Captain says brass downgrade felonies

precinct-level audits of the numbers twice a year and the use of a sophisticated algorithm that looks for anomalies.

Pontillo acknowledged, however, that an investigation of Vucinaj’s claims is underway.

“Based on allegations he has made we have an ongoing investigation regarding one command, and we’re taking a closer look at several categories of complaint reports citywide based upon what he said,” Pontillo said.

“Generally, we agree that there are some misclassified reports, but there (are) always misclassified reports. We’re talking about human error, and reasonable people can disagree about the fact pattern in a given case.”

Privately, police sources said, Vucinaj is known as a stickler for the rules and is not well-liked. “Cops don’t like him, his peers don’t like him, and no one wants to work with him,” one police source said. “Look at how frequently he’s been transferred.”

Vucinaj, 45, has 24 years on the job and is the highest-ranking active-duty officer ever to publicly make such claims. A captain since 2009, he has been in 10 commands in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

From 2004 to 2007, he was assigned to Interpol in Lyon, France, by then-Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. He also commanded the special frauds squad and was twice selected to help write promotional exams. He has never been formally disciplined.

For the past six months, however, he has been marooned in a donothing post in Transit Borough Brooklyn without an office phone, he says, as retaliation for reporting crime stat manipulation and other misconduct by commanders to Internal Affairs and the Quality Assurance Division — the unit that audits NYPD crime stats.

Prior to that, he kept getting bounced from one command to the next for similar reasons, he claims. He is mulling a lawsuit over his treatment. “This is a concerted effort to retaliate against me for what I have been saying internally,” he said.

An NYPD executive, speaking generally, said, “A number of factors are considered in determining assignments for executive-level

Capt. Marash Vucinaj detailed dozens of crimes he says were wrongly given a lower classification by the NYPD to reduce its index crime rate. Here are some examples: On May 15, 2016, a man was driving his two young children in a car on Merrick Blvd. and...