NYPD cop facing discipline for living in New Jersey points up quirks of NYC residency rules

A veteran NYPD officer who’s already been disciplined twice for living in New Jersey may again be in trouble for choosing the wrong suburb to live in.

Officer Pierre WIlkenson , a 14-year veteran assigned to the Times Square Unit is under investigation, is accused of living in the Garden State, according to police sources. He’s still on probation from previous discipline over the same issue, though he says he only stays with his family on his days off.

The issue isn’t that NYPD cops can’t live outside the city. It’s about location.

His place in East Brunswick is 35 miles from Times Square, substantially closer than cops who might live on the East end of Long Island or the northern reaches of Orange County. Wilkenson’s problem is he’s beyond the borders of the Empire State – an in-state residency requirement police sources say is designed, at least in part, to make sure tax dollars spent on goods and services stay in New York. NYPD officers by law can only live in the five boroughs, on Long Island and in Westchester, Rockland, Orange and Putnam counties.

Patrick Hendry, president of the city’s largest police union, the Police Benevolent Association, said that “instead of hassling cops over their living arrangements” the NYPD should focus on its inability to keep cops from leaving for other police departments.

“Cops are so overworked right now that they hardly ever get time at home with their families, no matter where home is,” Hendry said. “Many cops have stopped making the commute altogether because they’ve taken jobs with other police departments that offer better benefits and a better quality of life.”

The question before investigators in Wilkenon’s case is how much time he spends in New Jersey, where his wife and two children live.

“I’m only there when I have days off,” he said. “I’m not there all the time. I’m doing everything by the book.”

But two police sources told the Daily News the Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating whether Wilkenson effectively  lives there and only occasionally stays at his other home in East Flatbush. According to NYPD documents , he twice was accused of the same infraction — and both times was penalized.

Last Oct. 2023, he plead guilty in an administrative proceeding to living elsewhere between March 7, 2022 and Feb. 16, 2023. An NYPD judge, Anne Stone, recommended he lose 30 paid vacation days — though she acknowledged the “shame” he said he felt and “found his contrition to be sincere.” Commissioner Edward Caban upped the penalty to 50 days and placed Wilkneson on dismissal probation , meaning he could be fired for any infraction within one year of his plea. That probation expires next month.

The documents note that Wilkenson had already run afoul of the department on te same issue pleading guilty in September 2022 and losing 30 vacation days for living full-time in New Jersey — 42 miles from his two-family Brooklyn home — between Nov. 2018 and March 2022.

Wilkenson outlined a number of reasons for moving his family to New Jersey.

In an interview with the News, he spoke about the schools in Brooklyn, a bad tenant and said a man was shot near his home several years ago. According to documents in one of the previous cases, his wife is a full-time nurse, and most of his family is in New Jersey, “which makes finding child care in Brooklyn challenging.” He also listed in the documents the better quality of schools in East Brunswick compared to Brooklyn.

As a landlord, he also said, he was having a problem with a second-floor tenant in his Brooklyn home. The tenant had stopped paying rent for 11 months — and it took Wilkenson another eight months to evict him. The cost, he said, forced him to rent out a room in his own first-floor apartment. The stress drove him to New Jersey, the documents from one of the previous cases said, though he said he said he returned to Brooklyn after the eviction was completed.

In recent years, a number of elected officials and activists have called for the city to require all cops to live in the five boroughs, believing it would make for a police force more attuned to the city’s residents. Mayor Adams in the first month of his administration called the suggestion a “ good idea.”

But police unions have said any such move would have to be met with higher salaries to offset the higher cost of living in the city. About 48% of cops currently live in the city.