Mailman just didn’t feel like it

A WHISTLEBLOWER at one of the biggest and most dangerous homeless shelters in the city says his supervisors ordered him to downplay incidents to make the place seem safer than it is.

Daniel Kennedy filed a suit last week alleging he was constantly pressured to break the law by not reporting serious incidents and was fired for resisting his bosses’ stealth campaign to sanitize the safety record of the huge 30th Street Men’s Shelter in Kips Bay.

Kennedy’s allegations follow a Daily News investigation that revealed in February that the Department of Homeless Services had secretly stopped counting hundreds of so-called “critical incidents” inside shelters — including arrests.

The suit, filed by attorney David Schwartz of Phillips & Associates, accuses Homeless Services of deliberately minimizing problems inside the 30th Street shelter, a huge facility in Manhattan that has been the site of murders, stabbings and rampant drug dealing.

Kennedy alleges he was fired in retaliation for “alerting his supervisors to risk of imminent danger in the workplace” and “complaining of improper government action.”

Homeless Services spokesman Isaac McGinn said Kennedy was fired “for cause,” and stated, “These allegations insult the integrity of our dedicated staff. While we cannot comment on pending litigation, this employee was appropriately terminated following standard procedure, including multiple levels of review.”

In his suit, Kennedy says he was constantly fighting to file detailed reports and warning his supervisors that hiding serious incidents would violate the law requiring that all shelters report such matters to the state.

Kennedy began work as administrative director of social services at the shelter in the fall of 2016. Like all workers in city shelters, he was required to file detailed reports about “serious incidents” — such as assaults, drug dealing, robbery and theft.

The shelter was supposed to report a long list of serious incidents to the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, but by downplaying their seriousness, the shelter kept the state in the dark about what was really going on, Kennedy alleged.

Last spring, Kennedy said, his direct supervisor, Suzy Sanford, began to “obstruct her subordinate’s ability to file incident reports” and began encouraging them “not to file reports for major incidents.”

Sanford, he said, “would consistently challenge Mr. Kennedy’s reporting of incidents that occurred at the shelter, often exclaiming that such incidents never happened.”

In October, a higherup, Associate Commissioner Aqueelah Winston, reprimanded Kennedy for putting too much detail in incident reports, stating that “more detailed reports were more difficult (for Homeless Services) to ‘challenge in deposition(s)’ ” for potential lawsuits.

On Oct. 27, a client tried to kill himself by overdosing on unspecified pills, an incident Kennedy says is considered Priority 1 and must be reported to the state. A supervisor, Jane Etienne, ordered staff to categorize the incident as a Priority 3, which is not required to be reported to the state, Kennedy charged.

After he went over her head and emailed Assistant Homeless Services Commissioner Bill DiStefano with details of the incident, Kennedy says Etienne backed down and recoded it as Priority 1. Nevertheless Kennedy says he continued warning upper management about the pressure to understate incidents.

He was worried that “minimizing, denying and not reporting incidents would lead to the clients’ not receiving the social services and mental care that they need, which puts themselves, other clients and staff in danger.”

On Halloween, days after he’d complained about how the suicide attempt was handled, Kennedy says he was told by a boss that he was going to be subjected to a “clinical evaluation.” He says he was never given the notice in writing and that his supervisors didn’t respond to his emails asking where to go for the evaluation.

During a Nov. 30 meeting with his supervisors, he said he again warned them about hiding incidents from the state. One of his bosses stood up and began screaming at him before ending the meeting early.

Five days later, he was fired, the suit says.

On Thursday, Kennedy’s attorney, Schwartz, did not return calls seeking comment. A BROOKLYN postal worker got sent to the dead letter office Thursday for his failure to deliver the mail.

Postman Aleksey Germash (photo) dumped upwards of 17,000 pieces of mail instead of bringing them to the right addresses, authorities said Thursday.

Among the mail trove found in Germash’s Nissan Pathfinder, his apartment and his work locker was a letter from 2005, according to Brooklyn federal prosecutors.

Germash, 53, who has over 16 years on the job and no criminal record, was most recently assigned to the Dyker Heights Post Office.

Postal Service investigators discovered the missing missives when they got information on a Pathfinder containing multiple blue mail bags that were stuffed to the brim.

When investigators got to Germash’s car, they found more than 20 post office bags, containing 10,000 letters. There were about 6,000 pieces in his Brooklyn apartment and another 1,000 in his locker, authorities said.

Court papers said Germash told investigators “he was overwhelmed by the amount of mail that he had to deliver and made sure to deliver the important mail.”

Germash is charged with knowingly holding onto mail, an offense that’s punishable by up to five years in prison.

He was released Thursday on $25,000 bond.

Germash and his lawyer declined to comment on the charges.