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.”
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.