An armed NYPD officer was disciplined after getting caught sleeping on the F train last Thursday, according to a straphanger who photographed the cop sawing wood in the middle of the afternoon. Record producer engineer Martin Bisi tells us he boarded the F train at Carroll Street around 3:15 p.m. and immediately spotted the sleepy cop catching some Z's at the end of the subway car. "I was pretty disturbed by the whole thing," Bisi tells us. He got off the train at Jay Street-Metrotech, leaving the officer to his slumbers, but gave it some thought and decided to say something about what he saw.
"I felt I had to do something," says Bisi. "So a couple of hours later I approached a cop on 34th Street, and she couldn't believe the photo. She was shocked. So she took my information and a lieutenant called me fairly quickly, about an hour later." Bisi says the lieutenant, William Scarcella, asked him to forward the photos, and after reviewing the images, Scarcella followed up with Bisi about Sleepy.
According to Bisi, Lt. Scarcella told him the napping cop belongs to a mounted unit, and was off duty at the time. Nevertheless, Scarcella told Bisi he was "disgusted and embarrassed" by the officer's behavior, adding that it was extremely dangerous, considering he was carrying a firearm. Bisi says he was told that even sitting down was against regulations, and that uniformed officers are prohibited from sitting down in the subway.
The lieutenant told Bisi the officer would get some vacation time docked and have the rules explained to him again. "It didn't seem very severe to me as a punishment," Bisi says. A call to Scarcella this afternoon went unanswered, the MTA declined to comment, and the NYPD press office has not yet replied to a request for comment. We'll give them a couple more hours—it's probably naptime.
