference to tout his administration's commitment to safer streets on Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio was asked about the NYPD's policy of ticketing cyclists in the vicinity of where a cyclist has been fatally struck by a driver. Specifically, on February 7th, when an NYPD officer allegedly knocked a cyclist off his bike during a ticketing blitz in Midtown, a block away from where Chaim Joseph was killed by a hit-and-run driver just a few days before. The mayor's response: the law is the law.

"Whenever there is a fatality... it’s a horrible situation, and we all feel it. That does not mean we’re going to stop enforcement," de Blasio said. "We’re going to be enforcing on anybody who we think puts other people in danger, period."

The mayor added that the NYPD "should do it in the most careful way possible, that’s their training," and that he hadn't seen the video or the images in question.

"But no, if, if we know there have been injuries involving cyclists and pedestrians, we take that seriously, too. We need cyclists to obey the law, and of course enforcement is a part of that."

In 2018, cycling fatalities fell to 10, compared to 24 in 2017; pedestrian deaths increased over that same time period, from 104 to 107.

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson saw the incident in Midtown North differently.

No arrests have been made in connection with Joseph's death, an NYPD spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday.

Brooklyn Council Member Carlos Menchaca, who attended a rally outside the Midtown North Precinct on February 8th to support working cyclists, and said he was baffled by the NYPD's post-crash crackdowns on cyclists.

"I would like to know what forces an NYPD local precinct to start cracking down on bicyclists after a crash, especially a deadly crash," Menchaca told Gothamist at the rally. "It's not only appalling, it's the wrong kind of message that you want to send to a community that is mourning."

Menchaca also supports a bill to legalize throttle-based e-bikes popular with the city's immigrant delivery cyclists, who are frequently fined hundreds of dollars while doing their jobs.

"All of this is creating a massive mess on the ground, it's counterintuitive," Menchaca added. "What we need is education, what we need is organizing, what we need is trust, and that does not happen when the NYPD starts cracking down on bikes ridden by people of color—immigrants, delivery workers."

The mayor and DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg were in Bay Ridge to announce that the city is using new crash data to increase pedestrian crossing times and redesign portions of some of the most dangerous streets. According to the DOT, nearly half of all pedestrian fatalities occur on the same 7 percent of the city’s 424 miles of streets.

"The original sin here is quite clear—vehicles are where the biggest problem is and we’ve got to address the behavior of drivers," de Blasio said.

A reporter then asked the mayor why the plan didn't involve more aggressive actions designed to change driver behavior, such as closing down certain roads to vehicular traffic.

"I think right now we're trying to do things in sequential order. We've got an MTA problem we have to fix, we have a congestion problem we've got to fix...In my view, closing off streets is kind of contradictory to some of the other things that we're trying to address right now," de Blasio replied.

The mayor also said he had his NYPD detail pull over a woman who was texting and driving on the FDR:

Well, first of all, it's a - whenever I see anything out the window that requires police action, you know, I'll say it out loud to the detail in my car and they communicate with whatever vehicle is trailing us to go and deal with it or to, you know, reach out to the precinct to whatever it may be. So, no, I mean, literally we were driving on the FDR and someone next to us was overtly paying more attention to her device than to driving her car. And I just said, pull her over, take whatever enforcement action you would take in that situation, give her some on-the-spot education because I can't, you know - I'm saying this as a parent. I don't understand why people take that chance. They could kill someone. You know, it's just, it's too - you get too engaged and too involved when you're texting or even for some people while they're speaking on the phone if they're not doing it, you know, in the legal way - if they don't have a headset or whatever. People just get too caught up in the device and it's dangerous. So whenever I see it, I tell the cops, go get them. Please.

In 2013, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio was asked by moderator Errol Louis if he had ever texted while driving.

"My wife is sitting in the front row and she would laugh me out of my house," de Blasio replied. "Yes, I have sinned, Errol. I've stopped now."