The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (11 page)

“I did not become a cop to be harassing people in the street,” he said. “You end up summonsing innocent people. They don’t go to court, and the next time you stop them, they have a warrant and have to go to jail.”

“They want you to summons people for disorderly conduct, when they aren’t doing anything,” he said. “If the summonses are down for the month, they rush to get them up, so they’ll stick you in a checkpoint just for the purpose of getting 10 summonses. What happens when you don’t witness anything illegal, but still have to hit your quota?”

He said it was a common practice in the precinct for officers to be ordered to make arrests when they hadn’t actually seen the misconduct: “One time, I was ordered to give a guy a summons for no dog license, but the problem was I didn’t see a dog,” he said.

He looked on with disgust as supervisors ordered officers to downgrade crime complaints and refuse to take complaints from civilians in order to manipulate crime statistics. “It happened all the time,” he said. “The reason was CompStat. They know what they are going to be asked for in CompStat, and they have to have a lower number—but not too low.”

The effect of this approach is that it strained relations with the community, he said. “A lot of the time, I would apologize,” he said. “They are frustrated. They don’t trust the police. They feel we’re here to harass them.”

In one incident, he said, he responded to a call of a burglary in a city-owned apartment. When he arrived, he noted that a window had been broken, and the occupant said cash and a video game had been stolen. He called his sergeant and a lieutenant. When the lieutenant arrived, he wondered skeptically how a guy who lived in public housing could own a 40-inch flat-screen television. He ordered Polanco and his partner to leave the scene. Even though the victim wanted a report taken, the lieutenant closed the case as “unfounded.”

In a second incident, an alleged burglary, the door had been pushed in. The victim claimed that $600 in cash and some jewelry had been stolen. But a sergeant arrived at the scene and ordered Polanco to take a report for something called “unlawful eviction.”

“He said, ‘Don’t mention the money and jewelry in the report,’ ” Polanco said. “He told me that the numbers were high that week. They look at the
numbers weekly and compare them to the same week the previous year. What they want is to show a decline in the numbers, but not too low, because it will be harder the next year to show a decline.”

In a third incident, Polanco responded to a call of shots fired. A bullet had gone through a vehicle window, but he was ordered to take the report as reckless endangerment. “I was told to write that a ‘sharp object’ went through the glass,” he said. “They didn’t have the perp, and it would look bad for the precinct taking the report for attempted murder.”

Polanco said precinct supervisors routinely called crime victims back to try to persuade them to withdraw their report or change their account in some way that would allow the incident to be reclassified as a lesser crime: “They’ll say, ‘You know we’re not getting anything back on this,’ or ‘Do you really want to make the report?’ ” he said.

If a robbery victim refused to return immediately to the precinct to speak to detectives, cops were told not to take the report, Polanco said. “If the victim couldn’t identify anyone from mug shots, they would tell them they would follow up, but they wouldn’t take a report,” he said. “A lot of the time, they were Mexican or Chinese delivery people who don’t really know how the system works.” The sergeants in the crime analysis unit would call cops on the carpet to get them to explain why they took a given report, according to Polanco. There was a special bin for complaints involving the seven major crime categories, and the following day, the complaints would be reviewed and “edited.”

There were also a couple of arrests that bothered Polanco. In one case, a sergeant ordered the arrest of a young man for having a warrant for an open container, even though he had been slashed across the back—a wound that required 40 stitches to close. In another case, a man who had been shot in the leg was arrested and taken to the hospital in handcuffs because he had a prior warrant on a minor charge.

Polanco started wearing a tape recorder in August 2009 to capture some of the practices he witnessed. “It was the only way to prove what was going on,” he said.

In one recording, a sergeant said, “I spoke to the commanding officer for about an hour and a half. . . . They want 20 (summonses) and 1 (arrest). Next week you could be at 25 and 1, you could be at 35 and 1 and guess what?
Until you decide to quit this job and become a Pizza Hut delivery man, this is what you’re going to be doing.”

He taped another supervisor saying, “Things are not going to get any better, it’s going to get a lot worse. If you think 1 and 20 is breaking your balls, guess what you are going to be doing? You’re going to be doing a lot more, a lot more than what you think.”

A third: “It’s really non-negotiable ’cause if you don’t do it now, I’m gonna have you work with the boss to make sure it happens.”

“Twenty [summonses] and one [arrest, the monthly quota]—make sure you take care of what you gotta take care of,” a supervisor told cops in one of Polanco’s tapes.

When he made an issue of the quotas, another supervisor told him, “I don’t give a shit. You need to take care of your business, feel me? As a cop to a cop, make sure you take care of what you gotta take care of.”

Polanco also recorded two police union delegates heaping on the quota pressure. In one conversation, a PBA delegate told Polanco, “Twenty and one is what the union wants. . . . This is what the job is coming down to.”

Later, another delegate told cops in a roll call, “Things are not going to get any better. It is going to get a lot worse. If you think getting 1 and 20 is breaking your balls, guess what you’re going to be doing? You’re going to be doing a lot more. A lot more than what you think. This was all dealt with in the last contract.”

This delegate was later heard to say, “This is not coming from me—this is coming from higher up. The unions agreed on it. We’re unionized here. This is what we pushed through. And let’s be smart about it. You gotta be smart about it.”

“Play the fucking game,” a delegate said on another tape.

Those statements embarrassed the union, which had long railed against quotas, and at least one of the delegates was removed from his post.

When Polanco went to a sergeant to complaint about quotas, the sergeant told him, “It’s like fighting a current. If you stick your head out there, make sure. They’ll drown you.”

In October 2009, Polanco contacted Internal Affairs to report the quota pressure. “I went to Internal Affairs because I grew up in Washington
Heights, and I know what it’s like to sit in the park. . . . I was seeing an awful lot of people, kids, getting arrested for no other reason than being number for CompStat,” he said in a deposition in
Floyd v. City of New York
, a lawsuit that challenged the city’s stop and frisk campaign.

His bosses soon found out. “My supervisors knew I had gone to IAB [Internal Affairs Bureau],” he said. “They were asking me, why did I go to IAB?”

There was a larger conflict coming with his commanders. Polanco could feel it. And on December 13, 2009, that conflict came. On that particular day, he and his partner had been ordered once again to stand at an intersection and write tickets to increase the precinct’s summons numbers. His partner fell ill as the result of a heart condition, and Polanco called an ambulance.

His lieutenant, a man with whom Polanco had had words previously, responded and arrived at the scene. As the ambulance prepared to transport his partner to the hospital, Polanco asked if he could accompany him. The lieutenant refused and ordered Polanco to remain on post and keep writing summonses. Polanco lost his temper and argued with the lieutenant.

The lieutenant grabbed him. Polanco pushed him away. The lieutenant ordered him suspended and demanded his gun and shield. Polanco refused, because he didn’t feel safe giving his gun to someone who had pushed him. The lieutenant told Emergency Services that Polanco was to be treated as an “emotionally disturbed” person—the same label that Schoolcraft would later be tarred with.

He believed his commanders engineered the whole thing to prevent him from speaking out. For the next three years, Polanco drove to the Internal Affairs offices on Hudson Street from Rockland County, where he lived with his wife and three children, signed in, and drove home. But he didn’t remain silent. He gave several interviews, spoke at a forum on NYPD quotas, and gave a deposition to the Center for Constitutional Rights for their stop and frisk lawsuit.

In July 2011, the NYPD hit him with more charges, claiming that he filed out two criminal court summonses for misconduct he didn’t observe. The irony of the charge was that he himself had reported that to Internal Affairs.

As of March 2013, Polanco was still in limbo. His job status had been changed from suspended to modified, and he was working in VIPER, a unit where cops just sit at video monitors linked to security cameras and watch for their full tour.

“It took a lot of courage to do what I did,” Polanco said.

CHAPTER 6

“YOU GOTTA PAY THE RENT”

T
he new year, 2009, began with Schoolcraft still upset about the low rating. That January he decided to hire a lawyer to help him appeal the evaluation—a step that was fairly unusual in the NYPD and likely to cause more problems for him than it would solve.

Indeed, on the day after he gave notice that he would file an appeal, a sign appeared on his locker that read, “If you don’t like your job, then maybe you should get another job.” He never found out who placed it there, but the message was clear.

This sort of anonymous message was not an uncommon method of intimidation. On another occasion, for example, someone posted a fake thank-you note written by a perp on the locker of another officer. The note read, “Thanks to him, I’m still on the street selling my drugs and holding my gun. PO Edouard was too busy talking shit to some chick. Thanks to him, I’ll be getting some head.”

At any rate, Schoolcraft decided not to go outside the precinct to complain. And his tape recorder kept rolling, tour after tour. The theme was often “You gotta pay the rent.”

Mauriello and the other precinct bosses were irritated by the latest edict from the borough command, which, in addition to sending commanders downtown for CompStat, was holding its own mini-CompStat meetings. The strategy was being taken to ridiculous levels. And they weren’t just
reviewing crime, they were also reviewing the number of tickets each officer wrote and the number of days they called in sick. A boss called it “accountability” on January 13.

“Robbery spikes, crime spikes, on and on and on,” a sergeant later groused. “It’s a lot of horseshit I gotta sit through, but it’s accountability, alright?”

Mauriello continued to harangue the troops, and on January 27, he almost seemed to be speaking directly to Schoolcraft. “Be a cop, do your job,” he said. “You got a problem with how I roll? My style? Too fucking bad.”

On January 28, Mauriello visited the roll call again, calling for more stop and frisks. “Listen, if it’s micromanaging, it’s micromanaging,” he said. “Just do your job.”

Lieutenant De La Fuente in the same roll call then told the cops that Michael Scagnelli, a top-ranking chief, was closely questioning the command in CompStat meetings about the numbers of traffic tickets they wrote. “He says, ‘How many superstars and how many losers do you have?’ ” he said. “And then he goes down and says, ‘How many summonses does your squad write?’ I want everyone to step up and be accountable and work. Don’t get caught out there.”

De La Fuente then mentioned the patrol borough commander, Marino, who was apparently examining the “activity” of every cop in the ten precincts he oversaw. “He’s taking this very seriously, looking at everyone’s evaluations,” he said. “And he’s yelling at every CO [commanding officer] about ‘who gave this guy points, or this girl’s no good.’ ”

Points means evaluation points. The significance of these two statements was that top-ranking chiefs at the thin-air end of the NYPD pyramid were reaching down from Ararat and literally looking at the “productivity” of individual police officers in a way that was rare prior to CompStat.

De La Fuente said the cops should be able to hit their numbers targets. “I told you guys last month, they are looking at these numbers and people are going to get moved,” he said. “It ain’t about losing your job. They can make your job real uncomfortable and we all know what that means.”

He cited the declining number of officers in the department. “A lot of people are leaving the job,” he said. “They aren’t getting new recruits. Patrol is not getting new people. It’s more accountability, it’s less people. They got this catch phrase, ‘do more with less,’ right. And they’re looking at the numbers.”

He said the top bosses were pressuring the precinct commander, who was pressuring his supervisors, who then had to pressure the cops.

“Unfortunately, at this level in your career, you’re on the lowest level, so you’re going to get some orders that you may not like,” he said. “You’re gonna get instructions. You’re gonna get disciplinary action. You gotta just pick up your work. I don’t wanna get my ass chewed out, in straight words. I’m sick of getting yelled at.”

Here again, the threat was clear: Get your numbers or get punished. And it was clear that the pressure was also on the mid-level supervisors. Though the NYPD would stubbornly deny the existence of quotas, these remarks made by a typical lieutenant in a typical precinct seem to bear out what was really happening. Schoolcraft felt like these words, said to the group, were directed at him.

On February 3, 2009, he was written up for arriving 47 minutes late to court and for improperly wearing jeans and sneakers in court. One of the ways the NYPD controlled its officers was adherence to dozens of tiny rules about appearance in the Patrol Guide. An inspections unit spent all of its time roaming the precincts, looking for minor rule violations and handing out discipline.