A Brooklyn cop who admitted to submitting a phony COVID vaccine card after which mendacity about it was allowed to maintain her job by NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban regardless of a Police Division evaluate recommending she be fired.
Inner NYPD paperwork obtained Friday by the Each day Information present that as an alternative of getting her employment terminated, Police Officer Kimberly Lucas was docked 85 trip days and hit with a yearlong probationary interval — thanks largely to the intercession of Caban.
“This shocks the conscience. They’re mainly letting a fraudster keep on the job,” stated an outraged fellow cop, who famous that the circumstances across the case successfully disqualify Lucas from testifying below oath. “She will by no means testify in courtroom once more.”
Caban’s lenience within the Lucas matter isn’t the primary time the commissioner has let dangerous habits slide.
As first reported in The Information earlier this 12 months, Caban declined to self-discipline a high-ranking deputy chief who wrenched a feminine protester’s hair and shoved her face into the bottom. Since turning into commissioner final July, he’s blocked disciplinary instances involving 54 officers from going to trial, the information outlet ProPublica reported.
Some cops who’ve landed in scorching water additionally later noticed their fortunes enhance — like Lt. Brandi Sanchez, who was positioned on modified responsibility in 2020 after being caught having drunken intercourse in a rest room with fellow cop Sgt. Lambros Gavalas. In keeping with a police supply, regardless of that, Sanchez obtained a plum gig a few 12 months in the past working for First Deputy Commissioner Tania Kinsella.
Lucas, who’s labored out of Brooklyn’s seventieth Precinct for almost 10 years, was going through termination for her COVID-related misdeeds.
Different cops who instructed the reality about their refusal to take the vaccine after it was mandated have been fired because of this. The so-called vaccine mandate prompted the Police Benevolent Affiliation to sue the town — a case it received in September 2022. In consequence, a decide ordered the division to reinstate officers who have been fired for refusing the mandate.
However Lucas’ case was completely different from these in that she claimed she’d been vaccinated. As a part of her departmental trial, Lucas testified that she went to get a vaccine in 2021 after talking with a commanding officer about whether or not she’d adjust to the town mandate requiring all municipal workers be vaccinated for COVID.
At an pressing care facility in Brooklyn, a receptionist inquired whether or not she needed a vaccine whereas “smirking,” which Lucas appropriately interpreted to imply that “she was going to be given a vaccine card with out receiving the COVID-19 vaccine,” inside NYPD data present.
Lucas pursued that phony vaccine card path after the receptionist gave her a cellphone quantity to contact to acquire it. Data present that she finally did simply that on Staten Island and later uploaded the faux card to the NYPD’s Centralized Personnel Useful resource system.
Later that 12 months, in December 2021, the division’s Inner Affairs Bureau started a evaluate of the scenario and requested that Lucas carry her proof of vaccination to her interview.
Throughout the sitdown, she gave a “second fraudulent card to the IAB investigators” after dropping the primary one and lied to them, saying that she “was given the COVID-19 vaccine shot after which waited within the foyer for quarter-hour to make sure that there have been no unwanted effects.”
A couple of 12 months later, in a second official interview that came about in October 2022, she confessed to the falsehood. Throughout that interview and in trial testimony, she stated she feared the vaccine as a result of her mom suffered a stroke inside two days of getting it and that she couldn’t afford to lose her job as a result of she’s the only supporter of her little one.
Taking all of that into consideration, Anne Stone, an NYPD assistant deputy commissioner of trials, decided in October that Lucas ought to be terminated, however allowed to “file for vested-interest retirement.”
Caban overruled her in Might, although.
Whereas writing that he agreed with Stone’s findings that Lucas lied, he famous that Lucas “had fulfilled 9 years of exemplary service within the rank of police officer.” Caban finally concluded Lucas ought to solely be docked 85 trip days and hit with a 12 months of “dismissal probation,” which permits her to retain her full wage throughout that point.
A spokesman for the NYPD declined to elaborate extra on what went into Caban’s decision-making course of.
PBA President Patrick Hendry steered that his transfer was justified.
“The NYPD’s disciplinary matrix doesn’t restrict the police commissioner to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ set of penalties,” Hendry stated. “He’s nonetheless granted the discretion to transcend the advisable penalties to make a good closing dedication based mostly on a police officer’s previous document and different concerns. That’s what occurred on this case.”