The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (13 page)

Schoolcraft replied, “I feel my safety and the public’s safety is being compromised by the way they are behaving. I feel that other officers get
in trouble because of me. I’m not working in a tire factory. I’m a police officer.”

“Are you? Are you? Are you? Are you?”

“I’m a police officer, sir,” Schoolcraft replied.

Lauterborn told him every time he went to the bathroom, he had to write in his memo book.

Schoolcraft, having not been treated this way before in his career, said, “For seven years, haven’t had to do that.”

Lauterborn replied that since his activity was down, he was getting treated this way. “For seven years, you probably weren’t subject to that because no one would bother you. You were doing a good job.”

“So they are bothering me now?” Schoolcraft asked.

“No we have to pay closer attention to what you’re doing,” the captain replied.

Schoolcraft tried to get Lauterborn to specify exactly what he was being evaluated on, but Lauterborn wouldn’t do it. The captain told him that Mauriello was constantly watching each cop’s activity.

“Mauriello is a fanatic about this,” he said. “He is fanatically looking at what people do every single day. You want to warn and admonish everybody that’s out there [rather than ticketing or arresting them]? You want to be Mr. Community? Is that what you’re doing?”

“I wasn’t aware I was doing anything,” Schoolcraft said.

(In his subsequent notes on this conversation, Schoolcraft wrote that when he would stop motorists for not wearing their seat belts, and they had valid insurance and a valid driver’s license, he would make them put on their seat belt, warn them, and let them go without a ticket. “That was driving them nuts,” he wrote. “There is no official way of policing.”)

Lauterborn continued, “My question to you is: Is this getting through to you? Do you understand where this office is coming from? Explain from your point of view.”

“I’m out there. I don’t make things happen. If something happens, I correct it. I deal with it.”

“So tell me, from Adrian’s point of view, you’re saying you don’t create anything,” Lauterborn said. “When it comes to you, you address it. That’s what you do. So PO Schoolcraft will not go out there, and if there are a
bunch of kids sitting on a stoop in front of 229 Bainbridge, 187 Howard, you saw them sitting there, you won’t stop and question them?”

“I didn’t say I seen anything. I said I wouldn’t going to create anything.”

“What do you mean?” Lauterborn asked.

“It’s a common practice here by other officers to fake 250s, or there are fake summonses being handed in, because they can’t keep up with the numbers that the supervisors want,” Schoolcraft said. “It’s well known. I don’t know if the supervisors know it. Even Inspector Mauriello brought it up in in a roll call. He said stop doing it.”

(In his notes, Schoolcraft wrote that with stop and frisks for 90 percent of robberies, “It’s not the guy. Just grabbing a body. Guys fake 250’s more than anything else.”)

Lauterborn denied he had ever heard of that practice. He asked, “Are you going to question them, and if they refuse to answer, keep walking even if those people on the stoop say ‘Fuck you’?”

“That’s how it usually happens,” Schoolcraft said.

“Are you going to create something there?” Lauterborn asked. “I’m going to tell you if that motherfucker told me to fuck myself, yeah, is he going in handcuffs, yeah, cause he shouldn’t talk to anybody like that. If you let that go because there’s no violation, because he didn’t break a law, then I feel bad for you. Because then you have a tough job, and maybe you should find something else to do. Do you call that creating something? Or do you call that a matter of keeping the respect because they’ll step all over you when they see you out there, and not only you, but the next person in blue?”

Schoolcraft just said, “I want my activity log back.”

Lauterborn went back to hammering away on the numbers. “At one time, you were a police officer and now you’re not. . . . We want to help you. We don’t want to see you drop off. You got a long road ahead of you especially because of this. Eyes and ears are out there. The Boogie Man is around. Cross your t’s and dot your i’s and make it all look nicey-nice. People will move on. You want to be a cop?”

“Yes.”

Lauterborn asked, “Do you want to take the promotion test for sergeant?”

Schoolcraft shook his head. “The only supervisors I know are the ones here.”

“Are you coming in here miserable every day?”

“Most of the time.”

“Do you want to change precincts?”

“I don’t know how far this is going to go. I don’t want to change precincts. I feel I can do the job anywhere.”

“You don’t want to come to a place where you feel a pit in your stomach. You worked hard here at one point, right?”

“I just became aware the other day that I wasn’t,” Schoolcraft said.

In a subsequent interview, Lauterborn told Internal Affairs investigators that Schoolcraft went into a tirade that the captain and 81st Precinct officers were conspiring against him. However, the recording indicates there was no “tirade.” Schoolcraft was calm and polite throughout the conversation.

On March 27, Schoolcraft and a fellow officer patrolling a sector in the neighborhood together held a remarkable conversation about the extent of crime downgrading in the precinct, the extent to which commanders would go to come up with ways to shit-can crime reports, the micromanaging and the hurdles cops would have to climb over just to get routine crime reports accepted by their bosses.

“One day I had three GLAs (auto thefts) in a row, and they said have the sector disregard,” the other officer said. “They want special ops. Then he tells one of the victims at a GLA I was at, ‘Maybe karma took your car.’ ”

“Karma? Who?” Adrian asked.

“Mauriello,” came the reply. “He’s like, ‘Come over here, what do you mean the car was missing?’ The guy said, ‘I parked it there last night. I woke up today and it was gone.’ He says, ‘You ever been arrested before?’ The guy says, ‘Yeah.’ I think he did six or eight years for drug and gun possession. So Mauriello says, ‘You think karma woke up this morning and took your car?’ He’s like, ‘No, no, I think it was stolen.’ ”

“So he didn’t take the report because he’s a felon?”

“Basically.”

“That sucks,” Adrian said.

“I’m looking at him and I say I don’t really feel great about not taking the report, at least not transmitting the alarm,” the cop said. “He’s like, ‘Alright,
alright, take it for unauthorized use. Give it to the lieutenant to see what you are going to put in the story.’ So I tell the lieutenant how can we make this unauthorized use. He just looked at me.”

To this, Adrian replied with an anecdote of his own. “I was with Santana. This kid got jacked on Quincy and Patchen. He’s not really talking. The kid isn’t talking. The sister is saying they tried to take his PlayStation. They beat him up bad. He’s bleeding. I called a bus [ambulance].

“The sergeant says why did you call a bus. I say it’s a robbery. She goes, ‘Yeah it is, but what are we going to do about it? It’s a 90Y [a case disposed as an unnecessary call].’ I said, ‘No, I’ll write the report. It’s an attempted robbery. They beat him up. He went to the hospital. They didn’t succeed because he held the PlayStation like a football and they kicked the shit out of him.’

“Santana said they won’t take it. I say I’m going to write the report, sure as shit. You know I had to write that report four different times. The sergeant rewrote the aided card. They finally made it an assault three. They say go back and investigate. They say you’ve gotta call a supervisor over. Do we have to do that?”

“You have to for a major,” his fellow officer replied, meaning for a major crime of the type central to the CompStat numbers.

Surprised, Schoolcraft responded, “You do? So I said, ‘What is this story that I wrote?’ The sergeant says that looks like an assault three. He rewrote it for me. I said I’m not writing it again. He rewrote the aided card and the 61 [crime report].”

Back to the other cop. “Yesterday I walked into this thing. There had been a fire in a second-floor apartment on Van Buren. The firemen didn’t know it had spread, so they had broken in the other doors too. The landlord and the super came and they put new locks on the door. So, the victim tells me his PlayStation’s missing.

“The only people in the building were the landlord, the super, and the firemen. I’m think the fucking firemen stole the PlayStation. So I call it in and they go, ‘Take it for petit larceny.’ I’m like, ‘How?’ Whoever was in the apartment didn’t have permission. It’s a burglary. The sergeant says does it look like forced entry. I said the firemen forced in all the doors. The apartment is a fucking mess and all the doors are kicked in. I can’t tell if the
damage is from the firemen. I wrote a story this long hoping no one would read the goddamn thing. Because if you look at the story, this is a fucking burglary. How do you make it not a burglary?”

Adrian said, “What’s-her-name upstairs told me they change reports. I asked her, ‘Do they have to tell the investigating officer that something is being changed or augmented on the report?’ She says no. That’s criminal, I think. I think that’s fucking criminal.”

“And I got my named signed to it,” the other officer replied.

“And you’re signing it, that’s more important,” Schoolcraft said, incredulous. “Basically, you’re swearing to the story and they are changing it.”

He added, “It was so out in the open in December. If it was a major [crime] he would come over and call in his lieutenant. Some you can’t bullshit away, so he got all puffy. December must be the cut-off [for the annual stats]. He was stressing.”

Here, the other officer supplied another anecdote. “My favorite one of all is fucking is we get a cell phone snatch over on Stuyvesant. We throw the girl in the back of the car and do a canvas, and he [Mauriello] shows up and says roll down the window. He tells the girl, ‘What do you want us to do here really?’ ”

“Who’s this? Mauriello?” Schoolcraft asked.

“Yeah, he’s like, ‘What do you want us to do with this?’ She wants her cell phone back. He’s like, “What if we can’t get it back for you?’ ”

“Is this a normal-looking girl?”

“Yeah, she just moved out here from California, nice girl,” the cop said. “He’s like, ‘What are you going to do with this? Are you going to press charges?’ She says not really. He’s like, ’90 yellow. Take her home.’ ”

“When was that?”

“That was like six months ago. It is what it is.”

“Yeah,” Schoolcraft replied, “but that’s a pin that needs to go on the wall somewhere. Now that fucking crook, we helped him. We basically destroyed evidence or something. I don’t know how to articulate it in a court of law.”

“Exactly,” the cop responded. “You should just be able to fucking take the major and just put down won’t prosecute. This way there’s a record. But this way, the detectives aren’t going to look into it, nobody’s time is going to
be wasted on it, but you know a robbery occurred right there. So this way, if you start getting four or five of them, then you have a description of the guy.”

“Exactly,” Schoolcraft said. “Let’s not hide it. It happened.”

“They don’t going to do anything with it, that’s fine, but they know what happened,” the other cop said.

This one conversation captured on Schoolcraft’s tape recorder crystallized what was happening in the precincts as a result of the CompStat pressure coming out of 1 Police Plaza. It filtered down to the borough, to the precinct bosses, and to the cops, and in the end, crime victims were not being properly served by the NYPD, all in the name of showing better numbers. How could these same things not be happening in other precincts?

As April began, the pressure of working in the precinct was taking a toll on Schoolcraft’s health. He called in sick on April 3, suffering from chest pains and an upset stomach. An NYPD doctor told him to take the rest of the week off. He was told by his bosses to get a checkup and see the NYPD psychiatric services unit. He viewed this order as an attempt to push him out.

During the exam by a Dr. Joseph Ciuffo, he told the doctor about events in the precinct and the stress he was under from what he viewed as retaliation against him. Ciuffo diagnosed him with anxiety and ordered him to see a department psychologist.

On April 13, he sat and talked with Dr. Catherine Lamstein of the NYPD Psychiatric Evaluation Services Unit. Her notes from the session characterized Schoolcraft as a police officer under a tremendous amount of job-related stress, but also an officer who was being absolutely honest and forthcoming.

Schoolcraft told her that he was only getting four or five hours of sleep a night. He told her about his low evaluation. He had bouts of chest pain, tightness in his chest to the point where he went to an emergency room in Staten Island and got medication for anxiety, which he took only a couple of times.

His diet was awful. He drank too much soda. “I eat crap.” He dreamed of a better lifestyle. Of his personal life, he said, according to her notes, “No real dating, just one woman briefly, not into drinking or dancing, a chore to meet women in New York, drank a little in the navy.”

He talked about his mother Suzanne’s death. “My mother died of cancer five years ago. That beat the hell out of me and my father. My dad is depressed.”

She asked about drug use. “No one in my family drank or smoke. Coffee or soda was my only fix,” he said.

He told her about the sign that appeared on his locker. He talked about his philosophy as a cop and said he was disappointed in the reality of the NYPD. “I’m more comfortable on foot than in a patrol car,” he told her. “I would rather work alone than with a partner.

“It’s all about activity, they are pressuring me for activity, but other cops write fake summonses and the command won’t do anything. They want lots of movers for seat belts and cell phones, they want more stop and frisks.”

He continued, “I had no problems on the job until last year. My summonses are probably lower than the year before but I’m still very active. My bosses told me that I used to be a hammer, but I don’t ever remember being a hammer.”