Police have slapped street vendors with a skyrocketing number of criminal tickets since Mayor Eric Adams took office two years ago, despite a 2021 shift intended to prioritize civilian enforcement in place of the NYPD, an analysis of department data by THE CITY shows.
The NYPD sent street sellers to criminal court nearly six times as frequently in 2023 as it did in pre-pandemic 2019, with a total of 1,244 criminal summonses issued last year.
Now, some members of the City Council are fighting for a guarantee that sellers accused of violating strict vending laws will be kept out of criminal court — and avoid the collateral consequences, including lost work days and immigration and housing troubles, that can follow a criminal summon.
“For far too long, with a lack of resources available to vendors in our city to ensure they have the means and support and services they need to be able to live their livelihoods…the answer has been to criminalize those who are simply doing the work to support their families,” Councilmember Shekar Krishnan (D-Queens) said at a hearing of the Council’s Committee on Consumer and Worker Protection on Wednesday about his bill to repeal criminal misdemeanor penalties for merchandise and food vendors.
The proposal came in a reintroduced package of vending bills that were first brought to the Council in December in a marathon oversight hearing that lasted more than six hours. Removing criminal penalties is also one of 16 recommendations laid out in 2022 to overhaul the city’s street sales system by the Street Vendor Advisory Board — a joint Council-mayoral panel that consists of vendor advocates, business and property owners, and five city agencies, including the NYPD.
Krishnan’s bill would decriminalize unlicensed vending and selling at the wrong place and the wrong time. It would only have reach above ground, according to Mohamed Attia, managing director of the non-profit Street Vendor Project at the Urban Justice Center, who said the bill would still let the police enforce laws against the sale of counterfeit goods and vending within MTA stations.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021 reassigned street vending enforcement from the NYPD to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which boasted an “education first” approach.
Last April, amid complaints from business owners and others about vendors creating “a sense of lawlessness,” Mayor Adams transferred that task to the Department of Sanitation.
DSNY spokesperson Vincent Gragnani told THE CITY Thursday that the department takes a “warning first” approach and issues only civil summons.
But that did not stop the police from sending more street vendors to criminal court as local business associations blamed the roadside sellers for neighborhood crimes, trash, and other “quality-of-life” concerns.
The 1,244 criminal tickets the NYPD issued to street vendors in 2023 is almost triple the 459 criminal tickets it had given out the year before — and almost six times the 208 it gave vendors in 2019 before the pandemic, when NYPD was still the primary enforcement agency.
Vendors who are Black or Latino were disproportionately impacted, criminal summons data shows, receiving 78% of all the criminal tickets issued in 2023 although those groups make up just 52% of the city’s overall population.
An NYPD spokesperson said the department “maintains its authority to address all violations of law occurring within New York City, including those relating to street vendors.”
The spokesperson added: “Police officers use discretion and sensitivity when addressing vendor conditions, issuing warnings as a first response, where appropriate and consistent with public safety.”
NYPD also maintains the authority to issue civil tickets — including the 1,922 it doled out since April last year, when the sanitation department took over vendor enforcement. By comparison, DSNY, the agency in charge, has handed out about 400 fewer than NYPD, at 1,518 civil tickets over the same period of time, according to Gragnani.
The NYPD did not respond to specific questions about why criminal enforcement has spiked since Adams took office, or on its stance on the decriminalization bill.
Last year, THE CITY reported a similar surge in criminal summonses issued by the NYPD under Adams in connection with the most commonly ticketed quality-of-life offenses, including public drinking and littering.
‘The Web of Consequences’
Among the thousand-plus criminal vending tickets the NYPD handed out last year, 1,033 — or 82% — were attributed to unlicensed sales.
But a license is hard to come by, since the citywide permitting system has for decades capped the number of non–veteran merchandise and food vendors at 853 and 5,100 respectively, leaving almost 12,000 other people stuck on an endless waiting list.
The city resolved to increase issuance of new food vendor licenses by 445 annually starting in 2022. But Corinne Schiff, deputy commissioner for environmental health at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, testified in the December hearing that just 50 new licenses had been issued.
On Wednesday, Krishnan stressed how critical his bill would be to vendors, sparing them the aftereffects of getting dragged into the criminal justice system.
That “can have collateral consequences on their housing, on immigration — the web of consequences that can stem from a criminal conviction are so severe,” Krishnan told THE CITY after the hearing. “No street vendor who is selling fruit or tamales to pay their rent, to pay for childcare, should ever face jail time or criminal consequences.”
Amaris Cockfield, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office, said City Hall “will review this legislation.”
“Mayor Adams continues to deliver economic opportunities for working-class New Yorkers and create clean, safe public spaces — including at the first-of-its-kind community vending area at Corona Plaza,” she added, referencing recently revived street stalls in Queens.
‘There Are No Jobs’
Times Square on Thursday was busy as usual: Halal carts and apparel sellers dotted almost every corner, with uniformed police officers present every few blocks. Here, where flashy billboards and promoters compete for attention, is the epicenter of vendor enforcement. Nearly half of the criminal tickets related to vending issued citywide last year were handed out in Midtown Manhattan.
Maria Marta, who migrated from Ecuador four months ago, stood outside a shoe store with a plastic-wrapped pan of churros on top of a shopping cart. She has tried vending near her hotel shelter in Jamaica, Queens, she said, but Wednesday was her first day selling in Times Square.
“I am scared,” she told THE CITY, referring to the police and apologizing for her Spanish because she’s used to speaking Quechua in Ecuador. “They make us run. They don’t let us sell. They know how to take our stuff.”
Marta said she has four kids to feed back in Queens — plus one other she left behind in Ecuador. Still, vending has been her only viable means of sustenance.
“There are no jobs, that’s why we’re selling like this,” she said. “We look, but there are no jobs. We’re forced to go sell. We’re forced to be out.”
Ndiasse Nodye, who has been selling New York-themed photographs and artwork on 44th and Seventh for the past 26 years, told THE CITY he’s noticed an increased number of vendors in the area — many of whom he suspects are unpermitted.
“Before you don’t see vendors like this. It’s the economy,” said Nodye. “Most of these are migrant people.”
Nodye, who emigrated here from Senegal about 40 years ago, said he sympathized with the new migrants’ need to work even though he supports vending regulations and enforcement.
The 62-year-old is exempt from permitting requirements because he sells items that are covered under the First Amendment. But he, too, acknowledged the limits of the current licensing system for others who are looking to vend legally, and added that he has remained on the idle waitlist for a general license for 20 years.
“They need to organize,” added Nodye, who said he sometimes speaks to new migrants from other West African countries now selling electronics out of their backpacks in Times Square. “They need to find a way to give them something they can work with.”
Attia, too, said the decriminalization bill is only one prong of a holistic solution needed for a stringent system that currently forces many to work outside the law.
“Just to be frank and honest, even when this bill passes, which would be great…the big question is still out there: How are we doing with the system overall?” he said, noting his support for a bill introduced last year that would expand and eventually lift the cap on the number of food licenses issued by the city.
“We want to reform the whole system.”
Additional Reporting by Jonathan Custodio