The NYPD’s top cop says his department is ready to be led by a woman, but two former female chiefs say you’d never know it by the way he treated them just last year.
“We didn’t get a walkout — we got thrown out,” former NYPD Chief of Personnel Diana Pizzuti told The Post, referring to the department’s traditional sendoff for outgoing higher-ups.
Pizzuti and fellow former three-star chief Joanne Jaffe — who have 74 years with the department between them — have filed discrimination complaints against the NYPD over their abrupt and unceremonious January 2018 ouster at the hands of Police Commissioner James O’Neill.
In an exclusive interview with The Post earlier this month, O’Neill had said he’d like to see one of the department’s “really great women leaders” fill his shoes when he steps down — a claim that Pizzuti and Jaffe scoffed at in their own sit-down with the paper.
“The article sparked something in us,” said Pizzuti, 60. “How dare [O’Neill] say that the department is ready for a female leader when there have been female leaders and there continue to be female leaders?”
Pizzuti and former Chief of Community Affairs Jaffe, 61, said they were the department’s only female three-star chiefs when O’Neill called them into his 1 Police Plaza office and told them to clean out their desks within the week.
Offered no explanation or alternative assignments, Pizzuti and Jaffe were among four experienced brass — including both women and men — abruptly kicked to the curb as O’Neill shuffled the department’s upper ranks, they said.
As commissioner, O’Neill has the right to change the posts of appointed staffers, including chiefs, at his discretion.
“There’s a disingenuous ethic to it,” Jaffe said of O’Neill’s stated support of a female taking the helm.
“The mayor, him, they’re ‘at the forefront’ of diversifying in this #MeToo movement that’s across the country,’’ but “why don’t we talk about all the sexism and racism in the department that we were addressing two years ago?”
When Jaffe made history in 2003 as the department’s first-ever female three-star chief overseeing Housing, only 6 percent of captains, 8 percent of lieutenants and 11 percent of sergeants were women, department statistics show.
By 2017, the first full year of O’Neill’s tenure as commissioner, those numbers had risen to, respectively, 9, 11 and 17 percent — but Jaffe still saw plenty of discrimination worth speaking out against, she said.
In October 2017, she complained that the only two female investigators she saw working the scene of the bloody Lower Manhattan bike-path terror attack were assigned to menial tasks such as note-taking, Jaffe said.
Two months later, while working the Port Authority bus terminal bombing, Jaffe again saw two uniformed female officers effectively sitting on the sidelines, “assigned to check people in … while the ‘men’ did the work,” says her discrimination claim, filed with both the city and the state.
One month later, she was fired, Jaffe said.
“I loved the department. It was such an honor to serve the residents of this city and to touch lives,” she said, adding that getting fired “was like being kicked to the ground.”
Said Pizzuti, “There was no video of us. There was no get-together. There were no comments from anybody.”
Jaffe speculated that, while O’Neill talks a big game, he’s threatened by more experienced hands sharing the wheel with him.
“O’Neill, every time he speaks, he needs to say how much time he’s had on the job,” Jaffe said. “That’s an insecurity.”
The former top officer — the adoptive mother of the little girl who was the lone survivor of Brooklyn’s infamous 1984 Palm Sunday Massacre, a case Jaffe worked — joined the department in 1979, or four years before her former boss.
The NYPD initially declined to comment on the discrimination claims, which the women’s lawyer, Louis La Pietra, said they’re willing to take to court.
After The Post published the story online, an NYPD spokesperson called the claims “baseless” and said “there are many female leaders who hold senior positions on the executive staff.”
Since Jaffe and Pizzuti were removed, the NYPD has elevated three younger women to become three-star chiefs, including Jaffe’s replacement, Chief Nilda Hofmann, a department source said.
The NYPD also has several non-uniformed women in leadership positions, the insider said.
But O’Neill “dismissed the only two female leaders who preceded him, the two women who achieved the highest ranks of the department,” Pizzuti said, referring to herself and Jaffe.
“I think the commissioner is not so much looking for leaders but followers,” she said. “People who will maintain rather than innovate.”
Additional reporting by Tina Moore and Aaron Feis