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Dear reader, for anyone wondering why crime victims don’t report crime to the cops, hear my tale of getting hit by a $90,000 car whose driver then fled the scene. (Sorry for the long threads, but the hit-and-run driver was probably a cop, so I'm documenting the details here.)
It’s 1:50pm on a warm Sunday afternoon. I am riding my bicycle down 110th St. towards Central Park, hoping to sneak in a few laps before my 4-year old’s nap ends.
I’m rolling downhill, pulling up to a red light at Manhattan Avenue, a block from the Park. The intersection has a left turn lane, a right turn lane, and two middle thru traffic lanes. 
There is a black Range Rover in the right-turn-only lane, and a car in the traffic lane next to him. Not wanting to go between them, I pull into the lane left of that car, braking for the light, intending to stop where he can see me right in front of the crosswalk.
Suddenly—the light is still red!--the Range Rover tries to make a U-turn, coming thru the pedestrian crosswalk in front of the two traffic lanes and the left turn lane and crossing the double yellow line to head the other direction (back Westbound) on 110th.
I go right into the side of the Range Rover, luckily not going fast enough to snap anything on my bike, or put a dent in the side of the $90,000 car. I fall straight down to the pavement. Ouch.
(That’s 4 different violations for this driver, for those who are counting. Usually prosecutors will only charge a crash as a crime if a car violates more than one road rule – e.g. running a light plus also speeding—the so-called rule of 2. This guy met the rule of 4 threshold!)
Out hops the driver, black, rather fit, a bit young to be rolling in a $90,000 whip. “You hit my car,” he announces.
As I’m getting up from the ground I yell, “You need to wait for the cops. I have a security clearance. We’re gonna have to fill out a police report.”
As I’m getting up from the ground I yell, “You need to wait for the cops. I have a security clearance. We’re gonna have to fill out a police report.”
(All of which is true. I have held a Top Secret/SCI level federal security clearance for 11 years because of my work as a lawyer on terrorism cases. We have to report all interactions with law enforcement—and also all threats to our person—to our Justice Department minders.)
The driver seems taken aback by this. I find myself wondering if an ordinary person knows what a security clearance is. But he has clearly decided to stay put. I call 911. Meanwhile he is speaking to someone in his passenger seat.
He parks on curb on the other side of 110th. I limp over with my bike over to curb about ten feet from his car, to wait for the cops to show up. He walks towards me, and yells that I shouldn’t be so close to his car. I am literally about ten feet away.
I yell back that he needs to be worried about the fact that’s he’s going to have to explain this accident to the FBI. “What’s the FBI have to do with this?,” he asks; I have a clearance, stupid. He backs off and gets back in his car.
A full ten minutes after I called 911, I get a call from the NYPD: “which corner of 110th and Manhattan am I on?” I start dictating my location, walk a few steps towards the actual corner, waving my arm in the air, looking out east towards the Park.
After they hang up, I look over my shoulder to where the driver was parked. He is fleeing the scene, driving the other direction with his hazard lights still on.
I look down at my bike, thinking maybe I can ride after him, since I assume I have not yet gotten a good shot of his plates. My front handlebars are twisted from the crash. He escapes.
A minute later a police cruiser (# 4350-13) rolls up. The two lady cops are, to put it mildly, very disinterested. The cop driving the cruiser asks what happened, and then says “Let me get this straight. You want to file a report, because *you* hit a car.”
I am astonished, but I assume this is the reflexive reaction of cops to bike crashes: try to convince the biker not to file a report, because a filed report will raise the crime rate for the precinct on CompStat, the NYPD’s system for tracking crime stats.
Me: “Are you telling me that if my four year old was walking on the sidewalk and this asshole hit him, you’d say my four year old hit a car?”
Without missing a beat, driver lady moves on to her next stupid comment: “Do you have evidence it was his fault?” Me: “Besides me telling you, and the fact that he ran?” (Mind you, there are visible surveillance cameras on two of the four corners.)
Finally her partner gets out, looks at my bike, and explains that I got hit on the other side of the double yellow line dividing 110th street, which is the jurisdiction of the 24th Precinct. So I have to wait for another set of cops to show.
She gets back in and, wordlessly, they roll up their window. (Do all crime victims in the 26th Precinct get treated this badly? @NYPD26Pct?)
A few minutes later a police SUV pulls up from the south side of 110th with three cops in it. I assume one, the youngest, is a rookie or trainee of some sort, though his uniform is blue like his two older partners, a man and a woman. I tell them, again, what happened.
Senior guy: “Usually we don’t press charges if the other driver isn’t here to tell his story.” Me: “But he fled the scene!”
Young guy: “Well did you get his plate?” I open my phone , hoping against hope I got one good picture of it. I scroll thru photos of the front of the Range Rover that have no plate. (The female cop volunteers that you only need to have a rear plate in NJ.)
[I'm going to have to continue this in a second thread....]
The second thread is here (sorry, I'm not so good at Twitter):
