As 11 New York City police officers face ticket-fixing charges in the Bronx, the largest police union in the city — the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association — has angrily stuck to one position: Ticket-fixing has been condoned for decades as part of the "NYPD culture." Editorials have been slamming that argument all week, and the backlash has sparked a debate within the NYPD.

Current and retired officers admit they knew tampering with summonses was wrong, but they say supervisors set the example by doing it, too.  

Many of them maintain the issuance of tickets has always been a matter of individual discretion, so making a ticket go away should be within an officer's discretion as well.  They point out the NYPD's own Patrol Guide allows for the voiding of tickets.

Prosecutors in the Bronx have accused the indicted officers of fixing tickets in primarily three ways: defacing a ticket with false information, removing a ticket from a summons box at the station house or persuading an officer to lie on the stand in traffic court.

Knowing it was Wrong

Gary Gorman, a police officer in East Harlem during the 1970s and 80s, said he fixed about a dozen tickets during his 13 years in the NYPD. If he discovered a fellow police officer got slapped with a traffic ticket, maybe because his police union card wasn't displayed in his car window, Gorman would make sure that ticket wouldn't hold up in court. He said to do that he'd write incorrect information on the face of the ticket to make it defective.

"Is it a hundred percent right doing that? In my heart, no. I know that. I know the difference between right and wrong," Gorman said.

But he never got caught. He said other officers also knew it was wrong, but did it anyway — because in many cases, supervisors ordered officers to fix tickets.

Special Fixes for Special People

Joe Guagliardo was a police officer in Brooklyn during the 1980s when he unknowingly wrote a ticket for the chief of staff of a city council member. Guagliardo said an Integrity Control Officer — an officer who is tasked with rooting out corruption within the police — told him he had to "take care of it."  Guagliardo asked his supervisors how he was supposed to make a ticket go away, and he said they told him, "Change the date of birth, and don't worry about it."

Guagliardo said he and other officers would get rewarded with perks when they fixed tickets for their supervisors. Some were assigned to desirable shifts or jobs in the department.  

Retired officers say it was common to receive orders from supervisors to fix tickets for people from the mayor's office or city council members.

Aurelio Grillo, a police officer in Williamsburg during the 1960s and 70s, said he saw powerful voting blocks in his precinct get special treatment.  

"I was told by captains, inspectors, lieutenants, sergeants to avoid going on blocks where there were Hassidic communities that had shuls or temples, and they were double- and triple-parked, and we were told, you know, to leave them alone, even if they were blocking the street," Grillo said.

Retired supervisors say there's no question they did some people favors by forgiving traffic tickets, and they knew officers watched them do it.
 
"In the three different precincts that I commanded, I must have voided a hundred different tickets and summons," said Louis Anemone, who served in the 1990s as Chief of Department, the highest-ranking uniformed member in the entire police force. Anemone said he would regularly void tickets for church parishioners who were double-parked on a Sunday.

Not All Ticket-Fixing is Equal

But Anemone said when he voided a ticket, he would follow the official NYPD Patrol Guide procedure, which requires the department to retain copies of the original ticket. WNYC obtained a copy of that guide, which does spell out how to cancel a ticket.  But according to the rules, the procedure is only for tickets that were first issued "in error."

Anemone said other kinds of ticket-fixing were never acceptable — such as defacing a ticket by writing false information, or removing a ticket from the pile in the precinct.

"Why would we lock the summons box?  Because we were aware of the fact that it could happen," Anemone said.

And if an officer was caught lying on the stand in traffic court, Anemone said he would be fired.  That's why he said it was disingenuous for the police union to now say ticket-fixing has always been condoned — officers knew they faced administrative punishments for certain kinds of ticket-fixing.  

But Roy Richter, who heads the police union for captains and higher-ranking officers, said last week's charges in the Bronx is the first time anyone in the department has ever faced possible jail time for ticket-fixing. None of the 11 indicted for ticket-fixing were supervising officers.

Richter said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly should have issued an explicit internal order to the entire department to stop fixing tickets before prosecutors ever got involved.

"All of a sudden, we're going from administrative penalties to criminal penalties, and that's the unfairness of the indictments in the Bronx," Richter said.