As my grandma used to say, honesty is the best policy. But you know what else is a pretty good policy? Giving traffic tickets only to people who are actually alive. The cop fired by the New York Police Department says he was issuing summonses to deceased people, but only because he had to fill monthly quotas the NYPD says don’t exist.

He was already writing more than 125 to 150, reports the New York Post, but he says in a lawsuit filed this week against the NYPD that he was told to amp up that effort.

“Specifically, [the cop] was told that he needed to start issuing more summonses for red-light and seat-belt violations” and was warned he would be moved “if he did not issue the increased number of summonses,” the suit says.

Instead of handing out tickets to people who didn’t deserve them, the cop figured he could just issue summonses to dead people because hey, they can’t complain.

He went ahead and “prepared summonses by taking information from legitimate summonses that he had issued in the past. But he prepared the summonses in such a way that [they] would not impact any motorists,” the lawsuit explains. This is what I’d like to call the “Hey, I’m The Good Guy Here” defense.

The whole thing fell apart last July when his coworkers noticed he never had to testify about any of his tickets. Other cops say he wasn’t trying to help people out, just pad his pockets with the overtime involved in writing the tickets.

He pleaded guilty in May to three counts of falsifying business records, was sentenced to 150 hours of community service and was fired in June. He was officially fired in June but says he should’ve gotten a hearing first. Not so, says the NYPD, since his actions are considered an “oath of office offense” as he knew what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway.

NYPD officer canned for ticketing dead people says he was doing it to meet ‘quotas’ [New York Post]

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