The fox was guarding the hen house.
The NYPD cop in charge of the city’s crackdown on parking-placard abuses has been booted from his post after one of the coveted cards turned up on the windshield of a gal pal’s car, The Post has learned.
Lt. Jemal Doute, the head of the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau’s Vehicle Placard Unit, had been the department’s point person for determining which officers got placards — and also for keeping iron-fisted control over them.
The crackdown on the placards took place after it was revealed that the city was awash in nearly 150,000 of them, and Mayor Bloomberg ordered a wholesale reduction, to about 50,000, for municipal agencies.
That scale-back also was accompanied by an edict to root out employees misusing placards by parking at bus stops, fire hydrants and crosswalks — particularly around courthouses and other government buildings, where cops were major offenders.
With Doute at the helm, the NYPD recalled all of its 65,000 placards in May 2008 and then began rolling out “new” ones to only 43,000 cops during the following months — a downsizing that irritated thousands of officers.
Sources said Doute, a 15-year veteran, then came under IAB scrutiny himself after a patrol cop spotted one of the “older” models of the placards on the dashboard of a parked car in Brooklyn several months ago and notified Internal Affairs.
The probers traced the placard back to Doute’s unit and also determined that the privileged parker using it was a female friend of the lieutenant.
“Lt. Doute was the person in control of it,” a police official said.
When questioned about the errant placard, Doute acknowledged that the woman was a friend who had recently stopped by his office. But he claimed he did not give it to her and suggested that she must have taken it without his permission.
Doute faces departmental charges of failing to safeguard a department placard.
His lawyer, Philip Karasyk, declined comment.
A department spokesman said the NYPD has yet to determine where Doute will be transferred.
In the months after Bloomberg’s dismantling of the placard system last year, special teams of Internal Affairs cops, including Doute’s officers, went out scouring the city for illegally parked cars sporting city, state and federal placards.
They ticketed about 2,400 cars, including more than 1,000 driven by city cops.