The NYPD appears to be exempt from Mayor de Blasio’s big placard crackdown, stunning new numbers show.
The 24-person unit formed by Hizzoner to root out parking-permit abuse has given out 2,700 summonses — but only nine cops have been disciplined for abusing placards, NYPD Chief Thomas Chan said Friday.
The NYPD refused to say how many of the summonses were given out to cops — or clarify if the nine cases of disciplinary action mean that only nine cops have been issued tickets.
An internal NYPD memo says the placard unit “will be directed to issue summonses to personal cars.”
“In addition to the summonses, [command discipline] will also be issued,” it says.
Patrick Sullivan, a former school-board policy member who has been trying to draw attention to placard misuse near Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side, said it “doesn’t seem to make sense” that so few officers are getting disciplined given the amount of photos online of police permit abuse.
“It’s what you’d expect though — they’re going to take care of their own,” he said. “I think if you had state police or a different entity doing it, then it might work.”
A source told The Post last week that the NYPD didn’t want to release stats on the number of cops who have been issued summonses because so few tickets had been given to them.
“The reason we park illegally is because the city has failed to provide adequate parking around these station houses,” one police source griped.
“The real question is how do we rectify the problem. We can’t just summons people to death.”
As first reported by The Post last week, the placard-abuse unit has been alerting commands when they do sweeps outside of precinct station houses, so officers can move their cars.
Chan added that the number of summonses the NYPD has given out for placard-related violations has gone up by 13 percent since the unit was created.
“Since the beginning of the year we’ve also done placard enforcement on a regular basis, so for the year-to-date we have over 15,600 summonses that are issued to placards and related to that, and that’s 13 percent more than we did last year,” he said. “So we are continuing [the program].”
The NYPD also refused to give a breakdown of how many summonses have been issued to employees of other city agencies.