An NYPD officer is suing the department, saying she was wrongly accused of ticketing her commanding officer’s Mercedes-Benz—and then punished by former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly for refusing to take the blame.
Deputy Inspector Keith Green’s private luxury ride was ticketed outside the 104th Precinct in Ridgewood, Queens on Oct. 9, 2009, Officer Fizgeralda Sanchez says in her Manhattan Supreme Court suit.
But the 35-year-old patrolwoman says she was not involved in the slip-up and now she’s suing over a hefty penalty Commissioner Kelly doled out in November just a month before leaving office.
Superiors tried to get Sanchez on a technicality for the ticket —claiming the then-still green cop improperly used her partner’s summons book without her permission.
But they never denied that the car was parked illegally or that the summons was accurate, the suit maintains.
It’s unclear who issued the ticket, and Sanchez’s partner, Rhonda Eastman, was only penalized for leaving her summons book unattended.
Instead of pleading guilty to the administrative charge, Sanchez, who says she had a stellar record on the force since she started in 2007, opted for a departmental trial.
The judge found her not guilty in June 2013 and further discovered that police interrogators had lied to her about having done a handwriting analysis that supposedly would have implicated her in the incident, according to court papers.
The judge, Robert Vinal, docked Sanchez 10 vacation days — for failing to record other summonses in her log book. But then Kelly, who had to approve Vinal’s ruling, instead tripled the penalty to 30 vacation days.
“It is shocking to the conscience that the police commissioner would impose such a heavy penalty on [Sanchez] for a minor specification based on his apparent pique that [Sanchez] decided to go to trial…and then had the gall to win,” the cop huffs in her suit.
A spokesman for the city’s Law Department said, “We will review the papers once they are served.”
Kelly did not immediately return a call for comment.