this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Officer Demoted After Writing Traffic Tickets Gets $175,000 Settlement (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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New York City on Tuesday reached a $175,000 settlement with a Staten Island police officer who said he had been a victim of retaliation for giving traffic tickets to people with connections to the upper echelons of the Police Department.

The officer, Mathew Bianchi, filed a lawsuit against the city last May. The suit said that he had been transferred out of his precinct’s traffic unit after Jeffrey Maddrey, then the chief of patrol and now the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, asked that he be punished. Officer Bianchi had issued a ticket to a woman with whom Chief Maddrey was said to be friends, according to the suit.

“This settlement is a vindication for our client, allowing him to close this chapter and continue his service with the N.Y.P.D.,” John Scola, Officer Bianchi’s lawyer, said on Tuesday. “We hope that Officer Bianchi’s courage and this decisive outcome will inspire other officers to come forward as whistle-blowers.”

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Original article is paywalled so I looked up another, as from the comments here, it seems some more details are needed. I'll include some snips of a WaPo article here.

One driver giggled when New York police officer Mathew Bianchi pulled her over for talking on her cellphone, because it was the second time in as many days that he had done so, the officer said.

Another was going at least twice the 30-mph speed limit while driving on the wrong side of the street and blowing through red lights, he added.

A third who had been doing 50 mph in a 30-mph zone reacted to Bianchi approaching his Mercedes SUV by fanning out about two dozen “courtesy cards” and telling him to pick one, Bianchi said Wednesday.

In fact, all three of them had the cards issued by the New York Police Department’s biggest union to officers who then give them to family, friends and anyone else they want to be able to get out of low-level encounters with law enforcement, Bianchi told The Washington Post.

“There’s no fear of any kind of enforcement if they have the card,” he added.

Although he let all three of those drivers go, Bianchi eventually got fed up with letting reckless drivers off the hook, some of them repeatedly, and started writing tickets even if they had the cards, he said. That allegedly led to escalating retaliation that in May 2023 resulted in Bianchi suing the city and a police captain after he was pulled off the traffic unit and put on the night shift.

Bianchi patrolled on Staten Island, where he estimated as many as half the drivers he pulled over had one of the cards, he told The Post. Officers can buy 30 of them a year for $1 each, he said. They’re given not only to friends and family, but also in exchange for perks like meal discounts, he said, adding that he believes that is violating the public’s trust that police treat everyone equally.

On Nov. 28, 2018, Bianchi gave a driver a ticket even though she presented a card, the suit states. Several members of the Police Benevolent Association allegedly approached him, one telling him that he had to obey the courtesy-card customs or the union wouldn’t protect him.

Bianchi started objecting to the practice, first to his direct supervisor and then his commanding officer, who told him they couldn’t do much, he said. Then he filed a series of complaints — to the union, NYPD internal affairs and the New York City Department of Investigation — without getting any results, according to the suit.

All the while, Bianchi kept writing courtesy-card-carrying drivers tickets when he thought it was appropriate and kept getting scolded for it, the suit states.

Bianchi said he plans to stay at the NYPD for the foreseeable future, although he plans to use his upcoming windfall to reduce his reliance on the paycheck he gets from the city. He said he hopes that his lawsuit — and his payout — encourage other would-be whistleblowers to speak up about corruption, even if there is a cost.

I'm not sure how much more some of you want out of this guy. He got tired of a crooked system, and at cost to himself, he stood up for the right thing. He's taken more direct action for change than most people ever will. I can't speak of all his actions, but if he went through this much for something like traffic tickets, I don't think he was doing a bunch of bigger corrupt stuff on the side. It would seem we would want more police to follow his example, but instead people here are lumping him in with the rest.