Stinks From The Head Down: NYC Sheriff Anthony Miranda Abused His Placard And Defaced His Plate

They shot the Sheriff — and caught his wife’s car with a fake placard!

The city’s top civil law enforcement office Anthony Miranda was unceremoniously fired by Mayor Mamdani last week — and when the former Sheriff was escorted out of the agency’s headquarters, witnesses said, he was driven away by his wife in a white vehicle that, wait for it!, was busted in October for using a fake placard.

“Dept sheriffs office Counterfeit falsely purports to authorize parking,” a traffic agent wrote on the Oct. 10, 2025 ticket (right) in the space where placards are listed. The agent also wrote up the car for having an obscured back license plate and a “dept sheriffs office front” (below left).

The same plate got nabbed on Dec. 21, 2025 for a bus stop violation.

One expert saw Miranda’s placard abuse as a small example of a much-bigger privilege that undermines faith in government.

“We don’t talk enough about how [this] corruption plays in slow and unreliable bus service,” said Danny Pearlstein of Riders Alliance. “It’s not just the amount of traffic on the street or individuals’ choices on how they get around. It’s an entitled elite taking more of our public space than they deserve.”

It’s unclear why Mayor Mamdani gave Miranda the boot, but he faced other allegations of corruption while in office. In 2024, city investigators reportedly found tens of thousands of dollars in cash in Sheriff’s Office safes — money apparently collected during raids on pot shops.

The deputy sheriff’s union accused him of creating a “hostile work environment,” and investigators briefly shuttered the office’s training program after finding that firearm instructors were not certified with the state.

Miranda’s office could have been playing a bigger role in removing ghost cars from the street, but it did not appear to take the issue seriously.

Last October, it called the overnight towing of a mere 53 vehicles — a fraction of the 38,000 towed by the city since 2022 — its “ghost car crackdown.”

Some city employees get city-sanctioned accountability shields in the form of genuine parking placards. These officials are only supposed to use the placard assigned to them, and only for parking while on official city business, but, in fact, they use them for their own personal convenience.

A 2024 report by the Department of Investigation found that there are more than 100,000 parking placards in circulation among city employees. The report called on city officials to “phase out the use of physical permits.”

The NYPD said it has not given any placards to the Sheriff’s Office this year, adding that its traffic agents can “verify the validity of a placard in the field.”

The Department of Finance, which manages the Sheriff’s Office, did not respond to requests for comment.

Miranda did not respond to a message from Streetsblog sent to his former campaign email.