A New York Police Department sergeant faces possible dismissal from the force after what she claims was a false positive drug test, resulting from a hair being tested that came from her weave.
‘I was shocked,’ Sgt. Tracy Gittens testified on Friday during her department trial, regarding how she felt when she was informed that her random drug test came back positive for marijuana in January 2017, as reported by the New York Daily News.
‘I do not do drugs,’ she said, offering the possible explanation that the real human hair, snipped from her and tested was actually cut from a hair piece she said she was wearing as a ponytail at the time.
NYPD officials, however, said that’s not possible, following a DNA test that Gittens paid for.
NYPD sergeant Tracy Gittens, 43, faces possible dismissal from the force after what she claims was a false positive drug test, resulting from a hair being tested that came from her weave
Gittens, 43, used her own money to foot the bill for a genetic test on the hair sample that tested positive for marijuana.
She hoped that test would prove the drug-infused hair was not hers, but NYPD prosecutors said the results actually showed the hair was a genetic match to either Gittens or a close relative.
‘Unless a maternal relative somehow came in and switched out the samples with her own hair, there is no way this hair could be anyone’s but Sgt. Gittens,’ Department Advocate Office attorney Jeanie Moran said.
Gittens, however, maintained the hair tested did not belong to her.
She said on Friday that following the results in January 2017, she personally paid for a second drug test, also using a hair sample and conducted while she was not wearing the weave.
Gittens said an independent nurse took a sample from the top of her head, rather than the nape of her neck, where the NYPD Medical Services Division official taking the sample for the first random drug test took it from.
Gittens’fate with the NYPD rests in the hands of Police Commissioner James O’Neill, who will have the final say after receiving a recommendation from a Department Trial Commissioner
She also got a urine test and a blood test the very next day after the results came back in January 2017, that the Daily News reported came negative.
‘The (initial) test had to be wrong because I do not do drugs,’ she stand, in her testimony on Friday.
Despite all of this, Gittens was initially suspended for 30 days following the positive pot results.
Now, her fate with the NYPD rests in the hands of Police Commissioner James O’Neill, who will have the final say on her future after receiving a recommendation from a Department Trial Commissioner.
The NYPD has declined to comment on the sentencing of Gittens, citing Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law, which prevents the public disclosure of personnel records of uniformed officers.
DailyMail.com reached out to Gittens on Saturday, in hopes of finding out whether she still had the hair piece she claimed to be responsible for the false positive, but she did not immediately respond to a message seeking additional comment.