NYPD fires internal Web site founder
BY SEAN GARDINER AND DARYL KHAN, NY NewsDay, July 11, 2005

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The NYPD has fired the founder of the popular insider-dish Web site, NYPD Rant, voiding his resignation agreement after officials say he violated it.

For years "The Rant" has drawn the ire of the police department's brass.

Founded by 18-year NYPD veteran Edward Polstein, the message board can be at turns racist, raunchy, misogynistic and comical. But its postings also offer unedited, first-hand accounts of what goes on behind the scenes in the NYPD, as well as scathing criticisms of officials such as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, regularly referred to as "Popeye."

Polstein, 43, was found guilty last year at a departmental trial on charges that the Web site was "discourteous to ranking members of the NYPD," that he used the NYPD logo on it without authorization and that he described a self-initiated security test (involving an inert grenade) on police headquarters.

Rather than be fired, he accepted an offer to resign. The resignation agreement stipulated that he never sue or attempt to gain reinstatement to the police department.

It also awarded him $23,000 in pension, less than half of what he would have received had he has 20 years on the force. With a wife and three young children at his Deer Park home, Polstein needed the money and especially the medical insurance so he took the deal in October, his lawyer, Jeffrey Goldberg, previously told Newsday.

Then earlier this summer, the NYPD's medical board recommended that Polstein should be eligible for a full disability pension due to a line-of-duty hand injury that required surgery. The pension would have enabled Polstein to collect three-quarters of his pay, about $60,000 a year, tax free, according to a statement posted under his screen name on "The Rant".

But then an official from the police department's Advocate's Office, which prosecutes police disciplinary cases, told Polstein that his attempt to obtain a disability pension violated his resignation agreement and warned that if he didn't rescind his pension application he'd be fired.

On July 5 Polstein refused to give up his disability pension, contending that the agreement did not say that he could not apply for a disability pension. He was then terminated.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the firing came after Polstein violated his resignation agreement, which had been offered as a lesser punishment in the first place.

According to Browne, last July Assistant Deputy Commissioner for Trials Michael D. Sarner reccomended last July that "The Rant" founder be fired immediately after Nazi symbols appeared on the site.

"The Respondent's use of the Department's logos suggest that the Department had given its imprimatur to his 'rants' which is especially troblesome in light of his use of Nazi iconography," Sarner said. He continued: "More disconcerting, and potentially dangerous as well considering the climate of the times, was the respondent's publication of the Department's security shortcomings, which exceeded the recklessness of the test itself and manifested such poor judgement that, together with his lack of remorse, calls into question his fitness to remain in the Department... ."

Kelly, seeing Polstein's 18 years on the job, offered him the chance to resign, Brown said.

"He wanted to give him another way out," Browne said.

But once Polstein pursued an alternative route for his compensation by applying for a disability pension, he made the contract null and void, Browne said.

"Essentially he violated the agreement, the contract, so the original judgement of dismissal was imposed," Browne said. Polstein's lawyer, Goldberg, told Newsday two weeks ago that if Polstein was fired they would contemplate bringing a lawsuit against Kelly and the police department, possibly invoking laws that protect "whistle blowers."

Goldberg declined to make Polstein available for an interview yesterday.

But in a recent posting, Polstein, under his screem name explained the reason why he started the site.

"I would rant about all the corruption, physical, and mental abuse cops have to deal with from Commissioner Kelly down to their immediate supervisor. Baring the political satire everything on this site was TRUE... .Commissioner Raymond Kelly did not like this web site. Why? Because it became a whistle blowers site. A tell all of the NYPD."
Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.