These Brooklyn officers picked the wrong journalist to stop — and to hit with questionable traffic summonses.
My roadway ordeal started on April 12, a sunny Sunday afternoon, while I was heading to the gym for a quick workout. Instead, at Fourth Avenue and 86th Street in Bay Ridge, I was stopped by roughly half a dozen young NYPD officers who told me I had been pulled over for a “random traffic-safety check.”
After leaving me sitting there for about 20 minutes, a female officer finally emerged from a police car and handed me two summonses. The alleged violations: “illegal” dealership frames on the front and rear license plates of my 2019 Infiniti.
I was stunned. In fact, I laughed and told her she had to be reading the law wrong.
I explained that while I’m not an attorney, my work as a New York Post reporter has made me well aware of the newer laws targeting ghost plates, clear plastic covers and other tactics drivers use to prevent license plates from being captured by red-light, speed and toll cameras.
But dealership frames are different: they don’t block the plates and can likely be found on about half the vehicles in New York City. I also pointed out that, right on the block where I was stopped, there were a dozen cars with dealer frames.
So I asked her — along with the cluster of fresh-faced officers who had started gathering around me like ticket-quota hawks — what exactly made my car different.
The officers bristled, insisted they weren’t there to argue, and one male cop warned he would write me another ticket if I didn’t simply drive off.
So I did – straight to the 68th Precinct stationhouse a mile away.
I showed the ranking officer on duty both summonses – which were so sloppily scrawled that I could not make out the actual charges or potential fines.
He walked outside to check my license plates and admitted the tickets should never have been written.
He assured me the officers would be “retrained” because the law allows plate covers — provided, like mine, they don’t block numbers and letters on the plate.
He apologized but said he didn’t have the power to toss the tickets — which were about to cost me more than $300 in fines and surcharges.
On Friday, I finally had my day in court – a small hearing room at the state Department of Motor Vehicles office in Coney Island before an associate administrative law judge.
I was still angry about these petty and unfair tickets — and was ready to channel my inner Harvey Specter, the fictional lawyer from “Suits.”
I was up late the night before, vigilantly rehearsing what would be a spirited defense, complete with evidentiary photos and statutory citations.
But I barely got a word in edgewise.
The officer, Tiffany Ruiz, showed up in uniform wearing sunglasses, but removed them shortly before the two of us were called up to address Judge Perry Bohmstein.
Ruiz, an NYPD cop since 2024 who records show pocketed $77,228 with overtime last year, went first and flat-out lied — or had a memory fart.
She claimed my plates were “dirty and covered by plastic” – never mentioning our debate over the legality of dealership frames.
While the plates’ cleanliness was open to interpretation, the idea that I ever had transparent plastic plate covers – like the ones many of her fellow cops have infamously used on their private cars for years to avoid camera tickets – was not true.
I was ready to pounce.
But Bohmstein stopped the officer in the middle of her testimony — dismissing both tickets on the spot.
I was thrilled — yet sad. I blurted out that I had a whole case prepared.
“You don’t get to make the speech now!” the cranky, but obviously fair, judge barked, before warning me to leave immediately before he changed his mind.
So I did, but nobody was going to stop me from confronting Ruiz outside the trial room.
I asked her why she lied about me having a plastic cover on my plates.
I also asked if she was ever retrained on what constitutes an obstructed plate, as her superior promised.
But she would not comment.
So I left, but not before advising her to pick up the Sunday Post.
