New York City traffic is already a battle royale before you add pretend cops to the mix. But that is exactly what Brooklyn mom Maritza says happened to her when a Ford Explorer sporting emergency lights and a PA system signaled her to pull over last month. Only later did she discover the SUV wasn’t an NYPD vehicle at all, and it didn’t belong to a real police officer.
Disco Lights Meet the Brooklyn Bridge
The drama unfolded during a drive from Staten Island to Brooklyn, with Maritza’s kids snoozing in the back of her Wagoneer. She first noticed the mysterious black Explorer up ahead flicking its emergency lights on and off like a disco DJ with a power problem. According to her account, the driver would zap the lights at will, blinking them on when other cars cut him off, then off again when he wanted to dart forward. Predictably, other drivers obediently moved aside every time those lights blinked.
Once the convoy neared the Brooklyn Bridge, where a carpool lane briefly opens up for merging traffic, things got truly bizarre. The Explorer suddenly braked, lit up its lights and then boomed over the PA system demanding that Maritza pull to the side. She did just that, figuring it was a routine traffic stop. That’s when reality hit: the “officer” was a man in his late 50s or 60s, sporting glasses and an accent, not exactly the uniformed NYPD officer she expected.
Maritza asked what many of us would ask in that moment: “Are you even a cop?” His response, if you can call it one, was a lot of yelling and blaming her for being too close in traffic. Maritza’s kids were startled awake in the chaos, turning an ordinary afternoon drive into a stress test no one signed up for.
The Perils of Fake Lights
Dashcam footage of the encounter has been shared online and viewed hundreds of thousands of times. It was a rare viral moment born not from a fluffy cat or a celebrity sneeze, but from a traffic scenario that could have turned unsafe.
And when commenters weighed in, the story got even stranger. Some claimed the vehicle resembled units used by Hatzolah. Hatzolah is a volunteer emergency medical service in Jewish communities that sometimes equips its vehicles with lights and sirens. But the real problem, according to those commentators, was how some drivers use emergency gear outside legitimate calls…