The embattled mayor of Mount Vernon whose handpicked deputy police commissioner was recently charged with attempted murder also broke federal election law, according to the US Office of Special Counsel.
Democratic Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard violated the Hatch Act when she sent campaign mailers stamped as an “important message” from the city in her push to boost a slate of her hand-picked candidates in the June 2025 Democratic primaries, federal investigators determined.
The Hatch Act is a federal law first established in 1939 that bars state and local officials whose jobs are bankrolled in part by federal dollars from using the power of their office to try to sway an election.
“The language of these campaign mailers reasonably would lead residents to believe they contained official business from their mayor, compelling them to open the envelopes when they might not otherwise do so,” wrote Erica Hamrick, deputy chief of the OSC’s Hatch Act Unit, in the department’s ruling, which was obtained by The Post.
Patterson-Howard endorsed five candidates for comptroller, city council and city judge in the mailer and even included a sample ballot for residents in the Westchester County enclave to “cut and take with you to vote,” according to Samuel Rivers, the Mount Vernon activist who filed the complaint against her with the feds.
“Look at the letter — the federal government has now confirmed what residents suspected when they opened that envelope: The mayor used the power of her office to try to choose their representatives for them,” Rivers said — calling for the mayor’s resignation.
But the feds only hit Patterson-Howard with a slap on the wrist and issued her a simple warning letter and “advised that if in the future she engages in prohibited political activity, OSC would consider such activity to be a willful and knowing violation of the law.”
Still, the federal rebuke is the latest black eye for Patterson-Howard, who recently came under fire when her hand-picked deputy police commissioner, Jennifer Lackard, was charged with attempted murder for allegedly chaperoning her gang-banging son to a botched drive-by shooting outside a Bronx courthouse.
James Lackard, 47, the deputy commissioner’s drug-peddling, ex-con husband who was also allegedly in the car during the drive-by, was on the run from police before turning himself in a few days after the shooting, according to police.
Patterson-Howard — who made history in 2019 as the first woman elected mayor in Mount Vernon — had hired Lackard in 2020 to lead the police department’s Wellness Unit, a $125,000-a-year job reportedly created for her, despite her having no real law-enforcement experience.
The mayor has defended the hire, insisting Lackard passed a “rigorous background check.” Patterson-Howard did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Additional reporting by Mark Lungariello
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