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.”
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.
Looks like they were correct about that. The police union protects almost anything, except giving those with union ‘courtesy cards’ a traffic ticket apparently. That is just too far.
These fuckers give unions a bad name. Shouldn’t even be allowed to call themselves that.
Unions are just organized workers, sometimes the workers are dicks and wrong unfortunately.
Cops aren’t workers, they’re the enforcers of Capital.
The only surprising thing here is that this person thought they could exercise copfriend privileges against an actual cop without getting some kind of blowback. XD
They’re both, but you calling them that is a non-sequiter. The opposite of workers is owners, not people who work for owners.
There can be more than two categories.
Officer Bianchi, who joined the force in 2015, said in his lawsuit and in subsequent interviews that the standard practice in his precinct, the 123rd on Staten Island, was to avoid ticketing drivers who had cards issued by police unions — known as courtesy cards — which officers distribute to their friends and family. His troubles in the department, he said, stemmed from his willingness to issue tickets to cardholders.
Naked corruption.
The settlement did not involve any admission of wrongdoing from the city, which in court papers denied most of Officer Bianchi’s allegations, including those about Chief Maddrey’s role in his transfer.
No lessons learned. At taxpayers’ expense.
His troubles in the department, he said, stemmed from his willingness to issue tickets to cardholders.
And this is why ACAB. If there is a cop applying the law equally to everyone they get punished and pushed out.
Sure, he won his lawsuit, but I’m betting he’s still not going to be a cop anymore. And the people involved aren’t going to be punished or penalized, they got exactly what they wanted.
Ah, sounds like that traffic stop started with, “Do you know who I am?”
The police literally have ‘courtesy cards’ they hand out to friends and family to avoid getting them ticketed - that’s a practice that absolutely needs to stop.
Growing up I had a relative with one of these cards, signed on the back by the leader of the SWAT in the next town over. My relative was high on opiods while driving with me in the car when we got pulled over because he was nodding off and kept swerving and rolling stop signs and doing other dumb shit. He showed the cop the card and that was that, the cop was suddenly so nice and just let him drive off obviously drugged out of his mind with a child in the car.
