Kate Anderson on January 25, 2023
NEW YORK, NY – NYPD Sgt. Dana Martillo filed a lawsuit against the NYPD Tuesday, alleging that she did not receive a fair internal trial after the department docked her vacation for a month and suspended her for wearing a “Make Enforcement Great Again” patch while on duty, according to The New York Post.
A video showed Hammer wearing the patch during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2021, which led to her being investigated. As a result of an administrative trial that found Hammer guilty of promoting political statements as an officer, she was suspended and given 30 days of vacation. According to Martillow’s lawsuit, her trial was highly biased and politically motivated.
The lawsuit claims Martillo was taken aback by “the level of dishonesty, political bias, and bad faith that would so infect this entire administrative disciplinary process, due to the total control that the mayor as chief executive has over the New York City Police Department and the ‘Kangaroo court’ in which [she] was forced to mount her defense to these trumped-up charges (pardon the pun),” according to the Post.
NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell tweeted that officers “must remain apolitical” after the department announced that it was looking into reports regarding Martillo’s patches.
Martillo states in the lawsuit that the patches were not political since Trump was no longer in office and had not announced a bid for reelection at the time of the protest, according to the Post. The lawsuit also claimed that Martillo was barred from submitting testimony from a polygraph expert and that the witness testifying against her had lied.
The patches had a Marvel comic character called The Punisher with Donald Trump’s signature hairstyle, and Martillo also wore a second patch of just the character, according to the Post. The Punisher character has also been used by the militia group the Three Percenters.
The mandatory suspension and docked vacation, the lawsuit read, was “so disproportionate to the offense as to be shocking to one’s sense of fairness,” according to the Post.
An NYPD spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it “will review the lawsuit.”
Martillo could not be reached for comment.
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