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.”

  • Avatar_of_Self@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

      • JTskulk@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Unions are just organized workers, sometimes the workers are dicks and wrong unfortunately.

        • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
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          20 hours ago

          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