Pol's parking mad
Shames agent for doing right
A state legislator got caught abusing her parking placard outside her district office in Brooklyn — and then Facebookshamed the traffic agent who slapped her with a $115 ticket.
Assemblywoman Diana Richardson (D-Brooklyn) wrote that she was putting NYPD Traffic Enforcement Agent Nazir Raghubir, 20, “on blast,” even though he was just doing his job amid a citywide crackdown on placard abuse.
Raghubir issued Richardson the citation for illegally parking her 2011 Nissan in front of her district office at 330 Empire Blvd. on Monday, according to a photo she posted on Facebook.
The spot sits in a right-turn- only lane that is clearly marked with an arrow painted on the pavement. A pair of bright red sidewalk signs say “NO STANDING ANYTIME” and have arrows pointing toward each other.
The ticket also contains a notation from Raghubir that says: “Refused to move.”
“Putting Traffic Agent Raghubir, N on blast because this is not right,” Richardson wrote. “Imagine.....as hard as I fight for our community....and I’m issued a ticket for being parked in front of my district office WITH the Official Business Pass in the window. Sigh......”
Assembly-issued parking placards bear a bold-letter warning on their backs that lists “no standing zones” among a dozen areas — also including bus stops, fire zones and sidewalks — where they won’t provide a “valid verifiable defense” to a ticket.
Richardson’s blatant violation came less than three months into a crackdown announced by Mayor de Blasio, who said placard abuse was “contributing to traffic congestion” and “starting to erode faith in the integrity of government.”
Richardson’s ticket marked her latest brush with the law following her arrest last year in the alleged beating of her 13-year-old son with a broomstick. She was busted three days before last year’s election, in which she ran unopposed.
Richardson — who initially won a four-way 2015 special election on the Working Families Party line — scored a one-year conditional discharge of the charges against her in July, court records show.
One Albany lawmaker blasted Richardson’s reaction to her parking ticket, saying she should have just sent a letter to Traffic Court and claimed she was on official business.
Richardson’s claim regarding how “hard . . . I fight for our community” also prompted an eye-roll from a Democratic insider who joked about her criminal past, quipping: “The only thing she fights is a matter of court record.”
An aide working in Richardson’s office declined to comment, and said she would relay a message to Richardson, who she said was “out of the city on business.”
Raghubir said he couldn’t comment.