The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (12 page)

“Inspections,” a sergeant said with evident disgust. “They pull you over like a perp and you know it’s disrespectful to us, but this is what they’re doing. So inspections is not really our friend. Let’s leave it at that.”

On one particular day, a sergeant spent an entire roll call criticizing his officers for not having whistle holders for their whistles. “That’s unacceptable,” he bellowed. “When I fall down the mine shaft, I’m the only one that’s going to be able to call for help. The rest of you are going to have to fire off your gun, and they’ll give you a CD for that.”

On February 20, Schoolcraft was called to meet with Lieutenant Rafael Mascol to arrange a hearing with Mauriello about his decision to appeal the low evaluation in house. In this conversation, Mascol basically admitted what Schoolcraft had long suspected—that the whole system was completely subjective.

Mascol shuffled papers until he found a document he was looking for, and then he talked about the reality behind the evaluation system, which rated officers from a low of 1 to a high of 5.

“Nobody in this department get a 5, nobody gets a 4.5,” Mascol said. “If anybody read the standards of what a 5 is, nobody could ever get it. I have no time to get to the sergeants to tell them to evaluate their personnel correctly. I’m talking about what a 4 is, what a 4.5, what a 5 is. Because most police officers are just basically meeting standards. They are basically doing what they are told to do. Very few police officers are actually going above and beyond the recommended minimum of competence, you know? Those get a 4. For the most part, most police officers are just meeting standards.”

Another cop wandered by and asked, “Hey, what’s going on with you, Chuck?” The unflattering nickname for Adrian referred to the horror movie
Chucky
. Schoolcraft merely chuckled, going along with the joke.

Mascol then sang along with a line from a song on his radio, “I can’t get enough of your love,” and added, “I was talking with someone about evaluating personnel appropriately by the department standards of what each thing should be and what each person should qualify for, and we’re not even doing it.

“Unfortunately, if we like you, you get a certain thing, if we don’t like you, you get a certain thing as opposed to what the department requires in the performance standards. I have no time to change the entire department mind unfortunately.”

Schoolcraft listened quietly. Then Mascol told him he needed to “improve his activity.”

“How do I improve it?” Schoolcraft asked.

“Maybe answer more radio runs, do more summonses, might write some more reports and stuff, be more proactive out there,” Mascol replied. “If you have trouble seeing activity, maybe we can put you with an officer with high activity who could point it out to you.”

Schoolcraft decided not to sign the document until he spoke to his lawyer.

Then, another officer wandered by and asked, “What’s going on, Chucky?”

“Same old, same old,” Schoolcraft replied.

Mascol’s message was clear: Go along with the program.

His memo book provides a clipped sense of what Schoolcraft was doing during work hours in this period. On February 22, 2009, he started
at 3 p.m. and spent the next eight hours babysitting a prisoner at Brooklyn Central Booking, until the prisoner was released by a judge. He then returned to the precinct and was ordered to take overtime and sent to man the SkyWatch tower at Gates and Garvey. At 2:30 a.m., nearly 12 hours after he started his shift, he wrote in his memo book that he had been “released from forced OT.”

Three days later, he was called to meet with Mauriello about the appeal of his evaluation just before the start of his shift. Prior to the meeting, Schoolcraft talked with his PBA delegate, Raymond Gonzalez, who made a reference to statistics-obsessed Deputy Chief Michael Marino—and a disciplinary case against him. The appeal of the evaluation had been referred to Marino for assessment.

“Fucking steroid Marino is going to look at it, he’s going to look at the evaluation, he’s going to pull all your activity, and he’s going to say what are you fucking kidding me? He’s going to see the same. Knowing him, he’s going to talk a lot of shit. What would you like to see be done?”

“Change this. The officer has been trained,” Schoolcraft said. “I’d like to see documentation of it. I’ll admit it’s been whispered in my ear that I need to write more summonses. But there’s nothing documented.”

“This is based all on activity.”

“If you have Joe Schmo who comes in with a box of donuts every month, then that’s what they’re going to rate you on,” Gonzalez said. “Everyone here has a job to do. Well, let’s see what they want to do,” Gonzalez said.

“There’s no possible way that they can say I’m not doing anything,” Schoolcraft said. “I’m not going to summons a guy for open container for picking cans out of a trash can.”

Schoolcraft and Gonzalez went into Mauriello’s office for the meeting. Eventually six bosses joined them: Captain Lauterborn, Lieutenant De La Fuente, Lieutenant Mascol, Sergeant Stukes, Sergeant Weiss, and Sergeant Cox. Most of the meeting was taken up by the bosses trying to get Schoolcraft to agree to raise his activity and wondering why he had become inactive. Schoolcraft stubbornly resisted.

Schoolcraft asked, “What’s the standard?”

“If you’re out there on the street, we gotta see something,” Mauriello said. “I’m not here to hurt anybody. But you can’t put [these low numbers]
down. Guys in your squad did something and you did nothing. Everybody has to do something. The days of 10,000 extra cops are gone. We’re bare bones. They want everybody to get in the game.”

“I’m contesting that I’m seeing something and not doing anything,” Schoolcraft said. “I’ve taken action on anything I’ve observed, whether a summons, an arrest, or a warn and admonish.”

“The last thing he wants is this to go to Marino,” another boss said. “You’re likely to get kicked out of the command and work in another shithole.”

“No one here is looking to hurt you,” Mauriello said. “The people in the community want active cops. Our job is to make sure Bed-Stuy is safe.”

Mauriello added, “I’ve been a fighter all my life, and I’ve been knocked out numerous times on this job. As a captain, I thought I was never going to get a command. I busted my ass. You got a body blow. Now you’re going to get up off the canvas and fight. When I’m gone, they are going to miss me in the place, all the haters. I never hurt anybody on this job. I didn’t even want to have this conversation.”

Mauriello went on, “With these numbers, Marino will go through the roof. His head will come through the top of Wilson Avenue. He’s going to call me and ask me what the fuck was I doing six months ago that I didn’t put you on paper. We go to CompStat and they want names. They already have the numbers in their computer at headquarters.”

Schoolcraft then angered Mauriello by insisting on appealing and noting that he was going to get a lawyer.

Mauriello said, “When you came in here through the door, you should have said I have a lawyer and I’m gonna do what I gotta do, instead of wasting 45 minutes of us trying to talk to you and show you the results, and this is the way you are going to go out, so you know what, I tried.”

“I appreciate your assistance,” Schoolcraft said sarcastically.

“That’s for when I get the lawsuit, you can spell my name right,” the precinct commander said.

Schoolcraft said, “I’m not going to sue anyone.”

Schoolcraft left the meeting feeling he had been ambushed, in an attempt to intimidate him to drop his appeal and shut up.

Later, Stukes documented the meeting, and his frustration with Schoolcraft was almost pungent. “PO Schoolcraft was counseled in regards
to his low activity and the annual evaluation. He was instructed in the proper performance of his duties in the 81st Precinct and was given the opportunity to find a way to enhance his activity on a steady basis, at which time PO Schoolcraft refused any help!” (The exclamation point was Stukes’s.)

Later that night, their words still ringing in his ears, Schoolcraft helped a guy who needed an ambulance, served family court papers, and responded to a call of a blocked driveway and several other calls. He got home around 1 a.m.

On February 27, he wrote his own appeal of the evaluation, noting that the Patrol Guide “makes no reference to activity levels,” but instead the evaluation was based on bias against him and used other factors besides performance. He also accused Mauriello and Sergeant Stukes of falsifying documentation. He went on to ask for records, including a calculation of the “actual number of hours that Schoolcraft is available for enforcement duty.” This was a shot at the fact that cops were constantly being pulled away from enforcement for various special duties.

One again has to pause and consider this. No officer, at least in the NYPD, did this kind of thing, talking back to the bosses, accusing them of falsifying documentation.

And the screws continued to turn. On March 1, in a monthly activity report, Stukes wrote that Schoolcraft’s work was “unacceptable by NYPD standards.” Mauriello chimed in, “Unacceptable.”

A week later, Adrian’s lawyer, James Brown, sent a formal appeal of the 2008 evaluation to Mauriello. In a letter, Brown argued that the evaluation was wrongly calculated and pointed out that it noted he was good at interacting with the community.

“His overall evaluation fails to correspond to his evident accomplishments as reflected in his strong ratings and the above praise,” Brown wrote.

The letter charged that the evaluation was based on Schoolcraft’s “activity,” or numbers, and pointed out he had been given no set target for activity. Of course, it would be illegal for his bosses to start setting performance numbers, so they would be leery of doing that, but they were doing everything else short of it.

On the evening of March 13, 2009, Schoolcraft was assigned to a foot post on Reid and Bainbridge. While he was talking with another officer,
Sergeant Weiss approached him, according to his memo book, and accused him of being off post.

When Schoolcraft disagreed, Weiss said, “You’re being a wise ass right now. You’re off post because you’re inside a building talking to PO Chan.”

Almost tongue in cheek, Schoolcraft wrote in his memo book, “Sgt. Weiss wouldn’t elaborate on the boundaries of my post when asked. Sgt. Weiss responds with a smirk.”

Weiss then said, “You’re getting a CD for being off post and Chan for unnecessary conversation, and then ordered me back on my post.”

Later in the evening, Weiss took Schoolcraft’s memo book, read the entries, and lost his temper at the account Schoolcraft had placed in it.

From Schoolcraft’s notes: “After reading said copy, Sgt. Weiss lost control yelling while berating and belittling me in front of the 81 desk surrounded by multiple police officers because I disputed his charges that I was off post. Weiss’ public tantrum was not only unprofessional and embarrassing to himself and the NYPD but conduct unbecoming a New York City police sergeant.”

Of course, it was completely out of bounds for a police officer to write critically of a boss in his memo book, which is an official document. And one might think that Schoolcraft was just amusing himself. Far from it. He took his responsibility to document events on his tour seriously. But it didn’t help him with his bosses.

The taking of the memo book meant that from March 13 on, the command was aware that Schoolcraft was documenting events in the precinct that didn’t make his bosses look good.

On March 16, it happened again. This time Lieutenant Caughey and Sergeant Weiss found Schoolcraft off post because he’d left his post to urinate. Once again, they took his memo book and examined it, and told him they would have to watch him more closely. Schoolcraft felt he was being harassed, and so he went on his police radio and demanded that the duty captain respond to his location. A radio call of this sort was usually only used for a major incident, and it caused a huge reaction on the other end.

“The radio went crazy,” Schoolcraft recalled. “In my activity log, I was documenting the retaliation, and they were punishing guys [other officers] I talked to. They were building a paper trail.”

Schoolcraft claimed he was later told by another police officer that a sergeant was saying he would have to have Adrian “psyched,” which meant to get him labeled a psychiatric case.

The responding captain, Theodore Lauterborn, arrived and angrily ordered Schoolcraft back to the precinct. At the time second in command to Mauriello, Lauterborn also served as a duty captain for the entire Brooklyn North Command. His personnel records contained only minor black marks. He was cleared of two missing property cases, two excessive force cases, and several other minor claims of misconduct, the record shows.

When Lauterborn first arrived at the precinct in July 2008, he later told investigators, he viewed Schoolcraft as “active” and “an overall nice guy.” Over time, however, he began to believe his productivity and general disposition worsened, though there was no indication he thought Schoolcraft had any emotional issues.

Back at the station house, Lauterborn brought him into his office. What followed was a rare dialogue between two men who, viewed most favorably, had completely different ideas about policing: a commander demanding numbers, and a street officer resisting that pressure. Lauterborn thought Schoolcraft wasn’t working hard enough, and Schoolcraft thought he had been retaliated against for doing things his own way.

Schoolcraft was wearing his recorder and can be heard saying at the outset, “I just feel my safety and the public’s safety is being compromised because of the acts of retaliation. I assume it’s because I appealed my evaluation, in fact I know it is.”

“Today Lt. Caughey pulled up, asked me where I was, I was in the restroom, and takes my memo book,” Schoolcraft added. “Yesterday, Officer Chan got written up just for talking to me, and I want to report it.”

Lauterborn replied, referring to the February 25 meeting, “We told you when we left here, there’s going to be a lot more supervision out there. People want to know what you’re doing out there. . . . You don’t call for a duty captain who doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s running around doing 30 other things.”