EDITORIAL: Ticket Fixing Must Be Addressed

Alleged NYPD ticket fixing must be quickly probed, guilty punished, public assured it can't repeat
The New York Daily News - EDITORIAL - April 22, 2011

Evidence suggests the NYPD has been helping friends and family 'fix' tickets. The emerging evidence suggests that taking care of tickets as a "courtesy" for friends, family and the connected has been widely practiced in the NYPD. You're not surprised? Check. A Bronx grand jury is considering the matter amid reports that some 40 cops are facing potential criminal scrutiny and 100 or so may get jammed up departmentally. Those are goodly numbers, and they may well rise, given how casually the alleged fixing appears to have taken place. Consider the tape-recorded words of Deputy Inspector John D'Adamo, as reported in today's Daily News. Facing the grand jury's attention after asking a Patrolmen's Benevolent Association delegate for help in making a summons disappear, D'Adamo said: "I mean, how can you hammer me for asking a delegate to take care of one ticket? Come on!" Not that this is the French Connection case or anything, but the fact that D'Adamo is a ranking officer and that he sought the services of a union rep point to the participation of many and the knowledge of even more. Sergeants' Benevolent Association President Edward Mullins insists as much in a letter to his members. He wrote: "The current investigation into extending police courtesies by hardworking rank-and-file police officers is ludicrous. If the truth were to be told, it is hard to call such practices acts of corruption when the culture of extending courtesies to members and their families within the NYPD has existed since the day the very first summons was ever written." Mullins is asking current and former cops to send him information about favors done for notables, his argument being that since everyone was involved, no one should suffer consequences. Sorry, that's not how the world works. Police are charged with providing equal enforcement of the laws - including laws against driving without a seat belt or using a cell phone at the wheel. As for the Bronx grand jury, District Attorney Robert Johnson should stick to cases in which cops accepted money or other benefits for making tickets disappear - and he must wrap up the probe quickly. The NYPD has pretty much declined to discuss the scandal, other than to say that a new computerized ticket-tracking system should prevent cops from plucking paper summonses out of the pile before they're processed. That's comforting, but Commissioner Ray Kelly owes a fuller accounting to a muni-meter-paying public that has been told time and again that once an agent starts writing a ticket, there's no going back. What's good for parking violations must be good for moving violators - even if they happen to know someone who knows someone.