Tables turn on cheating Boston ticket writer

It's been said that guardians make the best thieves, but consider this one.

A city parking-ticket writer, one of the blue-jacketed officers sworn to uphold Boston's parking rules, according to city officials, last week discovered a ticket on her car, a citation for parking in a resident-parking zone without a sticker.

The officer marched into work the next day, ticket in hand, and told her boss that she, in fact, had a resident sticker and wanted the ticket cleared.

Her supervisor went outside to have a look. Sure enough, there was the sticker, properly mounted in the right rear window of the officer's car. But it didn't look right. It was severely faded, and when the supervisor ran the sticker's serial number through city computers, it drew up someone else's name. A disciplinary hearing was called.

Confronted by officials at the hearing on Tuesday, the officer -- whose name was not released -- began to confess. After originally saying she'd found the sticker in the street, city officials said, she told her questioners that she actually procured it from someone outside an East Boston laundromat who asked, ``Do you want to buy a hot sticker?"

The officer has been suspended without pay for five days and faces possible termination, pending an investigation.

Police are now trying to determine whether the sticker was stolen from another driver or if it is counterfeit, possibly suggesting a larger parking sticker racket.

``I hope that this is just an isolated incident," said Thomas J. Tinlin, the city's acting transportation commissioner, who said the sticker was sent to a company in Arkansas to determine its validity.

The incident has enraged some of the officer's co-workers, who deal almost daily with drivers trying to get out of tickets, Tinlin said. It has also caused worries about how it might play among the parking public.

``This should in no way reflect on the hard work and dedication of all of our employees who are on the streets everyday," Tinlin said.

For her part, the officer told Tinlin she was sorry. And with words no doubt uttered by thousands of other motorists caught by Boston's parking division, Tinlin said she explained that the whole matter was a ``lapse in judgment."

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.