Queens bill would lock in permanent NYPD squads for street takeovers

After a string of dangerous gatherings on city streets this year, a Queens member of the City Council wants to make the NYPD keep two permanent units focused on street takeovers, where drivers and crowds seize intersections for car stunts.

Under Councilmember Phil Wong’s bill, one unit would remove vehicles involved in illegal takeovers. The other would watch publicly available information for signs of when and where the next one might happen. The bill also adds a reporting rule: after every deployment, the NYPD would have 30 days to tell the mayor and the Council how many tickets were written, how many cars were towed and how many people were arrested, plus the methods officers relied on.

What happens at NYC street takeovers

A typical takeover sees drivers and spectators fill a street or intersection while drivers do stunts such as donuts, spinning their cars in tight circles. Videos of the gatherings often end up on social media.

On Aug. 23, a crowd of cars gathered on East 233rd Street in the Bronx, and police said an 18-year-old was shot and killed there while two other people were wounded. Earlier, in April, an intersection in Maspeth was filled by about 50 cars and more than 100 people, a criminal complaint says. According to that complaint, a fire was burning in the road as drivers spun their cars around it, and a marked patrol car ended up with a cracked windshield, damage the complaint attributes to two people.

NYPD says its street takeover strategy is already aggressive

The department says it already assigns weekend teams to all five boroughs and draws on officers from many parts of the force to watch for meetups and react to them. Each week, patrol, intelligence, aviation, highway and other units sit down to plan for possible weekend events, and a plan covering the whole city goes out ahead of time. Officers check social media and past patterns, police said, and pass along updates as soon as a meetup gets going.

Wong said organizers move too quickly for police to stop the gatherings. “By the time they get there, quite often they are somewhere else,” he said. He added that the city should study how other places handle takeovers.

Oswald Feliz, who leads the Council’s public safety committee, where the bill now sits, has raised doubts about whether the city’s current approach works. In his view, social media has made takeovers worse, and the latest incidents prove the city does not yet have effective ways to deal with them.