Oh the sweet, sweet smell of schadenfreude: as if the ticket-fixing scandal being investigated through the whole city and scaring cops out of writing traffic tickets weren't enough, it turns out that NYPD officers themselves owe approximately $1 million in unpaid parking tickets, according to the News. And the majority of those stem from the Internal Affair investigation into parking placard abuse.
The city started cracking down on the placard abuse in 2008, and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly formed a special unit in the IAB specifically for tracking down such offenders. Thousands of summonses have been written over that time period, but officers have long griped about the NYPD towing unmarked police vehicles in the middle of operations, or writing tickets for cops running red lights. Detectives Endowment Association President Michael Palladino said the Finance Department "should not be putting the NYPD in this trick box. The agency needs to get more familiar with the sensitive nature of undercover police work and the role of unmarked vehicles."
Of course, undercover police work doesn't really cover all of the other instances of placard abuse by city and state officials which have been reported on over the past couple years.
