A Brooklyn cyclist who refused to move off a Bergen Street sidewalk was grabbed by his backpack and yanked out of the way by two NYPD officers so a sergeant could park his personal car there — and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch ultimately declined to punish anyone involved. The 2023 encounter unfolded near the 78th Precinct house in Park Slope, where Sgt. William McKnight was attempting to park his personal vehicle on the sidewalk when the cyclist stood his ground and refused to move.
According to reporting by Streetsblog New York City, McKnight threatened to run over the cyclist, and two officers then used the cyclist's backpack to physically pull him out of the way. The Civilian Complaint Review Board reviewed the incident and recommended discipline for the officers' use and threat of force, finding the case file contained no indication that officers ever contemplated arresting the cyclist. The NYPD Patrol Guide limits the use of force to situations involving officer safety, protecting life, placing a person into custody, or preventing an escape.
A Deputy Chief's Written Defense
Instead of accepting the CCRB's recommendation, Deputy Chief Michael Baker, who handled correspondence for Tisch, set aside the disciplinary recommendation entirely. Per the same Streetsblog account, Baker argued that officers had the authority to move the complainant out of the way and that issuing discipline would not serve the interest of justice. Baker characterized the cyclist as having acted unlawfully and classified McKnight's threat to run him over as unrelated to his official duties, treating the sergeant as though he were acting as an off-duty private citizen rather than a supervisor directing subordinates.
That framing drew pointed criticism from Noah McClain, who questioned the capacity in which McKnight was acting when he parked on the sidewalk and then ordered other officers to move the complainant, according to the outlet's reporting. Baker's written response was itself a legal requirement: under a 2012 memorandum of understanding between the NYPD and the CCRB, the commissioner or a designated representative must issue a formal written explanation whenever the department departs from the board's disciplinary recommendations, according to NYC.gov.
Sidewalk Parking Long Tolerated Near the 78th Precinct
The Bergen Street sidewalk sits near a station house where cars have been parked illegally for years. The report notes that the 78th Precinct, located in Park Slope, already had cars parked on its sidewalk by 2021, and that the same outlet previously identified an officer's personal car tied to 53 speeding tickets and seven red-light tickets in 2017. In 2023, Streetsblog also found two officers with defaced license plates parking outside the station house.
An NYPD spokesperson blamed the cyclist for the encounter, saying the complainant had intentionally blocked an off-duty sergeant from parking, and described parking around station houses generally as a persistent challenge. The department maintains that it strives to balance officers' parking needs with the city's limited space, even as the Patrol Guide explicitly prohibits officers from parking on sidewalks and the officers involved say they never viewed the cyclist as a threat.
Self-Enforcement Zones Persist Despite Watchdog Objections
The NYPD describes precinct-area parking locations as “self-enforcement zones,” and officers and municipal employees routinely park illegally in personal vehicles there, often shielded from tickets by city-issued parking placards. A Department of Investigation study released in April 2024 found that out of 876 illegal parking tickets issued across these self-enforcement zones over a five-month span in 2022, only 76 summonses — just 0.3% of the total — went to police officers, according to Patch. Investigators also found the department maintains no written rules for enforcing parking in these zones, and civilian Traffic Enforcement Agents have reported facing potential internal discipline if they issue citations too close to a precinct.
City investigators recommended in 2024 that the NYPD's ability to self-enforce parking violations be removed altogether, but the department rejected that recommendation the following year. A July 2025 letter obtained by Streetsblog in November showed NYPD Legal Bureau Inspector William Gallagher formally notifying the Department of Investigation that the department would not eliminate the self-enforcement zones, rejecting the watchdog's central recommendation. Then-Chief of Department John Chell had testified in 2023 that the NYPD issued command discipline to 39 officers for parking violations in just the first four months of that year, after reiterating in 2021 that department policy prohibits parking on sidewalks.
A Pattern of Overruling Watchdog Discipline
The Bergen Street case fits a broader pattern documented in a December 2025 audit from the New York City Comptroller's Office, which found Tisch had accepted and imposed CCRB-recommended discipline in 77.8% of substantiated non-charges misconduct cases — a marked increase over former Commissioner Edward Caban's 22.9% acceptance rate. Yet the same audit found that between January 2024 and May 2025, the NYPD closed 51.5% of substantiated CCRB misconduct cases without any departmental review or discipline because the board had submitted its investigation reports too close to the administrative statute of limitations, according to the Comptroller's Office.
High-profile exceptions to that improved acceptance rate keep surfacing. In August 2025, Tisch overruled an internal departmental trial judge's recommendation to terminate an NYPD lieutenant involved in a fatal 2019 Bronx traffic stop shooting, ruling the officer's split-second decisions were reasonable, as Brooklyn Eagle reported. Hoodline has previously covered that reversal, along with the commissioner's broader retention record and mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani's October 2025 proposal to strip the commissioner of final disciplinary authority and hand binding power to the CCRB instead.
The disciplinary debate has also touched parking privileges among city officials themselves. In March, former Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry faced accusations of distributing more than a dozen unauthorized NYPD parking placards, prompting Tisch to invalidate the permits and direct officers to seize them, as Hoodline reported at the time. Taken together, the cases show a commissioner willing to act against placard misuse in some instances while declining to discipline officers who used force to protect a colleague's illegal parking spot in another.
