Judy Stanton, president of the Brooklyn Heights Association, had just left a meeting about how hard it was to park locally. As she and a neighbor walked back home along leafy Clinton Street, they kept their meeting going, as the neighbor complained about illegal parking on Aitken Place, a narrow, blocklong nook just west of Borough Hall.Vexed, the two decided to take a look.As Ms. Stanton remembers, they found a bonanza of violations. In the window of one illegally parked car that caught her eye was a permit from the city's Department of Buildings. Despite the permit, she said, the car should not have been there.When Ms. Stanton approached a police officer, though, the officer said, "No, we're told not to ticket any government vehicles," Ms. Stanton recalled.Twenty minutes later, after she spoke on the phone to the officer's supervisor, she said, the officer ticketed the car after all. Although Ms. Stanton left feeling happy, she was only mildly so, suspecting that "it would be business as usual as soon as I walked away, and the next day and the next day."That, according to a recent report from the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, is just how life is in New York neighborhoods with clusters of government offices, from Jamaica in Queens, to Concourse Village in the Bronx, to St. George in Staten Island.The report, "Above the Law," estimates that 150,000 city, state and federal vehicles have permits for parking in designated areas, but it says that many are parked illegally — blocking hydrants, overstaying at meters, and so on. The group's researchers visited nine neighborhoods, and of the 2,300 vehicles with government permits that they found, more than 75 percent were parked illegally, the report says.Moreover, the report claims that the police routinely fail to ticket illegally parked cars bearing government permits, and that fraudulent permits are now a significant added problem.In response, Paul J. Browne, a deputy police commissioner, said: "The Police Department does not condone illegal parking. An official placard holder must adhere to its restrictions, and is not exempted from parking tickets and other sanctions when he or she fails to do so."For her part, Ms. Stanton said that she noticed an improvement in parking enforcement this month, shortly after the report was published. But, she said, better solutions may be needed."If the city feels that they must provide a permit for people, just because it's so hard to work for the city that they deserve parking, then they should build garages," she said. "Or why don't they take the train?"