Carnage

Two Drunk-Driving Cops Crash Cars In Two Nights

Drunk off-duty New York City police officers have crashed their vehicles each of the last two nights.

By Noah Kazis

12:52 PM EDT on April 8, 2011

Drunk off-duty New York City police officers have crashed their vehicles each of the last two nights.

On Wednesday evening at around 6:20 p.m., the Daily News reported, officer Christine Mazarakes smashed her car at the corner of 81st Street and West End Avenue. Mazarakes, who is stationed at the Upper West Side’s 24th precinct, was charged with a DWI and suspended.

The following night, Detective Thomas Handley flipped his car over while driving on the BQE at around 11:30. His injuries were somehow only minor, according to the News, and like Mazarakes, he was charged with a DWI and suspended.

The pair of drunk-driving crashes caused by New York’s finest comes a few weeks after a similar crash on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. On March 15, Officer Sergio Gonzalez was arrested for driving under the influence after crashing his car into the back of a cab, speeding away from the scene of a crash and then hitting a police car further down the street. Two hypodermic needles were found in Gonzalez’s car, according to the Park Slope Patch.

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.