Michael Lin left his New York State Police patrol post during an overnight shift in August 2024, drove his personal car across state lines, visited a strip club in New Jersey and was arrested there for assaulting his girlfriend. More than a year later, after being fired and permanently barred from ever working as a police officer in New York again, Lin is now employed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as an engineer on PATH trains.
Lin skipped his assigned patrol shift with the State Police’s bridges and tunnels unit that night, according to Streetsblog New York City, which first reported his unauthorized trip to New Jersey. He drove over the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge while evading the toll, according to a separate Streetsblog investigation, which reported that he headed to the Garden State in his personal car, went to a strip club and was arrested for assault. Investigators believed a plastic cover on his rear license plate helped him dodge tolls on trips to and from New Jersey, that same reporting found.
New Jersey police arrested Lin for simple assault after he showed them his State Police badge, the outlet’s earlier report states. He was not prosecuted after his girlfriend declined to press charges, and New Jersey authorities ultimately dropped the case, according to Streetsblog’s later reporting on his Port Authority hiring.
A Background Check That Missed the Red Flags
Lin applied to the Port Authority in April 2025, while he was still a New York State Police employee and the internal investigation into his conduct was ongoing. As part of its background check, the Port Authority asked the State Police about Lin’s employment status, and the State Police told the agency he was an active trooper without disclosing his arrest or the internal affairs investigation underway, per the reporting.
State Police spokesperson Beau Duffy said the agency followed New York state law in how it handled the inquiry. Duffy told the outlet the Port Authority never actually requested Lin’s disciplinary records, and said that even if it had, the case could not have been disclosed without Lin’s authorization because it was still pending at the time. Lin went on to clear the Port Authority’s background check and was fired by the State Police in September 2025, then began working weeks later as an engineer on PATH trains, the same reporting states.
Streetsblog obtained a recent Port Authority pay stub listing Lin’s address as a residential property in Union City, New Jersey. Separately, investigators had found evidence that Lin lied about living in a sparsely furnished Manhattan apartment and appeared to actually live in New Jersey with his wife and children, according to the outlet’s earlier report.
Fallout Inside the Bridges and Tunnels Unit
Lin’s arrest triggered a broader internal investigation into the State Police’s bridges and tunnels unit, the earlier Streetsblog report found. That investigation identified almost three dozen shifts — including 16 overtime shifts — in which officers in the unit failed to do their jobs. Multiple troopers told investigators they spent hours of paid time napping in parking lots or scrolling their phones, and some troopers went entire shifts without reporting any interactions with the public, per that reporting.```
Lin was the only trooper among those investigated who left New York State during a shift or was arrested by another police agency while on duty, the outlet reported. He also admitted to investigators that he had sex with a woman in his car during a shift the day before his New Jersey arrest, according to the outlet’s prior reporting. Despite the scope of the misconduct uncovered, the State Police retained eight of the nine troopers who were found to have repeatedly neglected their duties — Lin was the exception. Trooper Marc Vixama, in a separate incident documented in the same investigation, spent about three hours of on-duty time at his girlfriend’s apartment in East Harlem the night Lin was arrested.
Lin’s Lawsuit and the State’s Response
Duffy said Lin’s firing stemmed from his own egregious misconduct. Lin has since sued the State Police over his termination and alleges racial discrimination within the department. His attorney, Eric Sanders, said Lin has moved forward professionally following his termination, and that his present employment does not alter the claims asserted in the lawsuit. Sanders also alleged fundamental inaccuracies in Streetsblog’s prior reporting without specifying them. The Port Authority declined to comment on Lin’s hiring.
A Pattern Playing Out Statewide
Lin’s case lands amid wider reporting on gaps in how New York tracks officers who are fired or decertified. New York has no statewide database of police employment or misconduct records, making it impossible to know how many so-called wandering officers remain working in the state, according to New York Focus. A joint investigation by thenewshouse.com found that New York’s decertification process has repeatedly failed to keep some officers from returning to law enforcement jobs elsewhere.
Central Current reported that journalists identified 12 cases of police and peace officers who were decertified but later retained their jobs or were rehired in law enforcement, while New York Focus’s earlier reporting found that 27 former officers decertified by state regulators were later rehired by another department or public safety agency. A Yale Law Journal study by Ben Grunwald and John Rappaport, cited by the Washington Post, coined the term “wandering officers” for law enforcement personnel fired by one agency and rehired by another.
Other cases illustrate the same pattern. Ryan Zarnowski was fired by the Oswego County Sheriff’s Office after supervisors documented performance problems and misconduct, and he had previously been fired by Syracuse University’s Department of Public Safety in 2021 after 17 years there before later being decertified, according to thenewshouse.com’s reporting. Joe O’Connell resigned from three separate police departments while under suspicion of sexual misconduct each time, per records obtained by New York Focus and MuckRock. By contrast, New York Focus noted that Oregon makes police decertifications final, while Arizona and Connecticut publicly publish the names and offenses of decertified officers — practices New York does not share.
New York’s 2021 Professional Policing Act created statewide reporting requirements for when an officer stops serving and mandated decertification when an officer is removed for cause, according to the bill page maintained by the New York State Senate. Lin’s case shows how a trooper permanently barred from policing in New York was still able to land a government job just weeks after his firing, with the gap in record-sharing at the center of how it happened.
