Cop contests ‘upbraid’ in drug test fail

WHEN NYPD Sgt. Tracy Gittens learned she tested positive for marijuana, her hair nearly stood on end.

“I was shocked. I do not do drugs,” said Gittens, who claims she was the victim of a false positive from her tainted hair weave, as she testified at her department trial at police headquarters Friday. “It was impossible for the test to be positive.”

After receiving the results of the random drug test in January 2017, she took it upon herself to get a urine test and a blood test at her doctor’s office. She got a hair test a day later. All those tests came back negative for marijuana, she said.

“The (initial) test had to be wrong, because I do not do drugs,” she said.

Gittens (inset), who was once assigned to Mayor de Blasio’s security detail, was suspended for 30 days over the positive pot results. But the mother of two claims the NYPD officer who snipped her hair for testing accidentally took the sample from her human hair weave, which she wears as a ponytail. During her testimony, Gittens said that when she paid to be independently retested, a nurse took a hair sample from the top of her head, not the nape of her neck as the officer at the NYPD’s Medical Services Division had done.

“I didn’t have my hairpiece on then,” she said of the second test. “(It was) all natural.”

The 43-year-old is now facing dismissal. She personally paid for a DNA test to prove the first sample wasn’t her original hair — but an analysis later showed it was a genetic match to her or a close relative, department prosecutors said.

“Unless a maternal relative somehow came in and switched out the samples with her own hair, there is no way this hair could be anyone’s but Sgt. Gittens,’ ” Department Advocate Office attorney Jeanie Moran said.

Moran said Gittens demanded that another portion of the sample be tested at a different lab — but that sample also came back positive for marijuana.

A Department Trial Commissioner will determine Gittens guilt and make a recommendation to Police Commissioner James O’Neill, who will have the final say on her future.

The NYPD won’t publicly release Gittens’ sentence as it continues to cite Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law, which prevents the public disclosure of personnel records of uniformed officers.