Chaos on New York’s Streets, Brought to You by the NYPD

Ian F. Blair is a writer and editor in New York City.

On a street in Harlem, a New York Police Department officer sees a line of cars in front of him and can’t help himself. First, he sits idle, acting as if nothing is happening — because nothing, in fact, is happening. The stoplight in front of him is red, cars are patiently waiting, an e-bicycle whizzes by. A pedestrian looks both ways and crosses unremarkably.

That’s when something strange occurs. The officer inches his Ford Police Interceptor Utility — bearing the words “COURTESY”, “PROFESSIONALISM” and “RESPECT” on the rear door — forward. He turns on his lights and dials up his choice of electronic siren. A quick whoop. A prolonged “bluuuuurrrppppprp.” A startling, pulsating, laser gun-sputtering sound. The cop car edges out over the crosswalk, then accelerates. As soon as he does, the sirens abruptly cease, like a fire alarm after a drill. The lights cut off. And the car is on to the next intersection. Inevitably, the police cruiser coasts through that red light too, nearly running over an auntie dressed in her Sunday best, who stops just in time not to become an afterthought.

Where the NYPD is headed in that moment is not immediately clear; it seldom is. Just ask your average New York City resident. What is obvious, however, is that, whatever his destination, the officer didn’t want to wait.

The worst-kept secret in New York is also one of its most bizarre and frequent happenings: The NYPD runs red lights in obviously non-emergency situations all the time.

The scene I just described was just an average Sunday uptown around brunch o’clock. But it might as well have been in Bed–Stuy during school pick-up or in Parkchester on a Saturday morning. I’ve seen cops run lights so many times I’ve lost count. And the more I talk to people, the more I’ve discovered how prevalent the practice is.

Stories abound. A parent at a party recounted a cop pulling out into an intersection against the light and nearly hitting a kid who had the right of way. Another person told me that officers at a red light near a church blurped the car in front of them, waiting patiently at a red. When the driver didn’t respond, one of the officers hopped on his intercom: “Just go through,” he instructed, assuring them that it was OK. The driver obliged, perhaps thinking it was an emergency. The cop car drove through. As soon as he was on his way, the car lights and sirens turned off.

I asked Gersh Kuntzman, editor of Streetsblog NYC and a vigilante corrector of illegal license plates and parking placards on the streets of New York, when he first saw a cop run a red. “It’s like saying, do you remember the first time you had a slice of pizza,” Kuntzman said. “It happens every day.”

Kuntzman, a street safety advocate who has for years documented the NYPD’s lawless driving behavior, told me nothing surprises him anymore. He has chronicled police parking habits — inspiring academic studies on the subject — and showed how cops go to extremes to avoid tickets and evade tolls on their personal vehicles.

“When [cops] drive recklessly and they park recklessly, it’s not just a kind of disrespect for their neighbors — the ones they have sworn to serve or protect — but it is an example of how they see the use of the car. They see it as completely normal,” he told me, adding, “They’re almost never held accountable for misdeeds behind the wheel.”

The New York Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for interviews and comment.

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One effect of watching a cop run a light is that something in you changes. Though what, exactly, is a bit difficult to pin down. It’s hard to maintain the sense of shock because it transpires so quickly and so unexpectedly. The city’s energy skips a beat, and when the flow of legal traffic resumes, you go about your day, with an expanded capacity to normalize what was previously unthinkable.

That doesn’t stop you from trying to rationalize what you’ve seen. When it initially happens, you think: Maybe there was a reason? Perhaps there is an emergency? After all, a police cruiser is, as defined in Section 1104, Chapter 71, Title 7, Article 23 of New York’s Vehicle & Traffic Code, an “authorized emergency vehicle.” In an emergency, an authorized driver may “proceed past a steady red signal, a flashing red signal or a stop sign” and “disregard regulations governing directions of movement or turning in specified directions.” Notably, they can do so only “when involved in an emergency operation.”

An “emergency operation” is its own well-known form of public peril. Police pursuits, according to a 2024 analysis of public traffic data by The City, can be quite deadly. Last year, NYPD vehicular chases resulted in nearly 400 vehicle crashes and at least 315 people injured. (The data didn’t even cover a full 12-month span.) Those numbers, which The City crunched using data from NYPD accident reports, have been rising rapidly under Mayor Eric Adams.

But at least blowing through a light during a high-speed chase, though dangerous, is fairly straightforward. More difficult to explain is the need to disregard a signal during an “operation” that is so recognizably un-justified. It’s easy to tell when the police are actually engaged in an “emergency operation,” because they act noticeably different. They drive with purpose, blowing through light after light on their way to the site of an alleged emergency. But when it’s not an emergency, they run a light more nonchalantly. There’s no urgency, no follow-through, no commitment. The lights don’t stay on. The sirens go quiet. You know they aren’t on their way somewhere because they often end up back in the flow of traffic a few blocks away.

Red-light running is a rare instance when the NYPD doesn’t hide its motives: There are no tactics of deception or smoke and mirrors. No detours around the corner. No exhibitions of speed. The NYPD can’t be bothered with filling plot holes to shore up the narrative. They have nowhere to be in a hurry, just not where they were.

In that respect, the act of running a red light is, paradoxically, an example of NYPD transparency — an act of transparency without any of the traditional metrics.

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There are no comprehensive statistics about how often cops run lights in non-emergencies, or which officers engage in this practice the most frequently. Red-light violations are public and searchable by license plate, as Kuntzman has shown, but a problem arises when you try to determine the story behind a plate captured by a traffic signal camera: If a cop running a red is legal “when involved in an emergency operation,” how would you determine what instances to include? How would you know how many red-light runs are part of the same “emergency operation”? In addition to the limitations of the data — a traffic camera can only see what the camera is pointed at — you would need a reliable narrator.

The police have proven themselves to be anything but, even if the media has a tendency to take them at their word. Will one of New York’s Finest dare to compile an accurate oral history of why their coworkers blow through reds on a daily basis? Without it, we may never know the whole story — the practice must have begun after 1920, when the first traffic towers were installed on New York’s streets, but even then, the lights were manually controlled by a fellow officer, who likely switched the signal to let their brothers’ Model A power through.

We do have our own ad hoc surveillance, though. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a cop run a red light for no apparent reason. It was in front of a large crowd of pedestrians, in midtown, not far from where Luigi Mangione allegedly killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO. I was waiting for one of the homies, people-watching, when I noticed a cop car stopped at a light one block north of the corner on which I stood. Some tourists slowly crossed the street. Then I noticed the cop car turn on its lights and slowly slide through the light. To my right stood a pair of uniformed NYPD officers, and two more sentries posted up across the avenue. The car turned its siren on as it passed them, and then cut it off. It decelerated, then hit the siren again to extrajudicially make it through the next intersection only to get stuck in traffic when it neared Times Square. I couldn’t believe what I had just seen.

I have lived in other major American cities, but I have never encountered police as pressed to get a few blocks ahead as they are in New York. After awhile, seeing a cop run a red becomes as visually unremarkable as seeing one scrolling on their phone. It is the kind of thing you might not notice unless you were looking for it.

It also belies the “Do as I say, not as I do” approach to safety the NYPD is notorious for.

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In April, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that police would begin issuing criminal summonses, in lieu of traffic tickets, to cyclists and e-bike riders caught running red lights. In June, the NYPD said it would expand its “quality of life” division to every precinct in the name of safety — “broken windows” by another name. Meanwhile, the NYPD and the mayor have been accused of corruption by several former high-ranking NYPD officers and by a former commissioner, who called their ring a “criminal enterprise.”

Allegations notwithstanding, the act of running a red — in non-emergencies and during bona fide emergency operations — is a demonstration of the freedom to move.

I like to think that any officer who partakes is responding to a limitation that they feel is imposed upon them by the law. They desire to be able to drive as they please, to be who they want to be behind the wheel, without being accountable for their actions. They are rejecting the fact that a framework should govern their movements. The act of running the red light, in defiance of a law they view as a burden, is a way for them to push against a preordained way of being and toward a future, which they alone desire to author. The line on the ground is literal, but it’s also metaphorical; it might as well be a Mad Libs for them to fill in as they see fit.

“The driver of an authorized emergency vehicle, when involved in an emergency operation, may exercise the privileges set forth in this section,” § 1104 begins. In hitting his lights and siren, the officer behind the wheel responds to the prompt. If only he would have noted the “conditions herein stated” downpage: “The foregoing provisions shall not relieve the driver of an authorized emergency vehicle from the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of all persons, nor shall such provisions protect the driver from the consequences of his reckless disregard for the safety of others.”