After years of speculation and observation, residents of a leafy section of Brooklyn managed to discover that a veteran New York police officer was behind a string of bizarre littering incidents on a street in Greenpoint.
“Now, I’m sure we all have random papers in our weekly recycling bin,” one resident wrote on the local site Greenpointers. “But I need to stress to those who have yet to experience this phenomenon with their own eyes the SHEER VOLUME of papers floating down the street. It looks like the work of someone with an enormous collection of old books who spends their weekend tearing apart pages before scattering them in the wind.”
Residents told Gothamist that for years on end, they would wake to find find pile after pile of meticulously sliced book pages strewn across Noble Street, ranging from selections of the Bible to 1970s porn magazines to a book on Greco-Roman art.
“Sometimes things would be underlined or highlighted on the pages, and we would try to figure out if there was a message,” former block association president Molly FitzSimons told the outlet. “We really could not imagine who would do this … It was just this shadowy mystery.”
“It made me just feel compassion for this person who clearly was processing something difficult.”
Others didn’t take so kindly to the document dumps.
Neighbours began actively trying to catch the person they dubbed the “book bandit,” with one resident deploying their surveillance camera to the effort, and another arranging for a private security firm to stake out the street in the hopes of catching the serial litterer.
Security footage obtained by WNYC shows the man in action, driving slowly in the dark and dumping an armful of paper into the road.
Eventually, the citizen efforts helped yield a licence plate number, prompting the NYPD to investigate Sergeant John Trzcinski, a veteran officer who joined the force in 1994 and earned $177,516, according to public records.
When asked about the littering allegations, the NYPD directed The Independent to a database of disciplinary actions, which showed Sergeant Trzcinski was disciplined on 30 May for littering, losing a vacation day.
The Independent has contacted the officer and the police union for comment.
The city Department of Sanitation confirmed to Gothamist that Sergeant Trzcinski, who lives in Long Island, hasn’t been fined for littering or illegal dumping.
Litterers need to be caught in the act by police or sanitation personnel, and the bundles of papers Sergeant Trzcinski left in the street weren’t large enough to qualify as illegal dumping.
Sergeant Trzcinski has been awarded multiple awards for police service, and hasn’t been previously disciplined, according to public records.
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