The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (15 page)

On August 17, a woman walked into the station house to report that her cell phone had been stolen. Mauriello wandered by the desk, according to a recording, and initially checked with Schoolcraft about his restricted duty status. Mauriello then brought the woman into his office to talk to her about the phone.

“What’s he saying to her in there right now?” Schoolcraft wondered to himself with amusement, assuming that Mauriello was trying to convince the woman to drop her complaint. “It was a friend, blah, blah, blah.”

The pressure for numbers continued, as August came to a close. Following a shooting during the overnight shift, a sergeant told his officers, “Do some community visits, C summonses over there, the usual bullshit.”

Since “activity” was tallied on a monthly basis, the final days of August became yet another chance to harangue cops on their productivity. “It’s the 26th. If you don’t have your activity, it would be a really good time to get
it. . . . If I don’t have to hear about it from a white shirt (a superior officer), that’s the name of the game.”

And on August 31: “Today is the last day of the month. Get what you need to get,” a sergeant said.

The following day, the roll-call topic ranged from a longstanding prank in which cops drew penises in one another’s memo books to personal hygiene to station house graffiti.

“As far as the defacing of department property, alright, the shit on the side of the building, and pictures of people’s faces, and on people’s lockers, and drawing penises in people’s memo books and whatever else is going on, just knock it off, alright,” a sergeant said. “We’re adults. It’s ridiculous. It’s criminal mischief and graffiti for one, which if the wrong person sees this stuff coming in here, then IAB is going to be all over this place, alright?

“It’s a joke and I’m all for a good time, but when the wrong person sees it, or you do it to the wrong person that’s not in on the joke, then you start bringing the heat down on this place, that’s not going to be fun. So spread the word also to people that aren’t in this roll call. Just knock it off, alright? You want to draw penises, draw them in your own memo book. You’ll look like an artist.”

The discussion then turned to hygiene. “Someone smells bad?” the sergeant asked.

A female officer said, “I tell the guys, when I think that you stink, I will tell you.”

“Don’t put your vest in the washing machine,” the sergeant said. “As far as the vest itself, take a damp cloth and some suds and hand wash it. If you throw it in the washing machine I don’t think it stops bullets anymore. Brush your teeth. Take a shower daily. This hygiene is the new training. Change your socks daily. Kicking around in these boots all day, you take these things off, your feet stink, so don’t just throw your socks in the locker and come in the next day. That shit won’t come out of your boots and you’ll be walking around smelling it all day. Anything else that people need to be reminded to clean?

“Clean your patrol cars too. They stink also. You’re leaving your sardine sandwich under the seat for the next person. Just throw it in the garbage.”

“You know what, you can’t have me as a partner doing that kind of shit,” the female cop says. “ ‘Cause I’ll be like, ‘Can you fucking clean that shit up?’ ”

On September 12, Schoolcraft heard about other downgrading incidents, when a fellow officer told him, “A lot of 61s, if it’s a robbery, they’ll make it a petty larceny. I saw a 61, at t/p/o [time and place of occurrence], civilian punched in the face, menaced with a gun, and his wallet was removed, and they wrote ‘lost property.’ ”

As September drew to a close, the officers once again heard about getting their numbers up in advance of the deadline. “If your activity’s been down, the last quarter is a good time to bring it up, because that’s when your evaluation is going to be done,” a sergeant said. “We all know this job is ‘what have you done for me lately.’ This is crunch time,” he said. “This is game seven of the World Series, the bases are loaded and you’re at bat right now.

“It’s all a game, ladies and gentlemen,” he adds. “We do what we’re supposed to, the negative attention goes somewhere else. That’s what we want.”

Mauriello turned to the precinct’s police union delegate, Richie Brown, to advise Schoolcraft to pick up his activity. “The CO [commanding officer] wants to know if everyone is happy and he also stated he can make you work more as long as they pay you,” Brown told Schoolcraft on September 29.

On October 4, the precinct bosses issued a new edict: Cops can’t take robbery reports on the street. They had to send complainants to the detective squad. “Don’t take robbery 61s [complaints]. Send them to the squad.” Schoolcraft saw this order, which was repeated three or four times through the month, as a clear attempt to reduce the number of robberies.

In essence, the precinct was adding a procedural hurdle to filing crime complaints. When a person gets robbed, they call 911 to report the crime. Now the cops would respond by telling the victim to go to the station house to file their report. Perhaps the victim has to go to work. Perhaps they have to care for a child. Aside from the inconvenience, the other insidious thing about this order was that it delayed the start of a criminal investigation. Most crimes that are solved are solved fairly quickly. Any delay ruins the one advantage that police have.

In this roll call, cops were told to be highly skeptical of what victims were telling them—another distortion of the crime reporting process caused by CompStat. “If it’s a little old lady and I got my bag stolen, then she’s probably telling the truth, alright,” a sergeant said. “If it’s some young guy who looks strong and healthy and can maybe defend himself and he got yoked up, and he’s not injured, he’s perfectly fine, question that. It’s not about squashing numbers. You all know if it is what it is, if it smells like a rotten fish, then that’s what it is. But question it. On the burglaries as well.”

That roll call also contained proof of a second questionable precinct policy: the callback, which occurred when a precinct boss called a victim back to ask more questions about the complaint with the intent of downgrading the crime that was alleged. “Whether it’s CO [the commanding officer], Lt. Crawford, or Seymour, they always do callbacks,” a lieutenant said. “So, a lot of time we get early information and they do callbacks.”

“And then we look silly,” a sergeant added. “ ‘Cuz they’re, ‘Why didn’t you do this,’ this is really not a . . . a domestic violence victim, woman, says, ‘Hey, my boyfriend stole my phone.’ He didn’t really steal the phone. It’s his phone, and he was taking it. Did he snatch it out of her hand? Yeah. Is it a grand larceny? No, because I’m telling you right now the DA is not going to entertain that.”

Again, a primary job of a police officer is to take crime complaints, but CompStat was forcing the precinct to come up with administrative techniques to eliminate complaints that had nothing to do with fighting crime. There was nothing in the Patrol Guide that said police should make it hard for citizens to file complaints.

Ten days later, the subject of “Mauriello Specials” came up again in a roll call. This time, it was from a police union delegate, warning the officers about signing off on arrests for misconduct they didn’t witness. “Make sure you don’t sign anything that says you witnessed the arrest if you didn’t,” he said. “There’s been a lot of cases overturned, and officers now being brought up on perjury charges.”

On October 11, the order to refer robbery victims to the detective squad came up again. Two officers took a report from a man who had his cell phone stolen by force. The victim didn’t want to immediately come to the station house because he didn’t want to be seen getting into a marked police car.

Mauriello erupted when the report crossed his desk, and since shit always rolls downhill in the NYPD, the cops heard about it from their sergeant. “OK, so he [Mauriello] was flippin’ on me yesterday because they wrote a 61 and the guy talking about he not coming in to speak to nobody,” the sergeant said. “He don’t want nobody see him getting in the car.”

She went on: “You know we be popping up with these robberies out of nowhere or whatever. If the complainant does not want to go back and speak to the squad, then there is no 61 taken. That’s it. They have to go back and speak to the squad.”

She suggested the crime victim was lying. “How do we know this guy really got robbed?” she asked. “He said he had no description. Sometimes they just want a complaint number, you know what I’m saying, so if he don’t wanna come back and talk to the squad, then that’s it.”

The topic turned to stop and frisks, and once again, the officers were told to just get numbers, without adhering to the legal standards of the tactic. “If y’all try to do a canvass, try to get at least a couple of 250s and put robbery down just to say that we was out there. You stop somebody, get a 250. Go over, let them see y’all doing something about it or whatever. OK?”

A week later, the edict about not taking robbery complaints was repeated again. “If the complainant says, ‘I don’t want to go to the squad, I don’t want to go to the squad,’ then there’s no 61, right?” the sergeant said. “We not going to take it and then they say they going to come in later on and then the squad speak to them and they usually don’t want to come in.”

The subject turned again to “activity” in the next roll call, this time a threat that cops who didn’t work would get new partners. “If you’re working hard, it’s not going to bother you,” he said. “If you’re not holding your weight, chances are you probably will be working with someone you don’t want to work with.

“Just make sure you get your activity because I can’t defend you, and I did a lot of defending in here the other day,” he said. “I can’t defend anybody who can’t get themselves to where it should be.”

Then, a sergeant reminded officers not to smoke at crime scenes. “And don’t pee in the toilet. Don’t eat food from the refrigerator. Don’t sit in the guy’s chair when there’s a DOA in the apartment.”

Three days after that, the topic was the constant shortages of cops on the day tour because again they were constantly being pulled away for a host of reasons. On a typical day in the 8-1, incredibly, there were just three to nine officers to patrol the entire precinct. “Where is everybody?” a lieutenant wondered in an October 27 roll call. “This is going to be a bad month.”

The precinct didn’t even have enough cops to man SkyWatch, the mobile surveillance tower placed in high-crime areas to deter misconduct. “We’d like to have two people assigned there,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury to do that. Today, once again, we have one, so the effectiveness of the SkyWatch is not there.”

A sergeant griped that his boss had told him to send a cop to guard a car where a gun had been found. “He said, ‘Put a body on it,’ ” the sergeant said. “He doesn’t live in the real world. I didn’t have any extra people to have them sit on a car.”

The shortage was so bad that bosses would pray for rain. “Hopefully, it will rain until 4 o’clock today,” a sergeant said. “That would be a big help to us, especially due to our limited manpower.”

The same month, there was a ban on bringing homeless drug addicts, who are known collectively as “bags of shit,” into the station house. These people often required special handling, which took patrol officers off the street for hours because they needed drug treatment or a visit to the hospital. Previously, it wasn’t uncommon for them to be arrested specifically so they would get treatment.

“If the guy murdered somebody, then that’s a different story,” the sergeant said. “If the guy is smoking a joint and his name is James Johnson, then you know what to do. I can’t tell you not to write him a summons or don’t collar him, but . . . that makes my freaking head explode.”

He added, “Listen, don’t bring Mr. Medicine into the station house, because he’s going to get free medical care from us that we all pay for, OK, and plus then he gets a nice police escort the whole time that he’s there.”

Often, the precinct was short of patrol cars because vehicles were pulled away for “critical response”—that is, for Kelly’s lines of cars touring Manhattan, lights flashing.

On October 25, the precinct actually didn’t have a single car to put in the field. “I brought it to the lieutenant’s attention because we don’t have no
cars for the day tour,” a sergeant said. “It’s just really, really bad. . . . So honestly, I’m going to call the borough [command].”

The short staffing led to what was known as “forced overtime,” in which officers were ordered to take overtime hours to fill the holes. In one roll call, a lieutenant made up a list of cops who had worked overtime and those who hadn’t. “If your name is not crossed off the list, and there’s an opening that day and you’re off, you’re working it,” he said. “Whether you can or can’t, you’ll be here.”

Schoolcraft, who had frequently worked forced overtime, thought the practice was a public safety issue. “What happens is they get addicted to the overtime, and they keep doing it because it pays for their school and housing bills,” he said. “But it’s exhausting.”

CHAPTER 8

THE LENGTHS PEOPLE WILL GO