Lee Zeldin Caravan Featured Thin Blue Line Flags, Vehicles With Hundreds of Speeding Tickets

On Sunday afternoon, a group of Lee Zeldin supporters grabbed their Thin Blue Line flags, hopped in their vehicles that have accrued dozens of speeding violations, and drove through the streets of Brooklyn to rally for a candidate whose campaign has almost exclusively centered public safety and the notion that laws are constantly being broken without any repercussions. 

A public records search of the license plates of the first four vehicles in the caravan, as seen in this video from a local news videographer, yields a total of 206 traffic violations, including 105 moving violations, like speeding through a school zone and running a red light.

The giant Ford pickup truck with the Thin Blue Line flag pictured above: 27 tickets in 2021 and 2022, including 8 school zone tickets and 1 red light ticket, according to HowsMyDrivingNY.

Brooklyn Councilmember Inna Vernikov, the Zeldin caravan's "special guest," rode shotgun in her Mini Cooper convertible (seen below) with 57 traffic tickets since 2020, including 26 school zone tickets, according to public records. Thirteen of those tickets were issued after the NY Post wrote about her driving record last October, most recent came on October 25. (Vernikov's office has not returned our request for comment on her driving record or the driving records of her fellow attendees.)

"New Yorkers are tired of speed cameras whose goal is to take away more of our hard earned money," Vernikov, a Republican, told the Post last year. To get a speeding ticket from a school zone camera, you have to be traveling at least 11 miles over the speed limit, so 36 MPH in a 25 MPH zone.

"We're gonna take the city back, we're gonna elect Lee Zeldin," a man driving a Honda minivan with New Jersey plates behind Vernikov tells the videographer. That vehicle has 100 violations since 2019, including 68 moving violations—five red light tickets, and 63 school zone speeding tickets, according to a records search.

Because this car accrued more than 15 speeding violations in a calendar year (26 from August 2020 to August 2021) it would have been eligible for towing or booting, and the driver would have had to take a class, per a city law signed in 2020 that is still not really being enforced.

The final vehicle in the four-car sample, a white Honda SUV, has a mere 22 traffic violations since 2021, two of them speeding tickets. 

Traffic deaths in New York City are still 15 percent higher than they were before the pandemic began—207 people have been killed on city streets so far this year.

A Hell Gate reporter witnessed the caravan start their journey at Floyd Bennett Field with no more than 20 cars, but at some point, the group appears to have picked up some interesting looking vehicles without any front license plates.