After two decades selling homemade tamales in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Sonía Pèrez has received her fair share of tickets from the police. Often, they’re for minor infractions: being too far from the curb, being too close to a crosswalk.
But a few years ago, an encounter with the police frightened her. While checking to see her vendor license, Ms. Pèrez said, four officers harassed her oldest daughter, who they claimed was affiliated with a gang because she had tattoos and piercings. The officers also threatened Ms. Pèrez with a $50,000 fine, she said.
That threat, she later found out, was empty. But it’s part of a larger pattern of discrimination against Hispanic and black vendors, said Ms. Pèrez, a single mother who supports her four children with her business.
“I don’t know what they’re going to ask me, or I don’t know how they’re going to act,” said Ms. Pèrez, 49, speaking through a translator. “If I respond in a way that they don’t like, they could attack me, or they could arrest me right there for selling.”
Ms. Pèrez was heartened by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s announcement last Sunday that the New York Police Department would no longer enforce street-vendor regulations, but she is uncertain what it means for her and her business, and fears even steeper fines.
“He just said the police are not going to handle it anymore, but who is?” she said. “We don’t want worse than police.”
As protesters across the city and nation demand sweeping changes in law enforcement, Mr. de Blasio announced that a civilian agency would be created to enforce regulations instead of the police.
He did not specify when the police would stop enforcement or whether vendors would still be subject to oversight by the other city departments that inspect or regulate them: fire, health, transportation, parks, sanitation and consumer affairs. Olivia Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for his office, did not answer questions about how people would be chosen to oversee the vendors, or how many. “We are finalizing next steps,” she wrote in an email.
The mayor also said he would redirect some police funding, but Ms. Lapeyrolerie would not confirm that money for the new agency would come from the Police Department.
Protests sparked by the death of George Floyd have grown into calls to defund police departments. That would mean reducing police budgets and transferring civic regulations — resolving family and school disputes, moving homeless people into shelters — to other agencies. Vendor oversight would fall well within those bounds.
“It was a gesture,” Carlos Menchaca, a City Council member, said of the mayor’s announcement. “I think it was to placate the people of New York.”
Street vendors are often the subject of complaints from store owners, business improvement districts, building managers and neighbors over noise, smells, sidewalk congestion and other nuisances. A public information officer for the Police Department said that enforcing the laws governing the vendors is vital to protecting public health, food safety and keeping sidewalks clear.
“We will work with City Hall to transition these responsibilities to the agency tasked with vendor enforcement going forward,” she wrote in a Wednesday email.
In 2018, long before the calls to defund the police, City Council members proposed a new framework for how vendors could be regulated: Intro 1116, a bill that has the support of more than half the Council but has not yet come up for a vote.
The measure outlines plans to create a civilian unit that would be trained to oversee both vendor enforcement and education. (Ms. Lapeyrolerie did not say whether the mayor would support the bill, which would need his signature.)
The plan would also increase the number of permits available to food vendors for the first time in four decades, which Mr. Menchaca, a sponsor of Intro 1116, said could help the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic. A bill to lift that cap is in committee in the State Senate.
The Street Vendor Project of the Urban Justice Center, an advocacy group, estimates that there are 10,000 to 20,000 vendors across the five boroughs. But only 853 people receive nonfood permits, and only about 5,000 can legally vend food, according to Matthew Shapiro, the center’s legal director.
As with taxi medallions, the organization says capping the amount of permits is dangerous, because many vendors have to sell illegally, risking fines, property confiscation and arrest. There is a decade-long waiting list for permits, and an underground market where a two-year permit (officially issued by the city for $200) can sell for $25,000 or more. Mr. de Blasio’s spokeswoman did not specify whether more licenses would be issued as part of the mayor’s plan.
“You don’t see the N.Y.P.D. in any other small business enforcement,” said Mohamed Attia, the director of the Street Vendor Project. “You don’t see an officer going into a restaurant and arresting a worker who is not wearing gloves. That doesn’t happen.”
For street vendors, many of whom are immigrants, any relief from police oversight is welcome. In November, officers arrested a woman selling churros on the subway; a video of the arrest drew widespread condemnation of the police.
As people of color across the United States know, an interaction with law enforcement can be perilous. Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold six years ago on a Staten Island sidewalk, was accused of selling cigarettes. Although Mr. Garner was not a licensed vendor, Mr. Attia said police harassment is widespread.
“Why is vending a crime?” Mr. Attia asked. “What city do we live in that making a living is being criminalized?”
Nogaye Lo, a 44-year-old vendor, has also had difficult encounters with the police at her stand in Union Square. Before the coronavirus pandemic, she sold seasonal wares: scarves in the winter, jewelry in the summer.
Now, as demonstrators fill the park almost every night, she sells T-shirts bearing the faces of people who have been killed by the police. On the back, they read, “Black Lives Matter.”
For Ms. Lo, an immigrant from Senegal, the message is personal. She has four sons, and she fears what could happen to them whenever they leave the house.
Officers regularly confront her, issuing tickets and confiscating her merchandise, she said. She has been arrested without cause, she said, and had to spend the night in jail. Once, an officer pushed her, putting his hands on her breasts, she said. He apologized, but she is still furious.
“We’re not animals,” she said. “We’re not garbage. We’re human beings.”
Even though she worries that a civilian agency could impose heavy fines, she fears the police more.
“Before you’re leaving your house, you’re thinking about if you’re going to be sleeping in the house again,” she said. “All the time, when you’re going out, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, cops are going to arrest me when I go to the table.’ That’s ridiculous.”
A.C. Fernandez translated between Spanish and English for Sonía Pèrez.
