Mount Vernon’s Deputy Commissioner for Police Reform Is Accused of Driving the Getaway Car in Her Son’s Gang Shooting. Democrats Called It “Unrelated to Her Duties.”
- $138,219 Jennifer Lackard's annual salary as Mount Vernon's Deputy Commissioner of Wellness/Public Safety Reform before she was fired — NY Post, via Fox News/1010 WCSI, Aug. 4, 2026
- 3 Lackard family members — Jennifer, husband James, son Chase — indicted together on 2nd-degree attempted murder and related counts — CBS News New York
- 8% the share of Mount Vernon officers who faced discipline for misconduct, per DOJ's Dec. 2024 pattern-or-practice findings — The Newshouse (Newhouse School)
- 3rd Mount Vernon PD officer or official charged with a crime in 2026 alone, after two earlier indictments/charges this year — Black Westchester Magazine
- $75,000 bail set for Jennifer Lackard at her Bronx arraignment; her husband James was held on $150,000 cash / $300,000 bond — CBS News New York; ABC7 New York
Jennifer Lackard, Mount Vernon’s deputy commissioner overseeing police-reform and community-wellness efforts, held a job that existed to make the department more accountable. On Aug. 4, 2026, NYPD detectives arrested her and charged her with 2nd-degree attempted murder — accused of serving as the getaway driver after her 20-year-old son allegedly fired a gun multiple times at a rival gang member behind the Bronx Hall of Justice.
Her husband, James Lackard, and their son, Chase, were charged alongside her. All three have pleaded not guilty and are presumed innocent as their cases proceed through a Bronx grand jury indictment. Mount Vernon fired Jennifer Lackard the same day, and the city’s official statement said the allegations “are unrelated to her duties” on the police force she was paid to help reform.
The case lands inside a Mount Vernon Police Department already under a documented pattern of federal scrutiny and officer misconduct — in a majority-Black city run entirely by Democrats, where the officials now fielding questions about how someone with no law-enforcement background ended up overseeing reform are the same officials who hired her.
Prosecutors say the shooting happened around 11:57 a.m. on June 29, 2026, behind the Bronx Hall of Justice, when Chase Lackard fired a semiautomatic handgun multiple times from the rear driver’s-side window of the family’s car at a group that included a reputed member of the rival “Sex Money Murder” crew. No one was struck. Bronx Assistant District Attorney Keturah Ladd described what happened next in court:
“The rear drivers side window is rolled down and numerous shots are discharged from that window. We then observed the father who was driving, James Lackard, during the time of the shooting, change seats with Jennifer Lackard, who then gets into the driver's seat.”
Keturah Ladd, Bronx Assistant District Attorney, via Fox 5 New York
Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark (D) announced the indictment covering all three defendants — more than a dozen counts including 2nd-degree attempted murder, attempted assault, criminal weapons possession, conspiracy, and reckless endangerment — and did not mince words about who was accused of getting behind the wheel:
“These defendants allegedly conspired with each other to drive from their Bronx residence to the Hall of Justice for the purpose of shooting someone. Despite multiple shots being fired, thankfully no one was hit. It is stunning that this public official would jeopardize her position and reputation to be involved in this alleged conspiracy.”
Darcel Clark (D), Bronx District Attorney
Jennifer Lackard had no prior police-department or sworn law-enforcement experience when Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard (D) — Mount Vernon’s first woman and first Black woman elected mayor — appointed her in 2020, during the George Floyd protests, into a newly created oversight role: Deputy Commissioner of Wellness within the department’s reform structure. Fox News reported that Lackard and Patterson-Howard are sorority sisters in Delta Sigma Theta, a detail drawn from court records. On the day of the arrest, the city terminated her employment and issued this statement:
“The allegations are unrelated to her duties with the Mount Vernon Police Department and do not stem from any conduct associated with the Department or the performance of her official responsibilities,” the city said, per ABC7, CBS New York, and Fox 5 NY. What the statement didn’t address: whether a role created specifically to reform the department’s conduct should have required law-enforcement experience, or how the city’s background check handled a household with a spouse whose prior record was reportedly disclosed during Lackard’s own vetting.
Jennifer Lackard, 49, served as deputy commissioner of wellness in the community affairs division of the Mount Vernon Police Department.
Former NYPD Lieutenant Darrin Porcher put the underlying question plainly to CBS New York: “Was this vetting process something that was successful?” Mount Vernon has defended its background-check procedures but has not detailed what, if anything, James Lackard’s disclosed record changed about the outcome.
The Lackard case did not land on a clean department. In December 2024, the Justice Department released findings from a civil-rights investigation into MVPD, concluding there was reasonable cause to believe the department engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional conduct — systematic strip and body-cavity searches of nearly every person arrested, racial profiling, excessive force, and unlawful arrests. Only 8 percent of officers faced discipline for misconduct, DOJ found. The Trump DOJ ended that oversight in May 2025, before any consent decree was put in place.
The pattern kept running through 2026. Detective Kyren Braunskill was indicted in March, accused of selling guns to a Long Island gang. Officer Brandon Hunter-Carney was charged with grand larceny in April over an alleged $800,000 pre-employment check theft, and Officer Frank Lucadamo was suspended amid stalking allegations in Florida the same month. Days before Lackard’s arrest, state police were called in after MVPD officers shot and critically wounded a 58-year-old man armed with knives during a mental-health standoff.
Jennifer Lackard was arraigned and pleaded not guilty; she is held on $75,000 bail with a court date set for September 2026. Chase Lackard pleaded not guilty in Bronx Criminal Court. James Lackard surrendered to NYPD days after the initial arrests and is held on $150,000 cash bail or a $300,000 bond. No trial date has been reported. All three remain presumed innocent, and this piece treats the allegations against them as exactly that — allegations, not established fact.
The arrest drew national attention beyond local Westchester and Bronx coverage, amplified widely on social media as a story about institutional failure rather than an ordinary crime blotter item:
WILD: Mount Vernon, NY Deputy Police Commissioner Jennifer Lackard ARRESTED for allegedly being the GETAWAY DRIVER for her gang member son after a shooting
Mount Vernon’s government is entirely Democratic, and the accountability so far has come from inside that structure, not outside it. City Councilman André Wallace, chairman of the Public Safety & Codes Committee, published a public letter calling the arrest part of a pattern demanding systemic reform: “Our city has experienced a series of events in recent weeks that should concern every resident… The people of Mount Vernon deserve a government they can believe in.” Damon K. Jones, the New York representative for Blacks in Law Enforcement of America and publisher of Black Westchester Magazine, went further, publicly calling on Mayor Patterson-Howard to accept responsibility for what he called “a growing pattern of leadership failures” — and correcting the mayor’s office’s own public account of who hired Lackard in the first place.
Shawyn Patterson-Howard (D), Mayor of Mount Vernon since 2019 — her administration created Lackard’s reform-oversight role and hired her in 2020; the city’s statement on the arrest called the allegations “unrelated to her duties” without addressing the department’s broader 2026 misconduct record.
Glenn Scott, Mount Vernon Police Commissioner (party not established in available reporting) — Black Westchester reported the mayor’s office incorrectly credited him as the one who hired Lackard.
André Wallace, City Councilman, Chairman of the Public Safety & Codes Committee — publicly called for reform following the arrest; his current party registration was not conclusively established in available reporting.
Jennifer Lackard, James Lackard, and Chase Lackard have all pleaded not guilty and are presumed innocent. What is documented independent of the verdict: a deputy commissioner hired in 2020 specifically to help reform Mount Vernon’s police department, with no prior law-enforcement background, is now charged alongside her husband and son in a Bronx gang shooting — inside a department the DOJ found disciplined only 8 percent of misconduct before federal oversight ended in May 2025, and that has produced at least two other officer indictments/charges in 2026 alone, plus a third officer suspended amid separate misconduct allegations. Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard (D) called the case “unrelated” to Lackard’s duties. Her own city councilman and Black law-enforcement advocates say the pattern says otherwise.
