A dozen Boston parking-enforcement officers under investigation for writing fake tickets to get off work
Boston MA June 18 2022 Six parking enforcement officers are off the job and another half-dozen are under the microscope after the city says it found that the ticket-writers had been penning fake or bad fines while they skipped work.
Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge told the Herald that the city has “clear evidence” of misconduct by six officers who were literally mailing it in, writing fake tickets while simply just not working certain shifts.
Of those, five either have resigned or retired since the investigation began late last year shortly after the Wu administration took power, and the one remaining one is on unpaid leave pending a hearing in the coming days, he said.
And data analysis of all tickets going back to 2020 has popped up “some flags” on about another half-dozen Boston Transportation Department parking-enforcement officers who the city continues to look into as its three investigations are underway: an internal review into employees, a police probe to see if any crime was committed and an outside counsel’s look into what went wrong in the system.
“This is completely unacceptable,” Franklin-Hodge said in an interview Thursday. “These are people who wield the force of public law with their ticket books.”
Franklin-Hodge said the investigation began at the end of 2021, shortly after he and Mayor Michelle Wu started in City Hall.
A shipping company had come to them with something curious: several of its trucks had been slapped with an outsized number of parking tickets for places the trucks hadn’t been.
That led to BTD identifying one problem individual, Franklin-Hodge said. The transportation department expanded the probe across the parking-enforcement staff of 130 — and saw similar patterns with some other officers.
He noted that the BTD cars have GPS devices in them, so it becomes simple to check and see if and officer was where they say they were for a suspicious ticket.
Franklin-Hodge said it appears that the alleged ticket-fakers either made up the license plates — which means no one actually was hit with a ticket or slapped fines on shipping and trucking companies, who pay the city in bulk at the end of each month and therefore, in theory, might not notice an extra ticket or two the way an individual getting a sudden notice of a mysterious unpaid ticket in the mail would.
The city said all this doesn’t mean your ticket that you found on your car and are angry about is invalid. After all, the bad tickets that the people in question are accused of writing specifically were not done in person — that’s kind of the point.
“It was to create the appearance that they were working when, in fact, they were not,” Franklin-Hodge said.
Wu said in a statement, “This breach of trust is unacceptable. I’m grateful for the swift action taken by Chief Franklin-Hodge and his team, alongside BPD, once they were made aware of this issue. We will work diligently to hold those responsible accountable.”
The city declined to give the names of the parking-enforcement officers under suspicion, and wouldn’t elaborate much on where their routes ran. Franklin-Hodge said there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason connecting the people in question, saying they have a range of lengths of tenure and patrol different parts of the city — though he, citing the ongoing investigation, wouldn’t say where.
“Parking meter supervisors” in Boston make up to around $84,000, depending on their level of seniority.
Franklin-Hodge said the city does not know if there was any coordination between officers.
The city referred the apparent wrongdoing to the cops, Franklin-Hodge said, and the Boston Police Department is investigating. The city has brought on big law firm Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr to investigate the system and report back on how these problems were able to happen and how to stop them in the future.
The city’s parking-enforcement officers are members of the AFSCME Council 93 union, which said it doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations that could involve discipline.
