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Urine trouble: NYPD tickets for public peeing flow faster under Mayor Adams
By
Samantha Max
Published Sep 22, 2025
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By
Samantha Max
Published Sep 22, 2025
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William Singleton couldn’t hold it any longer.
He tried to use the bathroom in a restaurant in East Harlem after attending a funeral for his aunt, but it was out of order, so he darted across the street to relieve himself. A police officer who happened to be outside the restaurant followed him and stood over his shoulder while he peed. Then, the officer handed him a ticket for public urination.
“If I could have held it, I would have held it. But obviously I couldn’t hold it,” Singleton said. “I wasn’t going to piss my pants.”
The NYPD has drastically ramped up its use of public urination tickets under the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, who has advocated for more enforcement of low-level offenses to address perceptions of disorder in the city. The department issued almost five times as many public urination tickets between July 2024 and June 2025 compared to July 2021 through June 2022, according to new data in the Mayor’s Management Report.
Elizabeth Glazer, the former director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, said handing out tickets is not the best way to stop people from peeing in public.
“ When you see the utter failure of summonses to change behavior over decades, it's time to rethink what you're doing,” she said.
The mayor's office said in a statement that the city has worked to expand access to public restrooms and address public urination in civil court.
“The Adams administration is committed to protecting and improving the quality of life for all New Yorkers, and that means ensuring our streets are safe and clean," said City Hall spokesperson Sophia Askari.
Data in the Mayor’s Management Report, which measures the performance of city agencies, shows summonses for public urination have been climbing for years. Between July 2020 and June 2021, during the COVID pandemic, 746 summonses were issued, according to the report. In each subsequent fiscal year, which runs from July through June, the number has jumped, from 2,129 in fiscal year 2022 to 10,003 last fiscal year. Those numbers include both civil summonses, which typically can be resolved online and don’t result in criminal records, as well as criminal summonses, which usually require defendants to go to court and may end up on their permanent record.
The spike in public urination summonses follows a shift away from enforcement for quality of life offenses like public urination when Bill de Blasio was mayor. In 2016, the City Council passed a bill that encouraged law enforcement to issue civil summonses instead of criminal ones for public urination, having open containers of alcohol and several other types of low-level offenses. Elected officials argued that criminal summonses were too harsh for these minor infractions and disproportionately affected low-income neighborhoods. While criminal summonses didn’t go away altogether, they dropped more than 90% in the first few months after the law took effect.
A recent report by the Data Collaborative for Justice found the number of criminal summonses remains far lower than its peak before the law change. In 2015, officials handed out more than 19,000 criminal summonses for public urination, according to data released at the time. Between July 2024 and June 2025, police issued 1,426 criminal summonses for public urination, down from 2,513 in the prior 12 months, according to NYPD data. Civil summonses went up during that time period, accounting for 86% of public urination tickets in fiscal year 2025, police data shows.
When officers do issue criminal summonses, the Data Collaborative for Justice found, they’re often thrown out because police filled out the paperwork incorrectly. Between January and December 2024, according to the data analysis, more than 65% of criminal summonses issued by the NYPD were dismissed because of errors.
The high rate of dismissals “suggests a pointlessness of the practice,” said Michael Rempel, director of the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College and one of the authors of the report.
“ If leadership in New York City wanted to continue to pursue aggressive low-level enforcement, then that would probably signal need for training on completing the summons form,” he said.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch launched a quality of life division earlier this year to crack down on public urination, aggressive panhandling and other minor crimes to make the city “feel safe,” she said at the time. NYPD spokesperson Brad Weekes said in a statement that quality of life teams are focused on “addressing the conditions that make daily life harder for New Yorkers.
“Our quality of life teams solve the daily problems that add up and chip away at a community’s sense of order,” he said. “These teams are towing the abandoned vehicle on your block, responding to the noise complaints at late hours and addressing the illegal parking that has persisted for too long.”
Weekes said quality of life teams are focused on responding to complaints, not making arrests and issuing summonses.
Glazer said summonses are “utterly ineffective” to address public nuisances.
“The process is the punishment,” she said. “If what you really want to do is stop public urination, or you really want to stop drinking alcohol in public, the summons is a wet noodle way to do it, and it has a lot of costs.”
Glazer said there are better strategies to deter people from peeing on the sidewalk, including public service campaigns and installing more urinals throughout the city. There are only about 1,000 city-run public restrooms across the five boroughs, according to a 2024 report. The City Council passed a bill this spring that aims to more than double that number — but the process is slated to take a decade.
Last week, Singleton called out of work and took the bus from his home in Albany to appear before a judge in Lower Manhattan. The 16th floor courtroom on Centre Street was packed with people who had received tickets for minor offenses, including passing between subway cars, possessing pepper spray and riding through a red light on a bike. Many required interpreters to translate the proceedings into Spanish, French, Arabic or Chinese. A 61-year-old man with bladder issues dodged a criminal conviction for public urination. Singleton agreed to pay $50 to resolve his case.
“It’s over with,” Singleton said outside of court. “That’s all I can say. It’s over.”
This story has been updated to include a comment from a spokesperson for Mayor Adams.
Tagged
east harlem
manhattan
nypd
public safety
Samantha Max
Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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