Ozone Park, Queens, New York

The 106th Precinct in Ozone Park, Queens is egregiously obstructing commuting public space on both sides of the street with police vehicles and their cars, notably on top of a handicap cut curb ramp and by a public park named after a cop who died in the line of duty. The cop the park was memorialized for, Officer Nicholas Demutiis, got killed trying to stop a car thief that ran him over on that same block. 

 

This falls in line with what the NYPD has been doing at their other precincts as they turn the areas around their taxpayer funded buildings into makeshift fortresses, especially with all the frequent protests that has occurred in the last five months along with a majority of citizens calling for defunding and abolishing of the police and the budget cuts that followed in July. A recent incident that got some viral attention involved a reporter from bike advocate news site Streetsblog who got stopped, questioned and also threatened for arrest when she exposed the NYPD using a playground as parking lot for their vehicles (with permission by the NYC Parks dept).

But the 106th truly stands out for their brazen territoriality of public space. And to show that their annexing of sidewalks isn’t a new thing, this precinct has been parking vehicles on this sidewalk and the one across the street for quite a while now. 

Although what the NYPD is doing here with absolute impunity is obnoxious and in contempt for the citizens they are supposed to protect, this probably would’ve got rectified if the recent budget cuts enacted by the woke City Council cronies didn’t include terminating the building of a new precinct in under-served areas of Southeast Queens. Maybe some of these spacehogging cops would have got transferred over there when it got completed. 

But this could be easily rectified right now. These cops could just park their vehicles the proper way parallel to the curb like they used to do and how the citizenry parks them instead of curbstoning them like how scofflaw chop shops continue get away with it. Maybe the city can contact the management and owner of Resorts World to use their vast parking lot for free or sanction some curb space by the abandoned Rockaway rail line for them and the BOWL 360 parking lot too. Ultimately and unfortunately since that aforementioned NYPD will never be built because of the budget cuts, what should be done is take whatever funding is going to the Strategic Response Groups that are being deployed to all these protests and use it to build a new parking garage. It would be a more common sense use for millions of dollars being pissed away having hundreds of cops damage their bikes by banging them up and down while kettling people demonstrating against them.

The cops over here should take their own advice they give towards protesters, reporters and even city officials and MOVE BACK their cars off the sidewalks.