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By: Donny Simcha Guttman
In recent days, New York Police Commissioner Edward Caban allowed police officer, Kimberly Lucas, to keep her job after being caught to have lied about receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. In 2020, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio made it a requirement for all police officers to get the COVID-19- vaccine, which caused much controversy as dozens of officers had personal objections. For an officer to keep her/his job during the mandate, a vaccine card was required to be shown to superior officers thus affirming that a COVID shot was administered. The mandate was later challenged and struck down in court, but till today, the effects of the mandate have been felt.
In the case of Officer Lucas, she told her commanding officer in 2021, that she received a vaccine; NYPD documents also show that when Lucas was offered a vaccine she agreed to the clerk with a smirk on her face as she understood that “she was going to be given a vaccine card without receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.” She received a phone number where she obtained the fake card where she then uploaded it to the NYPD’s Centralized Personnel Resource system. The NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau last year investigated Lucas’s case, where at her interview she presented a “second fraudulent card to the IAB investigators”, after losing the original one. In her interview, she reportedly said to investigators that she “was given the COVID-19 vaccine shot and then waited in the lobby for 15 minutes to ensure that there were no side effects.”
However, a year later in October 2022, she admitted that she lied about receiving a Covid vax and her fraudulent tactics of receiving a vaccine card. After the admission, Anne Stone, an NYPD assistant deputy commissioner of trials, ruled that she would be fired from her role as a police officer but would be allowed to “file for vested-interest retirement.” However, Commissioner Caban has overruled that decision and said that Officer Lucas, “had fulfilled nine years of exemplary service in the rank of police officer,” and will be allowed to stay on the job. However, she has received a dock of 85 vacation days and will receive a year of “dismissal probation”. The head of the Police Benevolent Association, Patrick Hendry, defended the Commissioner’s move by commenting, “the NYPD’s disciplinary matrix does not limit the police commissioner to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ set of penalties. He is still granted the discretion to go beyond the recommended penalties to make a fair final determination based on a police officer’s record and other considerations. That is what occurred in this case.”
This is not the first time that Commissioner Caban has allowed inappropriate behavior to slip past the cracks. ProPublica has reported that the commissioner has allowed in the past year 54 disciplinary cases to going to trial. In 2021, a few dozen police officers were put on leave for not taking the vax, this was as a result of admitting to not receiving the vaccine. Cases like Officer Lucas’s are unique within the category of officers that didn’t receive a vaccine, in that she lied to superior officers about her decision. During the trial when she admitted to lying, she said that she didn’t want to get the vaccine, as her mother got a stroke two days after receiving the vax.
