Ticket punched
There’ve been a flurry of stories written recently about NYPD officer Matthew Bianchi for a peculiar reason: he tried to equitably enforce the law, an anomaly in the department. Specifically, the one-time traffic cop alleged in public statements and a federal lawsuit that he was hounded for still writing tickets to traffic violators who presented Police Benevolent Association courtesy cards, issued to friends and family of officers. After ticketing a friend of now-Chief of Department Jeff Maddrey, Bianchi claims he was reassigned in retaliation.
The NYPD dismisses this as some sort of play by Bianchi, but the patrol cop seems to want little more than reinstatement to his role writing traffic tickets. In any case, his account certainly doesn’t represent a shocking departure from what we’ve long known. That the courtesy cards act as a kind of force-field to ward off low-level enforcement is so widely known as to barely qualify as an open secret.
A few years ago, Vice ran a lengthy story featuring multiple people explicitly detailing how handing over the card ended a police interaction immediately, even when they’d been openly flouting the law.
It’s also not a significant stretch to imagine Maddrey intervening improperly to help out a friend. After all, that’s exactly what the then-chief of community affairs did in 2021 when he personally went to a Brownsville stationhouse to spring retired officer and old pal Kruythoff Forrester from jail, getting his arrest voided less than three hours after Forrester was arrested for menacing three teenagers with a gun. That the Forrester incident took place isn’t speculation; there is video proof of the interaction, as was first reported by The City. The Civilian Complaint Review Board looked into the incident and recommended a paltry docking of 10 vacation days.
Even that was not lenient enough for Mayor Adams, who appears to have personally pressured then-NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell to not impose any discipline at all. She resigned shortly afterwards. If Maddrey felt that he could get a bud improperly released who had been credibly accused of pointing a gun at some kids, it’s certainly not a leap to imagine he engineered the reassignment of a cop who ticketed a friend.
The fact that the top cop is almost certain to face practically no consequences for either of the alleged offenses is precisely why the rankand-file will continue to look the other way when PBA cards emerge, not to mention the countless other ways officers and their friends play by other rules — the placard abuse, the refusal to abide by transparency requirements, the “testilying” on the stand. Why should they comply, when every signal points to it being all but officially sanctioned and tacitly expected that they don’t?
The straw man retort here is that the police have a tough and often dangerous job ensuring public safety for all of us. That much is hardly in dispute, but the authority that we vest in them should hold them to a higher, not lower, bar. Police leaders frequently complain about frayed trust between police officers and the communities they patrol. One surefire way to make that problem worse is to leave it clear that not only officers but even their friends and family have their own rulebook.