The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (34 page)

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the lawsuit on behalf of New Yorkers, alleging “a widespread pattern and practice of suspicion-less and race-based stops and frisks by the NYPD.”

Central to her decision, she said, were the Schoolcraft recordings, which she described as “smoking gun evidence.” The decision paved the way for the recordings to be used during trial.

“Plaintiffs have presented the smoking gun of the roll call recordings, which considered together with the statistical evidence, is sufficient circumstantial evidence for this claim to survive,” Scheindlin wrote.

Meanwhile, in the Schoolcraft case, discovery had finally begun a year after the lawsuit was filed. On September 28, the lawyers in the case agreed to a stipulation that all documents in the case would be kept out of the public eye. In other words, they couldn’t be shared outside of the court, the plaintiffs, and the defendants. The city often insisted on agreements like this, supposedly to protect “confidential records.” Plaintiffs’ lawyers often agree because it lets them see documents without a big fight.

“This was a conventional stipulation,” Norinsberg said. “It’s done in every single case involving the city.”

The Schoolcrafts said later that Norinsberg didn’t tell them about this stipulation, and the stipulation went against their wishes. Months passed before they learned of this document, they said, and when they did, they were angry. From the start, they had wanted the entire injustice played out in the public arena, and their lawyer appeared to have gone against that hope and then had failed to tell them.

In October, there came yet more grist for the quota debate. A detective named Stephen Anderson testified that cops made up drug charges against innocent people to hit arrest quotas. The judge in the case, Gustin Reichbach, was so startled by the testimony that he asked Anderson how many times he had done it. Anderson replied, “Multiple times.”

Four days after Anderson’s testimony, Kelly issued a new order reminding officers of the difference between quotas and “activity reports.”

As December came to a close, the
Times
published yet another article about someone whose crime report was not taken. A 34-year-old schoolteacher said she was groped twice, but when she told a police officer, he said filing a report would be a waste of time. “His words to me were, ‘These things happen’,” she told the
Times
.

By January 2012, the fight had turned to the NYPD’s internal audits of the crime statistics for the 81st Precinct. The department was refusing to turn over those records to the New York Civil Liberties Union, even though the department had released the data for every other precinct. Bed-Stuy City Councilman Al Vann jumped into the fray, demanding their release.

“Given the past controversy in the 81st Precinct, it is especially important that the NYPD be forthcoming and transparent with respect to what occurred in the precinct over the past decade,” he said in a statement. “By concealing this public information, the NYPD is not only violating the law, but jeopardizing the significant progress made in rebuilding the relationship and trust between the Bedford-Stuyvesant community and the 81st Precinct.”

On January 17, Kelly issued what would be at this writing the final of his steps to blunt criticism of the crime statistics: a departmental order essentially reminding officers that they can’t ignore civilians who want to report a crime.

It had now been a year since the crime statistics panel was created—and its report was six months overdue. There was no mention of any findings by the panel that would have triggered the order. It was simply released without comment or reference to the panel. Nothing was heard from the panel a year later either.

At any rate, the order went on to address other CompStat dodges—sending folks to another precinct or another police agency, ordering them to go back to the scene of a crime and then call 911, taking a complaint only if the victim fully cooperates, shit-canning a report because it can’t be solved or prosecutors won’t indict on it, or delaying the filing of a report into the next reporting period.

He told cops to take reports even if the suspect couldn’t be identified, the victim refused to look at photos, a grand larceny victim had no receipts, or the victim wouldn’t speak with detectives.

True to form, Kelly’s spokesman Paul Browne called the order “routine” and said it had nothing to do with crime report manipulation. Observers said this move was thin gruel if it was meant to address the mass of questions that had cropped up since 2009.

As March approached, the QAD report containing the conclusions of the Schoolcraft investigation remained secret, as it had for the previous 20 months, tucked away in some drawer at police headquarters. All who came near the NYPD asking for the report were rebuffed, as if the document contained the
nuclear launch codes. In fact, the NYPD hadn’t even acknowledged publicly at this point that any such report even existed.

At this point, Schoolcraft had been suspended for 27 months and had been living hand to mouth for that entire time. For him, the ordeal was turning into a long war of attrition, as if the city was testing him to see when he would crack.

Like Schoolcraft, Mauriello had also been in limbo. He was charged in October 2010, and now 18 months had elapsed, and very little had happened in the case. He, too, was getting the four-corners treatment. “The guy’s been put out to pasture for 18 months, and he wants to get this done,” his lawyer said, calling Mauriello a “fall guy.” “I don’t know if it’s done for political, or litigation reasons. It’s a big question mark. But he wants to move on. He’s saying take me to the trial room. . . . Any police officer who is awaiting an administrative trial is basically a man without a country.”

And then on March 7, as if stepping out finally from behind a curtain, the conclusions of the QAD report emerged in an article I wrote for the
Village Voice
. One could immediately see why the NYPD didn’t want to release the document.

Most of the allegations that Schoolcraft made in October 2009 were confirmed by the QAD investigators, as detailed in the 95-page report. For 25 months, Schoolcraft had been viewed by his critics as a man of lesser credibility, but this report pretty much vindicated him.

Eleven of the thirteen cases he brought to investigators were substantiated. Complaints were downgraded in an attempt to avoid index crime classification, investigators concluded. Reports were never filed. Reports were delayed and rewritten. Victims were ignored and pressured.

Rather than just stopping with Schoolcraft, the investigators interviewed 45 officers and examined hundreds of documents. They found a range of other instances in which crime reports had been altered, rejected, misclassified, gone missing, or not even been entered into the computer system. These involved a Chinese food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cabdriver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, and a woman beaten by her spouse.

“When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index crime classifications,” investigators concluded. “This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct.”

Crime complaints were changed to reflect misdemeanors rather than felony crimes, which kept the incidents out of the crime stats. The investigators said that “an unwillingness to prepare reports for index crimes exists or existed in the command.”

There was an “atmosphere in the command where index crimes were scrutinized to the point where it became easier to either not take the report at all or to take a report for a lesser, non-index crime,” investigators wrote.

Precinct commander Mauriello “failed to meet [his] responsibility.” As a result, “an atmosphere was created discouraging members of the command to accurately report index crimes.”

Most importantly, the report drew that bright line between the CompStat pressure from above down to the borough, to the precinct, to patrol officers, creating a situation that led bosses and cops alike to find other ways to reduce crime that had nothing to do with crime fighting. And if the 81st Precinct was a typical station house, then crime manipulation was certainly more widespread than city officials admitted.

Among the more egregious examples cited in the QAD report:

•
 
A 2008 attempted robbery classified as misdemeanor assault. Schoolcraft had alleged in this instance that a sergeant in the precinct ordered him to downgrade the report, saying, “We can’t take another robbery.”

•
 
A 2008 robbery wrongly classified as a report of lost property. Schoolcraft had given investigators an email from the victim who claimed he had been beaten and robbed of his wallet and cell phone by three men. But the crime complaint was changed to “lost property [because] the victim doesn’t feel he was a victim of a crime.” This could have been charged as perjury because the victim in this case wanted a complaint filed.

None of the precinct officers interviewed in that incident could explain how the report was changed to lost property. The complaint was upgraded to robbery. Two officers were disciplined.

•
 
A 2009 attempted robbery for which the precinct somehow “lost” the complaint. Schoolcraft had said in the past that he subsequently wrote a new report after the initial one couldn’t be found.

A precinct sergeant told the victim that he would have to return to the precinct to look at mug shots, a process that would take “several hours.” The victim said he had a job event to attend. The complaint disappeared after that. The complaint had languished for three days—a violation of a requirement that reports be “finalized” within 24 hours.

A sergeant was facing department charges over the incident.

•
 
A car theft that the precinct commander ordered cops not to take. Here, the victim ran into several barriers to filing her complaint. First, an officer told her to wait a few days to see if the car reappeared. That advice delayed the investigation for two days. In addition, Schoolcraft had alleged that Mauriello ordered the female officer not to take the complaint.

The officer lost five vacation days as a result of the investigation.

•
 
A 2009 incident in which an elderly man said he was a burglary victim. When he showed up at the precinct to file a report, a sergeant told him to go to another precinct to file the report. Again, this was a violation of the NYPD’s own policy. It was only after a newspaper article appeared months later that a report was taken.

•
 
A 60-year-old retired traffic agent made repeated visits to the precinct to get a complaint number for her stolen vehicle from May through June 2009. The investigation showed the report was never entered into the NYPD computer system, preventing it from being counted in the crime statistics. Investigators concluded nothing would have been done if the woman hadn’t been a traffic agent and pressed the issue.

•
 
Another auto theft, where the victim got frustrated because she had to wait hours to file her complaint. The report was never entered in the computer system. When she went to the 81st Precinct, she was
told she had to go to the 79th Precinct. When she contacted the 79th Precinct, she was told she had to go to the location where the vehicle disappeared and report it to the 81st Precinct.

“She waited an inordinate amount of time, her was complaint was never investigated, nor was a complaint report ever generated,” investigators concluded.

•
 
A man who walked into the station house to ask for his complaint report in June 2009. The report had disappeared, and a new one was made. Schoolcraft claimed that precinct commander Mauriello refused to accept the report.

A month later, two men were arrested for stealing the car. It was only at this point that 81st Precinct cops entered the report.