The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (26 page)

“I hope to collaborate with you on reporting the whole story on my investigations, objectively, without misquotes,” Schoolcraft wrote.

In a second email, he wrote, “Nothing has changed regarding my status. On suspension, and they won’t give me a department trial . . . Pay me or fire me . . . I’m never quitting . . . Never!”

There was an initial correspondence by email, and then I drove up to Johnstown on March 16.

The town was clearly depressed, stuck between the last vestiges of industry, a modest farm community, and the inevitable Walmart and chain stores that contrive to suck the life from any small town. The Schoolcrafts lived in a small cookie-cutter apartment complex that looked like it had been thrown up in a week.

Their one-bedroom apartment was disheveled and messy. The kitchen was piled with dirty dishes. There was something of a dog smell. The carpet was worn and pitted. A fuzzy television buzzed in the background. Larry slept on a sofa. Adrian had the bedroom, which contained a desk, a chair, a mattress on the floor, and plastic containers of papers and computer parts. After the interview, Adrian walked outside for a couple of photos. He was using a cane.

“How many recordings do you have?” I asked.

“Oh, about 1,000 hours,” Adrian replied. “Roll calls, patrol, the locker room, stuff in the station house.”

“Um, over how long?”

“About 18 months.”

I paused to take this in for a moment. No police officer in NYPD history had ever recorded 1,000 hours inside a precinct on his own. Sure, officers involved in undercover Internal Affairs investigations had done more limited recordings. But this was unprecedented. Schoolcraft had done it alone. Most cops would have been put off by the danger of getting caught. And he wanted it to go public.

“A lot of it is personal conversations between cops about their wives and girlfriends, and stuff like that, and I don’t think any of that should be put in the paper,” Schoolcraft added.

There was more discussion, and then I suggested, “Well, why don’t you send me the roll calls on a disk, and we’ll see what’s there.” Schoolcraft agreed. A couple of days after this visit, a single CD arrived in an envelope at my office at the
Village Voice
. It took weeks for me to transcribe the recordings into coherent form and then make sense of them.

On May 4 and May 11, the
Voice
published the first two articles in a five-part series with the recordings as the centerpiece. The first article examined crime stat manipulation and quotas. The second article looked at whether certain orders given by precinct bosses led to civil rights violations on the street.

The articles caused a public buzz, and there was turmoil in the 81st Precinct. On May 14, 2010, records showed that an anonymous caller to the IAB reported that Mauriello was yelling at officers because of the “Schoolcraft incident.” The caller went on to say that “numbers are being fudged” in the precinct and threatened to go to the
Village Voice
.

As these articles appeared, Brooklyn North Inspections substantiated 25 of 26 charges against Schoolcraft and referred their conclusions to department prosecutors. The report indicated that the unit expected Schoolcraft to be tried in absentia and fired. In all, they had opened at least 15 different investigations into Schoolcraft. But the conclusions ignored the elephants in the room: the QAD investigation, its relationship to Halloween night, and the Internal Affairs probe of Mauriello and Marino.

To understand how, on the one hand, the NYPD could be investigating Schoolcraft and building evidence that would get him fired, and at the same time could be investigating his allegations separately, one has to know something about the organization itself. Most people consider the NYPD to be a single monolithic entity that drives forward in unison. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is a rapacious battlefield in which police bosses with a range of agendas slug it out to rise higher in the agency. In this light, the Brooklyn North investigation can be seen as an attempt to discredit Schoolcraft to save the reputations of its leaders. Internal Affairs, meanwhile, may have been looking to protect Kelly. QAD, at the same time, was looking for a big case that might raise the profile of its bosses.

Since Schoolcraft was folding his arms and refusing to return to work, Kelly could order his department prosecutors to try Schoolcraft—even if Schoolcraft wouldn’t attend—and then fire him. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he left Adrian in a kind of employment limbo: still a cop with medical benefits but without a salary. Perhaps he was waiting for the conclusions of the QAD and IAB investigations, perhaps he viewed the Brooklyn North report as biased, perhaps he was concerned that he would take a public shellacking for getting rid of Schoolcraft, perhaps he was just following department protocol. On all these issues, he was publicly silent.

Schoolcraft was not. “They assassinated my character,” he told me. “I would someday like to be a police officer again. I have no other option but to fight this. What they did was cover up what I was trying to report.”

CHAPTER 12

THE SCHOOLCRAFT EFFECT

A
s the elements of the
Voice
article percolated and the internal investigations continued, the police department remained largely silent. Police officers themselves did not. The Schoolcraft revelations become fodder for discussions in precinct station houses throughout the city. Of course, none of those officers were willing to speak publicly. The fear of retaliation by the NYPD for making public comments was so acute that a lot of cops didn’t even want to be seen in the same room with a reporter.

But there was Thee Rant, an Internet site that acted as a sort of Greek chorus for the NYPD. On this site, the issues of the day were poked, prodded, dissected, and argued over. It was probably the only place where a police officer could publicly attack Kelly and get away with it.

A favored expression in the Rant’s forums, used for supporters of Kelly, is to say so-and-so “drank the Kool-Aid,” or bought into Kelly’s policies. It’s a reference to supporters of cult leader Jim Jones, who coerced his followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide in Guyana in 1978. Dozens of current and retired cops posted to the Rant about Schoolcraft. The fallout from his recordings eventually became known on the Rant, for better or worse, as “The Schoolcraft Effect.”

Some cops supported Adrian, believing it completely credible that Halloween night was retaliation for him reporting misconduct. Others call him a lying rat who betrayed his fellow officers. His case has clearly made waves.

One poster offered this more thoughtful analysis. “I can see this quickly degrading into the typical ‘he’s a rat’ argument . . . and there is a point to that. The bigger issue here is that there is finally some definitive proof that the NYPD is engaging in the systematic corruption of report manipulation and downgrading of index crimes.

“The article is so dead-on correct in many of the examples and practices it describes, the constant pressure to meet quotas, the threats of getting your tour changed or days off denied, how we treat victims of crime by looking at them as if they are the suspect, the callbacks, the manipulation of facts, and the NYPD definitions of crimes.

“Yes, the guy was taping fellow cops, and I can’t condone that. But people need to know the job is corrupt from the top down. We are numbers driven. We face the paradox of generating more activity while taking fewer reports.”

Another poster, who called himself Krepke, wrote a tongue-in-cheek memo: “From the ministry of information: ‘You have been made aware of the allegations of Comrade Schoolcraft. He is a good officer but has been under stress. Be assured, we will take good care of him. After a short rest, he will be sent to a re-education camp, where he can again learn to adhere to the teachings of the Organization. All would do well to learn from the experience of Comrade Schoolcraft. All would do well.’ ”

Another wrote, “What Chief Marino and his minions did is inexcusable. You should be outraged. If they get away with this behavior, who is next?”

A fourth: “Does the department downgrade complaints to serve statistics? Yes. Do supervisors set up cops who do not blindly follow dubious if not illegal orders? Yes. Forget your opinion of Schoolcraft and look at the issues.”

Another: “At least this guy didn’t roll over and die for the brass.”

Another: “I’ve brought in a lot of EDPs who I thought would get admitted, but who the Docs cut loose. But THIS guy gets admitted for six days?”

A seventh said if ranking officers “whisper sweet nothings” in the doctor’s ear, “Be assured that those docs are going to admit said cop forthwith.”

An eighth: “CompStat is now totally corrupted.”

A ninth: “The Feds should do a Mollen Commission or Knapp Commission on this case.”

Among the posts from critics of Schoolcraft, there was this: “Schoolcraft is definitely not the hero the Voice claims he is.”

Another said, “He doesn’t want to right a wrong. He wants to be a Hollywood star. In the end, when his 15 minutes are up, he will be left with nothing. Not even his reputation.”

A third: “He sounds like a paranoid mental patient who sucks at his job.”

A fourth: “Sorry but I’ll take the word of a dozen responding supervisors over the one raving lunatic.”

A fifth: “This article is crap. The guy is a nut. He’s looking for a big payday for being a lazy zero. I hope he gets nothing but a big lawyer he can’t afford when this is over.”

A sixth: “Schoolcraft is a nut who should be working at Walmart.”

One Schoolcraft critic posted a photo of a dead rat caught in a trap.

The reaction outside the department, in the public arena, skewed toward Schoolcraft, but the critical mass needed to push an outside authority to step into the story didn’t yet exist, if it ever would.

Once again, Councilman Peter Vallone, the chair of the City Council’s public safety committee, weighed in. He said some of the comments were “clearly” telling officers to commit “illegal conduct.” “You can’t tell a police officer to stop them no matter what,” Vallone said. “Some of it was clearly over the line.”

However, Vallone added that other comments “read like good commanders struggling to win the war against crime without enough officers.”

But the politician who was most incensed by the recordings was longtime City Councilman Albert Vann, who represented Bed-Stuy. He was shocked to hear Mauriello speak that way to his officers about the community he served. “It would seem to be two deputy inspectors: one that I know, who is very responsive to the community, and one who I believe, in responding to his superiors, has become overly aggressive in trying to make the statistics look good in the district.”

Meanwhile, lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was suing the NYPD over its stop and frisk campaign on civil rights grounds, immediately saw the value of the recordings, and they moved to obtain them as evidence in their case. They believed the tapes amounted to smoking-gun proof of the existence of quotas and their direct relationship with illegal stops and false arrests. The lawyers believed the recordings showed precinct bosses ordering their cops to violate the civil rights of citizens. They knew how rare
it was to find an officer who was willing to speak out on these issues. They reached out to Schoolcraft and deposed him for their lawsuit.

I would publish three more articles in the
Village Voice
related to the Schoolcraft Effect, and the debate over Schoolcraft’s tapes would continue through the year. For the moment, Kelly had not acted. Mauriello was still in place. Marino was still in place. The department was still insisting that any downgrading that did happen was miniscule. It was status quo.

Now, citizens from around the city began to step forward to tell their own stories of crime report manipulation. One particularly disturbing account came from Berry Hatfield, a 27-year-old film industry location scout living in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.

Hatfield said he was walking home on Halloween 2009, the same night that Schoolcraft was taken to the psych ward, when a would-be robber pointed a handgun at him and pulled the trigger. Hatfield took off. The gun merely clicked, he says, and no bullet discharged.

Police from the 94th Precinct arrived, listened to his statement, and then drove him around, looking for the suspect without success. Rather than taking the complaint on the spot, the officers insisted on taking him to the station. He went and was told that detectives would call him the following day.

The detectives didn’t call the next day. Hatfield waited a few days and then asked the precinct for a complaint number. The clerk couldn’t find it. After a month of waiting, Hatfield went to the station house to try to get the complaint number and a copy of the report. And it was like what happened to him had vanished, like it never happened. The precinct had no record of the incident, not in the computer, not in the log book. He left word for the responding officers to call him. They didn’t.

Hatfield waited another two months and tried again. The result was the same. The report had disappeared.

“A couple of weeks before, there was an item in the local paper that two girls got robbed nearby,” Hatfield said in 2010. “It was also a silver handgun. It was also a young black man. I was just surprised at the lack of interest in getting someone who was using a gun. It makes you wonder whether this type of thing is systemic throughout the NYPD.”

On March 21, 2010, a man named Joseph Bolanos, a member of Manhattan’s West 76th Street Park Block Association, reacted to the
Schoolcraft allegations. He posted on Eterno and Silverman’s website about an incident on January 23, when he was jumped by ten drunken teens. He was kicked in the head, kidneys, and ribs. Police got there 25 minutes later.

“When I asked to file a complaint I was told that a detective would call me on Monday,” he wrote. “Monday came and I didn’t hear from anyone from the 20th. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday . . . no contact from the NYPD. On Friday I walked to the precinct and waited for an hour to file a complaint. It wasn’t busy whatsoever. I just sat there. A sergeant came out and gave me a third degree asking me why I had waited so long to file a complaint! I had to convince him by telling my story in order to get my complaint taken. At least I felt that way. My complaint was finally taken and it was for Assault. I was told that a detective would call me. To date, no one has contacted me from the 20th Precinct.”