NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey makes last-ditch bid to toss his abuse of authority case
The NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed police officer is making a last-ditch attempt to toss his abuse of authority case, The Post has learned.
Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey had been set to face an internal trial this past Monday over allegations that he wrongfully intervened in the arrest of an ex-cop accused of pulling a gun on three kids in Brooklyn.
But Maddrey’s attorney, Lambros Lambrou, got the trial date pushed to August last week, sources said.
The lawyer on Wednesday then filed a motion, obtained by The Post, arguing that the NYPD’s internal watchdog — the Civilian Complaint Review Board — doesn’t have the authority to prosecute the case.
Lambrou had pushed last week for a meeting with CCRB investigators and the department advocate to hammer out a deal, according to the sources.
But the attorney then scoffed at the offer on the table — docking Maddrey 10 vacation days — and said his client had done nothing wrong and that he would move to get the charges dismissed, per the sources.
In his letter to Deputy Commissioner Rosemarie Maldonado on Wednesday, Lambrou wrote that the case was “beyond [the] scope of the authority of the CCRB’s power to prosecute.”
“[D]espite many hours of research, I have yet to find a CCRB prosecution in which a supervisor’s decision on an internal NYPD matter, in which neither he nor any of his subordinates thereafter interfaced with the public, found to be proper grounds upon which to prosecute,” he wrote in the motion.
“Perhaps the CCRB can provide such cases.”
The abuse of authority charges stem from a 2021 incident involving a former officer, Krythoff Forrester, who allegedly pulled a gun on a trio of kids — ages 12, 13 and 14 — after they smashed a camera outside the Forrester family’s realty office in Brownsville.
The kids said the camera was broken accidentally as they tossed around a basketball. Forrester claims he never pulled a gun on them.
Maddrey, who was chief of community affairs at the time, allegedly showed up at the precinct late on Nov. 25, 2021, and ordered the sergeant to void Forrester’s arrest.
He also allegedly suggested the kids should be cuffed instead.
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office reviewed the incident and decided the chief’s actions were not criminal.
The CCRB then took up the case, and recommended last April that the police commissioner issue an official reprimand to Maddrey for abuse of authority.
Then-Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell sided with CCRB investigators a month later, handing down a 10-day suspension to Maddrey, who chose to fight the discipline in the NYPD internal trial room.
“Maddrey undertook his own investigation into the arrest in question and overrode the prior decision and voided the arrest, an internal NYPD matter,” Lambrou wrote in the motion, arguing that the chief “did not interface with any members of the public and dare I say failed to cause any harm to any member of the public.
“Hence allowing the CCRB to become involved in reviewing the actions of Chief Maddrey in the present case, would be beyond the scope of the CCRB and would open and expand the CCRB’s powers beyond what it is empowered to do under the New York City Charter,” he wrote.
While the motion came days after Lambrou got the original trial date delayed, he argued the bid to toss the case was not a “last-ditch attempt,” telling The Post it was “the first attempt to get this overreach dismissed.”
“It’s a clear jurisdictional issue,” he stressed in a statement Wednesday. “Before this was even sent to the trial room – there was no analysis of whether jurisdiction was appropriate that I’m aware of.
“It takes the powers of CCRB to a level that was never intended. What are they going to do – second guess every internal police decision?”
CCRB spokesperson Clare Platt said the agency was “confident” that Police Commissioner Edward Caban “would agree that an officer’s rank should not immunize them from accountability for misconduct.”
“The dismissal of these charges would send the opposite message to both members of the NYPD and all New Yorkers,” Platt said.
