NYPD lawsuit reveal officer issuing tickets to dead people to keep up with quotas
The former police officer who was canned for ticketing dead people says he was doing it to meet the NYPD’s supposedly non-existent monthly quotas.
Paul Pizzuto photo supplied
In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Paul Pizzuto says he started issuing bogus summonses after brass at the 120th Precinct in Staten Island told him he had to produce more than the 125 to 150 he was already writing.
“Specifically, [Pizzuto] was told that he needed to start issuing more summonses for red-light and seat-belt violations” and was warned he would be moved “if he did not issue the increased number of summonses,” the suit says.
He was already writing more than 125 to 150, reports the New York Post, but he says in a lawsuit filed this week against the NYPD that he was told to amp up that effort.
Instead of handing out tickets to people who didn’t deserve them, the cop figured he could just issue summonses to dead people because hey, they can’t complain.
He went ahead and “prepared summonses by taking information from legitimate summonses that he had issued in the past. But he prepared the summonses in such a way that [they] would not impact any motorists,” the lawsuit explains.
The whole thing fell apart last July when his coworkers noticed he never had to testify about any of his tickets.
He pleaded guilty in May to three counts of falsifying business records, was sentenced to 150 hours of community service and was fired in June.
He was officially fired in June but says he should’ve gotten a hearing first. Not so, says the NYPD, since his actions are considered an “oath of office offense” as he knew what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway.
