Scofflaws!

Unless I’m missing something here, this former parking ticket judge seems sort of smart, is all:

A former judge at the city’s Parking Violations Bureau who thought he could beat the system got his law license suspended yesterday for trying to evade $12,000 in parking tickets.

Attorney Glenn Caldwell was barred from practice for the next three years by a state appeals court that found his behavior “appalling.”

The panel of judges said Caldwell, 56, must pay the price for attempting to beat the tickets by using an insider’s knowledge of the system.

“This was not an instance of a mere ‘error of judgment,'” the panel said. “But rather persistent misconduct by a former judicial officer.”

Caldwell, who presided over thousands of cases as an administrative law judge between 1991 to 1995, amassed 167 of his own parking tickets after he left.

Often, he parked illegally near courthouses — where he was representing other scofflaws as a ticket broker.

According to a board investigation, Caldwell kept his expired administrative law judge identification card on the dashboard, “ostensibly to discourage a traffic agent from issuing a summons to the vehicle,” the court found.

He also slyly ordered vanity license plates for two family cars, “intentionally requesting a combination of letters and numbers that he knew would provide him with a technical defense to any summons issued to those cars.”

Caldwell’s plate numbers, 4GZ-Z50 and Y50-V26, were often confused for regular plates by ticket agents and cops, a mistake that could be a basis for voiding a summons.

“That [Caldwell] . . . would utilize his expired identification card and his knowledge of the inner workings of the PVB adjudicatory process for his own personal gain, is simply appalling,” the court added.

I mean, the vanity plate thing is just brilliant, and the old ID card — well, what if he was just absent minded and forgot to take it off of his dashboard? But to be barred from practicing law because you’re crafty . . . isn’t that kind of the point?