Tuesday was motorcycle demolition day for NY Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.

The city’s top cop made good on his promise to destroy dozens of ATVs and dirt bikes seized during illegal rides through the city, while they’re stored in garages or during Craigslist sales.

As Bratton waved a traditional black and white checkered flag, two bulldozers revved up and crushed a total of 69 colorful dirt bikes and eight four-wheel ATVs neatly lined up in the NYPD’s tow pound on Columbia Street in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn.

“We want to send out a very strong message to the nitwits and knuckleheads who insist on operating these illegal vehicles on the streets, sidewalks, parks, and housing developments of the city of New York, creating extraordinary danger not only for themselves but more importantly for the public,” said Bratton after the crushing.

Bratton said the seizures of the illegal vehicles are up 96 percent from last year, with 679 of them confiscated by cops so far this year. As of this year, a total of 104 operators of the vehicles have been arrested on reckless-endangerment charges.

The Bronx saw the most confiscations so far this year with 182, followed by patrol borough Manhattan North with 108, officials said.

“They are illegal. They cannot be registered to use anywhere in the city of New York. And thus, they’re now in the junk heap in back of us,” Bratton said, adding that last year the two- and four-wheel motorbikes caused five deaths in the city.

So far this year, there were no deaths caused by the bikes, he said.

"These bikes & riders are a menace & I would, without a doubt, say we CRUSHED it," @CommissBratton #UseItAndLoseIt pic.twitter.com/x3a8OYmfBO

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) May 17, 2016

“I would hope some of that is a result of the significant increase that in effort that we’ve been placing in getting these things off the streets of New York,” Bratton said.

Bratton warned that the NYPD will continue to confiscate and “crush” the bikes, which he referred to as “a plague on the city.”
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Chief of Patrol Carlos Gomez spoke of the danger of the vehicles, saying they “can be very intimidating.”

“If you’re driving down the public streets or highways and these groups of motorcycles pass by you it’s certainly intimidating and it projects a sense of recklessness, a sense of lawlessness in our city,” said Gomez.

(Source: NY Post)

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