COP: CITY PAID ME SO I’D GO AWAY
He gets $275G in dispute that put strain on his life
An NYPD officer who says he was bullied about his 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy-related illnesses, then punished when he took legal action, has received a $275,000 settlement from the city this month, the Daily News has learned.
Transit cop Andrew Schmitt claims his bosses forced him to work under life-threatening conditions and refused to accommodate his handicaps, despite knowing about his disabilities, according to the Brooklyn federal lawsuit filed in 2015.
Schmitt, who says he was ordered to retire two years ago, told the Daily News he feels somewhat vindicated by the settlement, but is ultimately disappointed by the police department.
“I feel there’s no real resolution in this. I don’t think anything was solved other than [the city] throwing me a few bucks to make it go away,” the Massapequa father of two said. “But it will never go away for me. This has caused a strain on my marriage, a strain on my relationship with my family. I’ll live with this forever.”
Schmitt said he agreed to settle because he couldn’t afford to go to trial. The city said they forked over the money because it was in their “best interest,” not because they had done anything wrong.
“The NYPD is committed to fostering a professional, inclusive work environment and there is no admission of wrongdoing in this case,” a Law Department spokesman said.
Schmitt says his troubles began after he came back from a six-month rehab stint for substance abuse in December 2013.
The trauma of being unable to save a stranded man during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 took a great toll on the transit officer, who barely made it out alive himself. So Schmitt says he turned to alcohol.
“I would hear his screams almost every night. Every time I went to the shower and put the water on, and put the fan on, which mimics that howling wind from the hurricane, I would have auditory hallucinations of this man screaming out for help,” he said. “I didn’t understand it and I started drinking heavily. I developed an alcohol problem because of it. I just wanted to numb things out.”
When he got back to Transit District 34 in Coney Island in December, he started seeing posters around the command mocking his drinking problem, according to the federal complaint. One cartoon, made available to the Daily News by Schmitt’s attorney, depicted a man hooked up to two IVs, one filled with scotch and the other with soda.
“I just figured it was cops razing on me and whatnot,” Schmitt, 50, said. “They were putting them on the podium which everyone in the command saw. They were all over my locker. It was embarrassing so I just started throwing them out. But they kept popping up.”
The posters were only part of the problem, says Schmitt. His work at Ground Zero left him with a number of health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder, a kidney condition that prevented him from standing in the heat for too long and constant low blood pressure.
Yet his supervisor Sgt. Tin Mai ignored his pleas for modified duty, forcing him to work without air conditioning and allegedly referring to Schmitt as a “f***ing scammer,” according to the federal complaint. Sgt. Mai did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Another supervisor, Lt. Noe Campos, allegedly accused Schmitt of abusing sick leave, and at one point yelled at him to “go out sick!” after a long break on the job, the complaint says.
“I felt like I was an inmate on a work release program every day I showed up for
work [after rehab]. That’s exactly how I felt,” Schmitt said. “After a while I said something has to be done about this, something’s not right. Enough was enough.”
Schmitt filed a complaint with the NYPD Office of Equal Employment Opportunity in August 2014, but says nothing came of it.
Two months later, he filed a discrimination claim with the New York State Division of Human Rights, which found that the NYPD “has engaged in or is engaging in the unlawful discriminatory practices complained of.” The Daily News has seen a copy of the agency’s decision letter.
Schmitt officially sued the department in October 2015. The decision to take legal action “started a sh** storm” in the command, court papers say, angering the cop’s superiors even more.
In their motion for summary judgment, the NYPD contended that “calling Schmitt a “scammer is rude but does not establish a hostile work environment” and that the cartoons “are more akin to ‘simple teasing,’” according to court documents. A Brooklyn federal judge denied their motion.
The NYPD also claimed, in their motion, that “none of the alleged behavior or comments were physically threatening.” The judge disagreed with that defense.
Lt. Campos denies ever harassing Schmitt, and says he never saw any demeaning cartoons.
“He was never harassed, not by me, not by anybody,” Campos, who now works with the NYPD TV and Movie unit, said. “When he started off, he was a good guy, a good cop. I liked him a lot. I don’t know what happened. I just hope he’s okay.”
“Whatever issues he was dealing with, I hope he’s better now. That’s all I can say.”
Schmitt, who comes from a family of law enforcement officers and had always dreamed of a life in public service, now wants nothing to do with the NYPD.
“I enjoyed helping people on the job. My goal was to be the next police commissioner. I really wanted to do that. I wanted to do something better to serve the public,” Schmitt said.
“After this I couldn’t care less about the police department. It’s severely mismanaged. If I ran a business the way the police department runs its business, I’d be out of business.”
“This cost [Schmitt] money, it cost him time, it cost him emotional output. It’s a stressful experience to go through a litigation,” said his lawyer Rick Ostrove, of Leeds Brown Law. “He probably never would’ve come to us in the first place if anyone, anywhere along the line just did the right thing.”