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.”