Where your hearing happens matters. These are the outcomes of every decided hearing, borough by borough.
Look up your plate free → — your own open tickets, with the measured odds stamped on each one. Nothing stored, nothing to pay.
Contesting is free either way: request a hearing yourself at nyc.gov — Dispute a ticket, within 30 days of the date on the ticket. You never need us, or anyone, to do that.
| Borough | Dismissed outright | Dismissed or reduced | Decided hearings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staten Island | 31.1% | 40.2% | 324,764 |
| The Bronx | 30.8% | 47.6% | 2,419,066 |
| Brooklyn | 30.7% | 43.7% | 4,478,938 |
| Queens | 29.2% | 51.5% | 4,645,399 |
| Manhattan | 23% | 67.2% | 15,114,517 |
Manhattan has one of the lowest outright-dismissal rates (23%) and the highest dismissed-or-reduced rate (67.2%). That is not a contradiction, and it is the most useful thing on this page.
The two columns measure different outcomes. "Dismissed outright" is NOT GUILTY — you pay nothing. "Dismissed or reduced" adds GUILTY WITH REDUCTION, where the officer sustains the violation but lowers the fine. A borough where full dismissals are rare but reductions are common is one where contesting more often changes the amount than erases it. If you are deciding whether an hour is worth it there, the realistic outcome to weigh is a smaller fine, not a canceled one.
What we cannot tell you from this data is why — the file records dispositions, not reasoning, and the mix of violation types differs by borough. We publish the pattern and stop there.
Staten Island, at 31.1% dismissed outright and 40.2% dismissed or reduced, from 324,764 decided hearings. The lowest is Manhattan at 23%.
Measurably in the aggregate — the spread is 8.1 percentage points. You do not choose your borough, and these are historical shares of decided hearings across all violation types, not a prediction for an individual case.
No. We hold the city's borough totals and the city's violation-type totals, not the cross-tab of the two. Anywhere a borough figure appears on this site it is a marginal across all violation types, and it is labeled that way.
Rates are shares of decided hearings (guilty, guilty-with-reduction, not guilty). Minimum 1,000 decided hearings per entity. County codes are merged to boroughs including legacy code variants. Computed 2026-08-31 from NYC Open Data (nc67-uf89).
A borough number is a marginal across every charge, not a forecast for yours — and you do not get to pick your borough anyway. I publish the spread because the city writes it down, and I stop where the data stops: the file records what was decided, never why. If a figure here does not match the city's own file, email me. One person reads that mail and answers it; expect a reply within a few days.
Computed 2026-08-31 from NYC Open Data. County codes merged to boroughs (incl. legacy code variants). Rates are shares of decided hearings.
← Violation-by-violation rates
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