‘Highway Therapy’: Lawsuit Reveals Alarming Details Of NYPD’s Rampant Car Culture

It was their way or the highway.

Top NYPD brass misused the department’s internal-affairs bureaucracy and doled out “highway therapy” to grind down a mid-career officer for the crime of ticketing city employees for parking violations and for failing to recognize then-Assistant Police Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, according to court papers.

Plaintiff Mark Schwartz, a 15-year veteran of New York’s Finest, sued Daughtry, former Chief of Department John Chell and another top NYPD official late last year in a filing that lays out an apparently coordinated effort among Daughtry and Chell to intimidate and menace him for minor issues while using cars as both a pretext and a tool for punishment.

Schwartz is seeking unspecified monetary damages for “pain, suffering, emotional distress, loss of dignity, humiliation, and damages to reputation and livelihood.”

“It’s sad, really,” said Schwartz’s lawyer John Scola. “It’s just someone who’s trying to do his job, and then, because he didn’t basically bow down to the egos of Chell and Kaz, his whole life gets uprooted and he has to endure years of hardship, because these people essentially have a bruised ego.”

Schwartz joined the NYPD in 2010 and worked at precincts in northeastern Queens for more than a decade. On Sept. 6, 2023, his lawsuit alleges, he was working at the 109th Precinct in Flushing when Daughtry entered the building through its back door and became angry that Schwartz did not recognize him and thus did not “call attention” to Daughtry’s presence with a salute.

Daughtry, “noticeably angry,” then exited, leaving Schwartz confused. When a sergeant told him, “That’s Kaz,” Schwartz simply replied, “What the fuck is a Kaz?” Daughtry had only been named assistant commissioner weeks earlier.

‘Highway therapy’

Three days after Schwartz did not recognize Daughtry, according to court papers, he received a drunken late-night call from Chell, who asked Schwartz where he lived and whether he had a problem with Daughtry. The court papers described Chell as “noticeably intoxicated and angry.”

Immediately after that call, according to the lawsuit, Chell phoned the 120th Precinct on Staten Island’s North Shore. It is unclear what Chell said on the call — the lawsuit provides no details — but Schwartz was transferred to the 120th.

The long distance from Queens was not a coincidence. The transfer imposed “the greatest commuting burden of any available tour, at times, resulting in an unbearable two-hour-plus commute each way,” the lawsuit states. 

In other words, Chell had prescribed Schwartz a heavy dose of “highway therapy” — an unofficial punishment chosen by NYPD officials to deal with disfavored cops, the lawsuit alleges, calling the maneuver “a common retaliatory tactic in the NYPD” that police officials inflict on rank-and-file officers to create “an arduous, and often expensive commute (due to tolls and gasoline usage), with the intent of causing the transferred member frustration and ample time to reflect on their infraction.”

“Life’s basically a living hell,” Scola told Streetsblog.

Staten Island blues

Schwartz soon ran into more trouble on Staten Island. According to the lawsuit, NYPD personnel at the 120th precinct shut him out of crucial software and subjected him to extreme administrative scrutiny, while Chell and Daughtry allegedly misused the department’s internal-affairs bureaucracy to intimidate and harass him on bogus accusations of racism.

“I would let you rot in Staten Island,” Chell allegedly told Schwartz during an internal affairs interview.

After Schwartz sought help from his union, the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, he was reminded that Daughtry ”held a position of exceptional influence within the NYPD and had direct, high-level access to [former Mayor Eric Adams], making retaliation against officers who displeased him both swift and unreviewed,” the lawsuit states.

Schwartz again ran afoul of NYPD brass in late 2023, after he wrote tickets for several illegally parked cars on Hamilton Avenue in Staten Island. The road had a history of parking complaints, but Schwartz’s boss at the 120th Precinct apparently considered the offending cars off-limits because they belonged to teachers at a nearby school.

As a consequence, Schwartz was allegedly stripped of his patrol duties and placed in a windowless office with no responsibilities, assignments, or subordinate staff. He was “functionally sidelined” at his new assignment, the lawsuit claims.

Looking for a way out, Schwartz sought a different, “less desirable,” assignment that offered overtime. But court papers claim that NYPD Chief of Transit Joseph Gulotta, the other top brass named in the suit, ensured Schwartz did not receive that opportunity.

Denied promotion

Several months later, the lawsuit alleges, the NYPD summoned Schwartz to a promotion board to consider his advancement to the rank of captain. According to the lawsuit, one of the board’s members was Chell, who opposed Schwartz’s promotion and successfully pressured the other two board members to vote against it.

During that board meeting, the lawsuit claims, Chell “emit[ted] a loud and dismissive exhalation.” He also “specifically [made] a comment about [Schwartz] writing the tickets at the school and [made] it known that he will not be promoted due to the lawful police action [Schwartz] took.” At one point, Chell “[lost] emotional control and [became] verbally abusive, calling [Schwartz] ‘stupid.’”

“[Chell] definitely prevented the promotion of my client, because [Schwartz] issued tickets to teachers in Staten Island who were parked on the sidewalk after he spoke with the principal and asked them to move, and they refused,” Scola said. “He did what he’s supposed to. He ticketed those lawbreakers and then Chell used that to justify him not getting promoted.”

Schwartz’s lawsuit is not the first time that Daughtry and Chell’s behavior drew attention of watchdogs. The city’s police oversight agency repeatedly found that Daughtry engaged in misconduct, and Chell faced numerous investigations by the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau, including for tax evasion. A jury previously determined that Chell, then a cop, “intentionally discharged” his gun in a 2008 incident, killing Ortanzso Bovell and forcing the NYPD to pay out $2.5 million in 2017 to Bovell’s family.

NYPD’s mysterious policy

Schwartz’s lawsuit adds new evidence that the NYPD has politicized traffic enforcement. In March, Chell himself said on X that a “standing order for decades” has instructed police officers not to issue tickets to teachers, doctors, nurses and employees of “other city agencies.” When he was the NYPD Chief of Department, he said he added to that list “friends” of right-wing radio host Sid Rosenberg. (The NYPD denied Chell’s assertion.)

Schwartz is now a captain working in Manhattan, but thinks he should’ve received this promotion much sooner. The lawsuit also alleges he was denied cash overtime and faced other workplace challenges due to the retaliation.

Scola said that the lawsuit “sheds light on the selective enforcement of laws and the arbitrariness of how the NYPD polices.”

“[Schwartz] lost that promotion, he would be at a higher rate of pay now, he’d be in a different place in his career, all because he didn’t get the memo that the NYPD had selective enforcement for, whether it’s Sid Rosenberg’s listeners or city workers or whoever it may be that’s basically connected to the executives in the NYPD,” Scola said. “It’s not fair.”

Scola is hopeful that a new mayoral administration will settle the suit and that the NYPD will “clean up their act,” but he’s not holding his breath. 

Chell retired from the NYPD in 2025, and Gulotta still works for the police department. Daughtry became the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety in May 2025 after four of then-Mayor Eric Adams’s deputy mayors resigned in protest. He now works for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

None of the three men replied to requests for comment from Streetsblog, nor did the NYPD.