8 Accused Of Fighting NYC Tickets With Fake Parking Placards

NEW YORK — Eight people posed as disabled drivers or government workers to get out of parking tickets — but most had to pay the fines anyway, New York City authorities alleged Tuesday.

Seven New Yorkers and one New Jersey man submitted forged parking passes to the city Department of Finance as they tried to dispute tickets they received from August 2017 to July 2018, the city's Department of Investigation said. Only one of them was successful, the DOI said.

All eight were arrested Tuesday morning and charged with offering of a false instrument, which comes with a maximum four-year prison sentence, the DOI said. Three of them were also charged with criminal impersonation, officials said.

"Parking comes at a premium in a city like New York and using fraudulent placards to circumvent the rules is a crime," DOI Commissioner Margaret Garnett said in a statement.

Four of the individuals used bogus handicap parking placards and two used passes that purportedly belonged to city Law Department employees, the DOI said. One was a fake New York Blood Center placard and another was supposedly meant for the United States Postal Office, officials said.

The group includes four Queens residents, two Manhattanites and one Bronx resident, according to the DOI. All had to pay their parking fines except for Elliot Obeng-Dompreh of Bloomfield, New Jersey, the DOI said.

Officials say Obeng-Dompreh submitted a bogus handicap placard to fight an August 2017 summons for no standing in a meter zone, which the Department of Finance dismissed.

The arrests come about four months after Mayor Bill de Blasio redoubled his administration's efforts to crack down on the abuse of official parking permits. The DOI said its investigation stemmed from a referral from the Department of Transportation, which is responsible for about 50,000 city-issued placards.

More than 125,000 city-issued parking placards were in circulation last year, a number that has reportedly increased greatly during de Blasio's tenure. The problem of using their official permits — or fake ones — to flout parking rules has persistently rankled New Yorkers.

Prosecutors in 2017 accused 30 people of selling or using fake parking passes to skirt city parking restrictions. The fake placards in that case were modeled on those used by law-enforcement officials, the New York Post reported at the time.