When New York City spent years and millions redesigning Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn into a one-way road with a two-way protected bike lane, the idea was to make the corridor safer for everyone. What nobody apparently accounted for was the police officer who would later roll right through it.
On June 10, NYPD Officer Michael McGinn and cyclist Andi Khoo-Miller were both traveling eastbound on Schermerhorn Street at around 2 p.m. When McGinn turned right onto Hoyt Street, he struck Khoo-Miller with the nose of his squad car, in what would have been an entirely preventable collision had the officer done two fairly routine things: signaled and stopped. He did neither.
McGinn struck Khoo-Miller with the front of his car, leaving him with back and leg pain. The cyclist was later taken to hospital, where he was prescribed painkillers and forced to miss a day of work. Video of the incident obtained by Streetsblog confirms Khoo-Miller had the green light and was well within the marked cycle track. McGinn’s sirens and lights were off. This was not an emergency response. This was a right turn.
What happened next might be the most remarkable part of the whole thing. McGinn later claimed the cyclist “came out of nowhere,” even though the eastbound cyclist had the right of way. A police report written by McGinn’s colleague confirmed he failed to come to a full stop before turning and did not signal. For anyone who has spent time on New York City streets, this will sound grimly familiar.
What the Officer Said After the Crash
Beyond the crash itself, Khoo-Miller criticized the officer’s attitude, claiming he was “indifferent” to the danger he posed. The cyclist claimed McGinn told him that he “came out of nowhere,” before repeatedly asking Khoo-Miller to show his ID.
When Khoo-Miller asked for an apology, he got something else entirely. “I asked him to apologize and he said, ‘I would, but I don’t like your attitude,'” Khoo-Miller told Streetsblog. He then asked for another officer to come take a report, a completely reasonable request that McGinn apparently could not process. Eventually, McGinn’s lieutenant arrived on scene.
When Khoo-Miller told him his officer claimed the cyclist came out of nowhere, the lieutenant’s response was almost refreshing in its honesty: “Yeah, they always say that.”
What the NYPD’s Own Rules Say
The NYPD’s Patrol Guide stipulates that officers must obey traffic laws “except under exceptional circumstances or extreme emergency.” Those conditions were not met by McGinn, whose sirens and lights were off at the time of the crash.
The rules also spell out the consequences if McGinn faces any discipline at all. According to the NYPD’s disciplinary matrix, he faces no more than five lost vacation days for failing to signal. Five vacation days for driving a 3,000-pound cruiser into an unprotected human being in a marked, legal bike lane, with the light in the cyclist’s favor. That is the ceiling. Not the floor.
A Street That Was Already Supposed to Be Fixed
Schermerhorn Street’s redesign in 2022 was a direct response to years of documented danger. Between 2015 and 2022, the then-two-way street between Smith Street and Flatbush Avenue was the site of 396 reported crashes that injured 28 cyclists and 34 pedestrians. The DOT narrowed it to one-way traffic and installed a protected two-way bike lane with the explicit goal of reducing those numbers.
The problem, as Khoo-Miller and others have pointed out, is that the redesign left enough room for officers assigned to the Transit Bureau station house at the nearby Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station to park their personal vehicles far out into the roadway.
In 2025, a Brooklyn councilmember found 457 illegally parked cars every day on key routes in the area, 60 percent of which had NYPD placards or memorabilia on their dashboards. Khoo-Miller said he regularly files 311 complaints about it. They get closed out.
The Bigger Pattern
This incident did not happen in a vacuum. In fiscal year 2025, NYPD car crashes cost the city significantly in settlements, according to the comptroller’s dashboard. And the accountability mechanisms have not kept pace with the scale of the problem.
The transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 2 voted unanimously in April for the city to return parking enforcement powers to the DOT, essentially saying the NYPD could not be trusted to police itself.
Meanwhile, in 2025, bicyclist fatalities accounted for over 10 percent of all traffic deaths in New York City, nearly half of the state’s cycling deaths. The city has invested heavily in infrastructure designed to prevent exactly what happened on Schermerhorn Street. What infrastructure cannot do, apparently, is guarantee that the people sworn to protect the public will look before they turn.