From May 2019 to October 2020, Jackson Cheng appeared on paper to be working hard in his role as an NYPD captain and member of the department's Asian Hate Crime Task Force. Now, he's a former police officer, after an internal affairs probe found that hundreds of the hours he'd claimed to work in southern Brooklyn were falsified. More than 400 hours, in fact, with a payout of about $60,000, police sources tell the New York Daily News, with one of the sources telling the paper that Cheng, 45, confessed to the nonwork so he wouldn't get fired and could retire with at least part of his pension.
Police say that during a hearing, Cheng said some of the time when he was supposedly working was taking care of his sick parents. The 432 hours and 37 minutes for which he was paid without actually doing any work included nearly 200 hours of overtime, per officials. It appears he was able to evade detection for some time by claiming he was a duty captain, which took him away from his desk to work crime scenes throughout the city.
The shady hours were discovered during a standard overtime review. A final determination to allow him to walk away from the job with a partial pension was made at the end of November by Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell—overriding the recommendation of a department prosecutor, who believed Cheng should just be fired. But the outcome was in agreement with NYPD trial judge Paul Gamble, even though Gamble said there didn't appear to be any extraordinary situation that would've prevented Cheng from going to work. (More NYPD stories.)
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