A Bronx cop claims a superior punched him for refusing to write bogus summonses. "I'm not going to give the bread deliveryman a ticket before going into the deli and telling him," said Officer Anthony Minoia, 46, who is planning on filing suit against the city for the violent incident. "I didn't forget what it was like to be a civilian before I got a badge."
Minoia, an Air Force veteran and Columbia University graduate, is the latest in a string of officers to accuse the NYPD of having quotas for summonses and arrests, pressuring officers to write false summonses, and manipulating crime stats so commanding officers appear to have a better grip on their precincts. "I'm not going to pull out my summons book and write a summons because my boss is telling me he's going to make it difficult for me if I don't," Minoia told the Daily News. "I don't use my powers to make a deputy inspector get promoted."
After 18 months of refusing to write summonses, Minoia says things turned ugly on Jan. 11. First, a supervisor accused him of taking too long of a bathroom break. Then he was informed that he had been transferred to a midnight shift. According to police reports, Minoia fainted minutes after learning of the transfer. The documents reportedly indicate that when Deputy Inspector Timothy Bugge tried to disarm him, Minoia grabbed the commanding officer's neck or collar. Minoia—who has been suspended for insubordination and getting into an altercation with a superior—rejects that version of the story, and claims that Bugge punched him.
